I thought the 39-page Statement by the UK regulator deserved a more serious look, especially in view of a sharp contrast with Canada’s regulatory posture, as set out in its 2024 Telecom Regulatory Policy: “Competition in Canada’s Internet service markets.”

Like the UK and many countries, Canada has set a political objective to extend high-speed broadband service to rural and remote regions. Of course, what the UK considers rural and remote is very different from the challenges faced by Canadian carriers. Officially, Canada defines rural as “areas [that] have populations of less than 1,000, or fewer than 400 people per square kilometre.” Roughly 20% of Canadians live in rural Canada. The UK government defines areas as rural if they fall outside of settlements with more than 10,000 resident population. In Canada’s Far North, we have a population density of just 0.02 per square kilometre. Although the definitions differ, roughly 20% of the population of the UK and Canada live in rural areas.

By the end of 2024, the CRTC shows 90.6% of Canadian households had access to gigabit broadband; Ofcom shows 87% of UK premises by mid-year 2025.

In their policy documents, there are similar opening statements by Canada’s CRTC and the UK regulator, Ofcom:

• CRTC: “the Commission is working to increase competition while ensuring continued investments in high-quality networks.”
• Ofcom: “Our regulation is designed to promote competition and investment in high quality gigabit-capable networks – bringing faster, better broadband to people across the UK.”

The UK’s approach, as laid out in Ofcom’s statement, is an endorsement of facilities‑based competition, with regulations mandating access to passive infrastructure (eg. ducts and poles). Canada used to operate under the premise that facilities-based competition is the most sustainable form; in recent years the CRTC decided to experiment with a hybrid approach, seeking to ensure its wholesale framework “provides equitable regulatory treatment” (as it describes in TRP 2024-180). The divergence is more than just philosophical; it is producing different market structures, and different investment incentives. Canada’s ‘top-down’ regulated wholesale-access policy is applied on wireline and wireless, in sharp contrast to the market-led approach in many other jurisdictions.

In its Policy determination, the CRTC said “Consumers have fewer choices when buying Internet services: in recent years, competition has been declining. By the end of 2022, independent ISPs served significantly fewer customers than they did at the start of 2020. At the same time, several of the largest independent ISPs have been purchased by incumbents.”

This formed part of the rationale for the CRTC’s shift. But there are some strange disconnects in the Commission’s logic. “These facts suggest that the Commission’s prior regulatory approach, which prioritized facilities-based competition, has not brought about sustainable competition that delivers more choice and more affordable services to Canadians, nor has it resulted in universal access to higher-speed Internet services.”

There were two different concepts there. On the first, I would actually argue that there had been greater competitive intensity today among the facilities-based service providers, as evidenced by levels of investment, lower prices, and marketplace rivalry. The fact that independent ISPs – those depending on wholesale access – hold a diminishing share of the market should have been expected as a confirmation that facilities-based service providers were always seen as the most sustainable.

What did the Commission think was meant by sustainable competition? The level of competition should never have been measured by the number of competitors.

As to the second concept (universal access to higher-speed Internet services), coverage cannot be extended by way of wholesale access. Extending coverage requires construction of new facilities, which would seem to imply the need to focus on promoting investment.

The CRTC noted that it had received evidence that “demonstrated how [a decision to mandate wholesale access] could decrease network upgrades and prevent future network deployment. The Commission recognizes that regulatory measures that reduce the incumbents’ revenues can challenge the business case for the incumbents to deploy networks.”

So, the CRTC set up a 5-year “head start” provision as an incentive for telephone companies to extend the reach of their fibre networks. “While the Commission notes that its rate-setting process is designed to be compensatory, it considers that a five-year head start would provide additional incentive for the incumbents to invest in areas where they have not yet built FTTP by giving them an opportunity to more rapidly recoup their initial investments.” At the same time, the CRTC excused cable companies from the obligation to wholesale its fibre, since it only has about 5% of homes with fibre to the premises (as contrasted with 60% of telephone companies).

As it turns out, that 5-year head start isn’t proving to be enough of an incentive. Over the past couple of months, I have written frequently [such as here and here] that capital expenditures are down, measurably down, with carriers pointing blame at the CRTC framework. The Commission’s own monitoring report shows annual drops in capital spending in 2023 and 2024 since levels peaked in 2022. Public company reports are pointing to nearly 10% lower capex in 2025, and projections to fall another 15% lower in 2026.

