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To: JayPC who wrote (19641)	2/14/2000 12:52:00 PM
From: JayPC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

More on Access: Not all the major players feel that the cable cos should necessarily be required to provide access to their underlying telecommunications facilities unless those facilities are found to be essential facilities. Telus (Canada's second largest telco) supports the CCTA on the following. From Richard Stursberg President of the CCTA. 2393. The way I read the decision with respect to local competition, local telephone competition is the same way that you read it. The decision is designed precisely to incent people to build facilities. What you have done is you have said, except in those very remote bands, in the near bands even though the telephone companies facilities are non-essential, we will ask them to unbundle their loops but only for a limited period of time so that people can get on with getting into the business, but that they will be deeply incented to build facilities. Because at the end of the day, the only sustainable competition will be based on the ownership of facilities rather than anything else. 2394. Now, I think that to a certain extent we may want to think about ISPs the same way. That it seems to me that you do want to encourage ISPs to be facilities based. 2395. I think that one of the things that we learned from the long distance markets is that a resell opportunity is not really much of an opportunity at all. What it is is it a -- at best it is a short-term opportunity that allows you to build some revenue while you are building facilities, which is why I think that the logic of the local telephone decision was so good to limit the period of time while unbundled facilities were available to incent people to build. 2396. What we saw in the long distance markets was precisely that as soon as you opened the markets in 1992 there was a ton of resellers out there who were essentially involved in an arbitrage play. Those resellers proved to be unsustainable in the long term and they are now rapidly converting. They have either gone out of business. They have been consolidated with larger companies and those larger companies are now converting themselves into facilities-based companies, which is a good thing. 2397. It is a good thing because it means that there is extensive investment in Canada. These facilities are very expensive. It is a good thing because it means that there will be long term competition. 2398. My own view is that that is probably a good thing as well from the point of view of ISPs, that ISPs should be incented to build facilities. 2399. Now, where all this takes me is that I think that the model that was laid out in the local telephone decision was a very good model. I think that there is a discussion that is going on right now about access to cable plant by ISPs. In that discussion you have found to date that these are not -- well, you have made no findings with respect to essential facilities, but clearly your conclusion is that they are not essential facilities. 2400. If there is going to be unbundling of the cable companies to provide access for Internet services to the ISPs, that access should be as it is for the telephone companies, limited in time. It should be made very clear to the ISPs that you expect them to build facilities to guarantee that there will be sustainable long-term competition in this area. However supportive telus was on the above, check this out: 7. TELUS and BC TEL are strongly opposed to CAIP's proposal that the cable companies be directed to make their retail ISs available to competitive ISPs for resale on an interim basis at a discount. The better approach, in this case, given the intransigence of the cable companies, is simply to prohibit the cable companies from marketing or promoting retail level high speed services for an interim period as suggested by CAIP. Unbelievable, Imagine what telus would say if anyone proposed they be prohibited from selling a profitable viable service. Unbelievable! I have yet to see anyone reselling cable in Canada. I'm going to try to find out some more about the field trials, but Rogers was somewhat coy when I asked for specifics.