That should be no surprise to the Commission. The CRTC was warned, as it acknowledged in the Policy determination at ¶34: “The incumbents submitted that a Commission decision to mandate aggregated HSA is likely to reduce investment in high-speed networks.”

Investment impacts quality and coverage – factors that are important for consumers. Contrast sharply falling investment in Canada with Ookla’s latest report on the US market, “Aggressive U.S. Broadband Expansion in 2H2025 Narrows Digital Divide”. “The U.S. broadband landscape underwent a big shift in the latter half of 2025. Thanks to record-breaking new fiber builds, the aggressive expansion of SpaceX’s Starlink, and the growth in fixed wireless access (FWA), broadband availability achieved some new milestones.”

The Commission’s decision to exempt cable companies from mandated fibre wholesale due to low share might also serve as a disincentive for cable companies to invest in fibre. In the Policy, the CRTC said that it was excusing cable from mandated fibre wholesale because the cable companies had such a low percentage of premises with fibre: “by the end of 2022, the cable carriers’ FTTP reached just 5% of the homes they pass nationally, compared to over 60% for the ILECs… Mandating the cable carriers to provide aggregated FTTP services would be costly to implement relative to the benefits it may bring to Canadians. It may also result in a loss of cable carriers investment.”

The Commission warned, “A significant increase in the percentage of homes passed by the cable carriers’ FTTP may prompt a Commission review of whether the cable carriers should begin providing aggregated FTTP services.” This was very strange wording in my view – effectively threatening increased regulation if the cable companies invest too much in fibre.

In his speech at the Scotiabank TMT Investor Conference, CRTC Vice Chair Adam Scott described the Commission’s decision-making process as “we take the evidence on the record and use it to form a regulatory hypothesis — that by taking a certain course, we will see a certain type of outcome.”

In the case of capital investment levels arising from its fibre wholesale policy, the CRTC is clearly not seeing its anticipated outcome. How should the Commission respond?

I noticed an interesting phrasing in the Ofcom document with respect to capital expenditures: “We also recognised that the long-term nature of network investments requires regulatory stability and therefore set expectations about future regulation to 2031 and beyond.”

No one wants to see a return to Canada’s Calvinball approach to regulation. “The only permanent rule in Calvinball is that you can’t play it the same way twice.”

If we want to create appropriate incentives for private sector investment in telecom, we can’t keep changing the rules. But first, we need rules that actually encourage investment.

The post Promoting investment appeared first on Telecom Trends.

Let’s face it. Canada’s telecommunications landscape is at a pivotal moment. Questions around slower industry growth, investment, resiliency, and policy direction have never been more central to our national conversation. That’s why the upcoming Connecting Canada event, taking place May 20, 2026, at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, is especially timely for industry leaders, policymakers, and anyone invested in the future of our connected nation.

This free event is presented in collaboration with the Canadian Telecommunications Association and the GSMA, Connecting Canada will be bringing together voices from across the sector to examine the performance, pressures, and priorities for Canada’s telecommunications sector.

Canada is one of the most geographically challenging – and therefore among the most capital-intensive – markets in the world for building and operating telecommunications networks. The telecom sector continues to face scrutiny on prices, competitive dynamics, and gaps in rural connectivity. But, meaningful progress needs more than a simple recitation of all-too-familiar talking points.

What we need is a fact-based dialogue, acknowledging there are necessary compromises inherent in policy decision-making, reconciling public expectations with economic realities, in order to deliver world-class infrastructure.

Connecting Canada provides a forum for such an informed and constructive conversation.

The conference promises a thoughtful exploration of:

• The state of Canadian telecommunications industry – from financial fundamentals to looking at the sector through a global lens
• Canada’s connectivity reality check – the realities of connectivity, including coverage gaps, adoption challenges, priority setting, and new technologies
• Network resiliency – realistic approaches to risk reduction and lessons learned
• Beyond retail: the telecom sector’s role in driving productivity and innovation across industries, and its growing strategic importance underpinning Canada’s national security, economic resilience, and sovereignty
• Canada’s 6G Future
• Protecting Canadians from fraud and scams
• The future of telecom

These aren’t just abstract debates. There are real tensions and trade-offs associated with these issues shaping the sector today. As the event’s organizers note, the aim is to move beyond headlines and assumptions toward an evidence-based dialogue grounded in the operational realities of the industry.

Connecting Canada coincides with the 6G Global Summit, being held at the same venue the following two days. While registration is separate, it reinforces that Ottawa will be a hub for global and domestic telecom policy conversations throughout the week. Together these two events highlight the growing interplay between national policy and international technology roadmaps. Discussions at Connecting Canada will set the stage for broader conversations about spectrum, standards, and next generation networks.

If your work touches telecommunications, whether from an industry, policy, regulatory, academic, or technology perspective, this event is worth your time. The agenda promises thoughtful keynotes, candid panel conversations, and a welcome emphasis on grounding policy in real-world data and operational experience. You can learn more or register for the event here.

The post Connecting Canada forum appeared first on Telecom Trends.

To me, the frequent internal website failures should be embarrassing for the regulatory body chosen by Parliament to manage and oversee so much of Canada’s digital world. I count at least 13 days of planned and unplanned outages since mid-August of 2025:

• Scheduled: August 22-24, 2025
• Scheduled: September 20-21, 2025
• Scheduled: October 3-5, 2025
• Unplanned: November 5, 2025
• Unplanned: December 10, 2025
• and now, unplanned: April 4-6, 2026

That is barely 1 nine performance, 95% uptime, in a world where we target non-stop resilience.

Last November, I wrote “Network resilience in competitive telecom markets”, acknowledging that all networks will fail at some point.

Improving network resilience helps ameliorate the situation when a failure condition exists.

Increasingly complex network architectures, coupled with more extreme environmental conditions, will lead to the potential for more network failure events, with even greater impact.

How do service providers build more resilient networks? How does the industry collectively create a more resilient national infrastructure? What is the role of government regulatory authorities, policy makers, and emergency preparedness organizations?

Last September, the CRTC issued a decision requiring reporting of service disruptions by telecom service providers. Seeing the duration of the CRTC website failure on a holiday weekend, I have to wonder if anyone at the CRTC would read or respond to a telecom carrier failure outide normal business hours.

My November blog post talked about two consultations that were launched that same day:

1. “Development of a regulatory policy on measures to improve the resiliency of telecommunications networks and the reliability of telecommunications services” [TNC CRTC 2025-226]; and
2. “Consumer protections in the event of a service outage or disruption” [TNC CRTC 2025-227].

I made a number of comments about the value of a more consultative approach to improve network resilience, exploring how the Commission can contribute to the proactive planning and coordination across all branches of government. Indeed, the Commission could benefit from learning how to get the CRTC website to be more resilient.

Update (April 7, 7:45am): The CRTC website just came back online after nearly 75 hours.

The post If the CRTC website fell down in a forest… appeared first on Telecom Trends.

I frequently talk about the tension that exists with wanting to promote competition today, without undermining the incentives to invest for tomorrow.

Recent disputes over network decommissioning and fibre upgrades suggest the CRTC may be running up against the limits of its own framework—at a time when investment trends are already moving in the wrong direction.

At issue are cases where smaller, facilities-based carriers and cable operators are upgrading legacy copper or coaxial networks to fibre, while wholesale-based competitors are seeking continued access during the transition. Examples in Ontario and Nova Scotia have brought this into sharper focus.

The CRTC’s wholesale fibre framework was intended to strike a balance. On the one hand, it aimed to expand competition by enabling wholesale access. On the other, it sought to preserve incentives for facilities-based investment, particularly among smaller regional carriers. That balance was always going to be difficult, but it was a central premise of the policy.

Early on, the framework was already showing signs of strain. By allowing the largest carriers to access competitors’ fibre networks, the decision blurred the line it was attempting to draw. Rather than reinforcing the competitiveness of smaller facilities-based players, the Commission created conditions where they could face competition from much larger players who enter their market using the fibre of another large competitor. For larger operators, mandating wholesale access for competitors of all sizes to rely on their fibre networks inevitably weakens the business case for expanding fibre footprints. That outcome sits uneasily with the objective of sustaining investment incentives.

More recent disputes over decommissioning bring a second layer of tension. When a carrier upgrades to fibre, retiring its legacy copper infrastructure is a logical step. Maintaining parallel networks is costly and inefficient, particularly as traffic shifts to newer technologies. Yet wholesale-based competitors, who rely on those legacy facilities, are understandably resistant to losing access.

The Commission is now being asked to intervene, and the emerging responses appear to present two options. One is to require carriers to keep legacy networks in operation longer than planned. The other is to require access to the newly upgraded fibre networks.

Both approaches create problems. Extending the life of legacy networks increases operating costs and delays the transition to more efficient infrastructure. Those costs are not theoretical; they directly affect investment decisions and, ultimately, the pace and scope of network modernization. Alternatively, mandating access to new placements of fibre runs directly counter to the five year wholesale holiday, set out in the fibre access decision as a way of protecting investment incentives.

This is where the policy tension becomes more apparent.

The earlier framework sought to limit wholesale access to encourage investment by regional providers and cablecos. Now, in the context of decommissioning, there are pressures to expand access or constrain network evolution to preserve retail competition. These are not easily reconciled objectives. Attempting to do so may contribute to a broader chill on investment.

So, has the CRTC boxed itself in?

By expanding wholesale access in ways that the Commission sought to avoid in its wholesale fibre decision it risks pulling policy in conflicting directions. As network modernization accelerates, similar disputes are likely to become more common.

The question is whether the CRTC can re-establish a clear and coherent framework that resolves the underlying tension between service-based and facilities-based competition, while reinforcing the conditions needed for sustained investment.

This is not just a theoretical concern. We are already beginning to see warning signals. After years of sustained investment to expand and upgrade networks, capital spending is declining and investments are gravitating to areas where returns on investment are more predictable. While multiple factors are at play, policy signals that weaken expected returns or introduce new risks cannot be ignored.

If the policy goal is to sustain facilities-based competition and the long-term benefits it delivers in terms of coverage, quality, resilience, and sustainable competition, then carriers need clear and credible signals that investments in network modernization will not trigger new obligations that undermine the business case. Carriers also need the ability to retire outdated infrastructure efficiently and redeploy capital to next-generation networks.

If every upgrade comes with new obligations, it should not be surprising when upgrades start to slow.

At some point soon, the Commission will need to decide whether preserving incentives for investment is just a talking point, or a fundamental policy objective. Because the two should look the same in practice.

The post Has the CRTC boxed itself in? appeared first on Telecom Trends.

Canada is entering a decisive moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence. The conversation is no longer just about models, innovation, or regulation in isolation. AI is becoming infrastructure—built on data, compute, networks, and energy systems—and the choices we make now will shape our economic resilience, our competitiveness, and our sovereignty for decades.

Three forces are converging in ways that demand fresh thinking:

• AI Sovereignty — As AI systems consolidate around global platforms, Canada must decide what it needs to control—data, compute, models, or something else—to remain a credible middle power in a shifting geopolitical landscape.
• AI Trust — With agentic AI accelerating, business models and regulatory frameworks must evolve to ensure transparency, accountability, and public confidence.
• AI Sustainability — AI’s energy and carbon footprint is rising fast. Grid resilience, climate alignment, and sustainable infrastructure design are no longer side issues—they’re core to long‑term viability.

These are the new fault lines shaping investment, innovation, and Canada’s national AI strategy.

The workshop will explore issues that telecom and digital policy leaders are already grappling with:

• How should Canada translate AI governance principles into practical levers for sovereignty, trust, and sustainability?
• What does a “Canadian profile” in AI governance look like between the U.S.’s industry‑driven approach and the EU’s risk‑management model?
• How should business models adapt as trust becomes a competitive differentiator?
• What are the real risks of an AI‑driven productivity paradox—and how do we avoid locking in the wrong infrastructure choices?
• How should we measure sovereignty, trust, and sustainability in the AI stack?

These are just some of the questions that could define the next decade of telecom, digital infrastructure, and national competitiveness. This workshop provides an opportunity to hear global perspectives through a Canadian lens and shape the conversation on AI governance.

It is worth noting that the White House released its National AI Legislative Framework last Friday. This framework addresses six key objectives:

1. Protecting Children and Empowering Parents: Parents are best equipped to manage their children’s digital environment and upbringing. The Administration is calling on Congress to give parents tools to effectively do that, such as account controls to protect their children’s privacy and manage their device use. The Administration also believes that AI platforms likely to be accessed by minors should implement features to reduce potential sexual exploitation of children or encouragement of self-harm.
2. Safeguarding and Strengthening American Communities: AI development should strengthen American communities and small businesses through economic growth and energy dominance. The Administration believes that ratepayers should not foot the bill for data centers, and is calling on Congress to streamline permitting so that data centers can generate power on site, enhancing grid reliability. Congress should also augment Federal government ability to combat AI-enabled scams and address AI national security concerns.
3. Respecting Intellectual Property Rights and Supporting Creators: The creative works and unique identities of American innovators, creators, and publishers must be respected in the age of AI. Yet, for AI to improve it must be able to make fair use of what it learns from the world it inhabits. The Administration is proposing an approach that achieves both of these objectives, enabling AI to thrive while ensuring Americans’ creativity continues propelling our country’s greatness.
4. Preventing Censorship and Protecting Free Speech: The Federal government must defend free speech and First Amendment protections, while preventing AI systems from being used to silence or censor lawful political expression or dissent. AI cannot become a vehicle for government to dictate right and wrong-think. The Administration is proposing guardrails to ensure that AI can pursue truth and accuracy without limitation.
5. Enabling Innovation and Ensuring American AI Dominance: The Administration is calling on Congress to take steps to remove outdated or unnecessary barriers to innovation, accelerate the deployment of AI across industry sectors, and facilitate broad access to the testing environments needed to build and deploy world-class AI systems.
6. Educating Americans and Developing an AI-Ready Workforce: The Administration wants American workers to participate in and reap the rewards of AI-driven growth, encouraging Congress to further workforce development and skills training programs, expanding opportunities across sectors and creating new jobs in an AI-powered economy.

Kristian Stout of the International Center for Law & Economics released a commentary on the Truth on the Market blog, calling it “a welcome set of guidelines … a light-touch federal approach, grounded in existing legal doctrines, and focused on harms rather than speculative risks. Whether Congress can translate that posture into durable legislation remains an open question. But as a statement of direction, the framework gets more right than wrong.”

Join me for AI Governance: New Tradeoffs for Sovereignty, Trust and Sustainability, on the afternoon of Monday May 11, 2026 at Ivey’s Donald K. Johnson Centre in downtown Toronto. Registration is open now.

The post AI Governance: Why Canada Needs to Get This Right appeared first on Telecom Trends.

The most striking figure in the report is the tenfold jump in customers on 500 Mbps and above, from 3% to 31% in just twelve months. That’s not incremental growth; that’s a structural pivot in how households consume connectivity. It validates what I argued in earlier posts about the NBN’s design compromises: Australians were never “satisfied” with slower speeds — they were constrained by the economics of a network built around copper bottlenecks. Once the value equation changed, behaviour changed with it.

This is where the economics get interesting. NBN Co’s Accelerate Great initiative effectively boosted speeds for a third of customers at no additional wholesale cost. In other words, effective prices fell, yet residential ARPU rose by $3 to $52. That’s the paradox I’ve highlighted before in the context of Australia’s NBN and other wholesale fibre markets: when you give customers more for the same price, they don’t simply pocket the savings, many migrate up the value chain. Faster tiers become the new baseline, usage expands, and the network becomes more central to daily life.

This is a dynamic we’ve seen in other markets, including Canada: increasing speeds with the latest technology results in a better value proposition and it delivers more value to consumers and network operators alike. Lower operating costs, fewer faults, and a multi‑decade asset life create room for service providers to improve value without undermining revenue. NBN Co’s 7% drop in operating expenses and 15% reduction in direct network costs are dividends of replacing copper with glass.

The milestone of three million FTTP customers — and one million copper‑to‑fibre upgrades completed — marks a symbolic turning point for Australia’s NBN. A decade ago, fibre‑to‑the‑node was sold as a pragmatic compromise. Today, it’s being quietly retired, with 47,000 premises upgrading every month and the final 622,000 FTTN lines scheduled for completion by 2030. Australia’s political debate may have faded, but the engineering logic of increased investment has prevailed.

What’s equally notable is the shift in business demand. Nearly half of business customers are now on high‑speed tiers, driven by cloud workloads, AI tools, and the growing need for symmetrical bandwidth. The download‑to‑upload ratio for business is already 2:1—far closer to enterprise patterns than residential ones. That’s another indicator of a market moving up the curve, not down.

All of this reinforces a broader lesson: when networks remove friction — whether technological or economic — customers respond with higher engagement, higher usage, and indeed, higher ARPU. ARPU goes up, not because the price increased, but because customers are seeing greater value from the lower prices for the next tier. It’s a reminder that affordability and revenue growth are not mutually exclusive.

That phenomenon applies in Canada as well. At the recent Scotiabank TMT investor conference, TELUS CFO Doug French said success is based on being relevant to customers. As the NBN data demonstrates, value, not headline price, drives broadband behaviour. When networks deliver more speed, more reliability, and more headroom for emerging applications, households and businesses naturally migrate upward. The result is a healthier revenue mix, lower operating costs, and the financial ability for network operators to invest in platforms that can sustain the next decade of digital demand.

Canada is already deep into this transition to fibre, but there is a need to ensure the government policy environment encourages continued network investments. Yesterday, Ofcom (the UK telecom regulator) released a policy statement, “Promoting competition and investment in fibre networks: Telecoms Access Review 2026-31”. Most significantly, at paragraph 2.12, it states, “Our strategy is to promote investment in gigabit-capable networks through network competition in areas where this is viable. We consider that network competition brings potentially significant benefits to consumers, compared to competition based on regulated access to wholesale services provided by a single network.”

It continues in paragraph 2.12, “Network competition creates stronger incentives to attract and retain customers by offering them the services they want, and so is a more effective spur for innovation and investment in high quality networks than access-based competition. This is because network providers have much greater scope for product differentiation and can strive to win customers and generate higher margins by offering a better service than their competitors.”

The Ofcom policy statement, promoting competition and investment in fibre, will be worth further examination. I have already expressed concerns that Canada’s current regulatory framework is inhibiting investment. In a blog post yesterday, Ted Woodhead noted “there is a net reduction in total industry Capex which is a trend that Canadians hoping for better service, or any service at all, should find deeply disturbing.” A report from Scotiabank yesterday repeated previous advice for incumbents to materially reduce capital expenditures given the current regulatory climate.

Fibre is more than just a technology upgrade. It is an enabler for an economic reset, helping align network capabilities with customer expectations and needs for an AI-driven digital economy.

As we’ve seen in the results from Australia’s NBN, that alignment is where quality, coverage, affordability, and investment can coexist.

The post Australia’s NBN provides a lesson in economics appeared first on Telecom Trends.

The report contains a number of recommendations of interest to the telecom sector. Many will focus on Recommendation 34: That the Government of Canada review measures related to competition policy in the telecommunications, transportation and financial services sectors to strengthen competition in Canada.

In my view, there are two important prerequisite recommendations to such a review:

• Recommendation 19: That the Government of Canada work with provinces and territories to reduce the regulatory burden by addressing irritants systemically rather than individually to improve the overall impact of regulatory decisions, support innovation, encourage investment in Canada bring down prices for consumers. This may include but is not limited to:
  • streamline regulations surrounding domestic food processing and manufacturing, to encourage investment in Canada;
  • adopting legislation requiring all federal regulatory agencies to explicitly consider competitiveness and business growth in the performance of their duties by rigorously assessing the potential impacts of regulatory decisions on economic growth beforehand, rather than as an afterthought;
  • expanding the scope of the Red Tape Reduction Act by reducing or eliminating the exemptions it currently provides; and
  • establishing an independent body, modeled on the United Kingdom’s Regulatory Policy Committee, responsible for publicly assessing the quality of regulatory impact assessments.

and,

• Recommendation 20: That the Government of Canada undertake a comprehensive review of federal regulatory and permitting systems in order to identify and remove unnecessary regulatory and reporting burdens – particularly where they disproportionately affect small and medium-sized enterprises – with the objective of reducing duplication, accelerating timelines, improving predictability for investors and aligning regulation with trusted jurisdictions where appropriate in order to free up capital and management time for growth and technology adoption.

If you search for “incentives to invest” on my blog, more than 130 references come up. Just 2 weeks ago, in “Regulatory impacts on investment”, I referenced evidence of capital investment reductions triggered by CRTC regulations – evidence that is found in the CRTC’s own industry monitoring report.

I wrote, “The next few years will test whether Canada can maintain its infrastructure leadership while pursuing competition policy based on government intervention.”

The INDU study references a witness who “proposed undertaking systemic reform to improve the impact of all regulatory decisions. He criticized that previous government efforts had focused primarily on isolated irritants, comparing this approach to ‘pumping air into a leaky tire: It might help you in the short term, but the underlying problem goes unsolved.'”

While the INDU Committee would like the Government to improve productivity with a review of telecom competition policy, such a review needs to consider the impact of regulation on investment and competition in the sector.

The post Improving productivity in Canada appeared first on Telecom Trends.

To be fair to the Commission, it had no choice but to respond to the legislative change. Today’s Decision was based on this new section of the Telecom Act:

Prohibition
27.‍04 (1) A telecommunications service provider must not charge a fee to a subscriber that is related to the activation or modification of a telecommunications service plan, or any other fee whose main purpose is, in the opinion of the Commission, to discourage subscribers from modifying their service plan or cancelling their contract for telecommunications services.
Types of fees
(2) The Commission must specify the types of fees for the purposes of subsection (1).

There are two parts to the CRTC’s determination: elimination of early termination, and elimination of activation or modification fees.

The legislatively prohibited “activation or modification fees” are defined by the CRTC as those that aren’t “related to the physical installation of a telecommunications service at a customer’s premises or fees related to additional products or services the customer has explicitly chosen to purchase”. I found it interesting that the various consumer codes are modified to include the new definition by today’s policy decision, but there is no accompanying paragraph that explicitly tells consumers that such fees are prohibited under the Act. Since the Codes are consumer-facing, one might have thought that the newly defined term should be found in the Codes.

The Wireless Code already dealt with early termination fees. If a consumer terminates service within the first 2 years after receiving a device subsidy, the service provider is able to recover the remaining balance. If no device subsidy was provided, the service provider could charge up to $50. That fee can no longer be charged. As a result, it is hard to imagine how service providers will be able to offer discounts in exchange for longer-term commitments.

The CRTC launched its consultation in November 2024, 16 months ago, initially giving the public an extremely tight schedule to provide input. It extended the deadline for submissions until March 12, 2025, exactly 1 year ago today. At the time, I asked, “Will the CRTC be able to find effective ways to work around the government’s naively constructed amendments to the legislation, using a short 6-week process?” Unfortunately, I don’t think it did.

The accompanying press release for today’s Policy says “Based on the public record, the CRTC is eliminating extra fees to activate, change, or cancel a plan. This will give consumers more flexibility to manage their plans and take advantage of better offers without worrying about unexpected costs.”

I don’t understand how regulating service provider pricing mechanisms results in more flexibility for consumers. I see at least one area where the new rules could result in less flexibility. With no ability to charge an early termination fee, service providers may tie discounts for long-term contracts to only those customers getting a device. This could eliminate discounts for one or two-year commitments for consumers bringing their own devices.

Regulations that reduce choice end up reducing consumer flexibility.

The post Prohibition of fees could raise prices appeared first on Telecom Trends.

The report [pdf, 7.7MB] indicates the gap in AI trust is growing and we need to consider whether our policy framework is prepared.

Artificial intelligence has become so deeply woven into daily life that many people no longer notice or appreciate when they’re using it. AI shapes how we search, shop, navigate, communicate, and essential information. Increasingly AI is involved in how we access healthcare, and other government services.

According to the AI Trust Atlas, AI adoption in Canada and the United States is now nearly universal, but trust in AI is not rising alongside its use. The public is embracing AI tools at unprecedented rates, yet confidence in the institutions deploying them remains low. While nearly 9 in 10 Canadians (89%) actively used an AI-enabled tool, only a third of Canadians (34%) trust the companies using it. Only a quarter (27%) of Canadians believe the current laws are adequate to address their concerns. In both Canada and the US, 90% believe it is important for AI to be regulated.

The result is a widening trust gap — a kind of trust recession — in which AI becomes more pervasive but not more legitimate.

This recession is not defined by a collapse in trust, but by something subtler and more corrosive: stagnation. The Atlas shows that only a minority of Canadians and Americans trust companies that use AI, and those numbers have barely budged even as adoption has surged. People are using AI more than ever, but they are not feeling more secure, more informed, or more protected. They are living with AI, but not living comfortably with it. That is the hallmark of a trust recession — a moment when public confidence fails to keep pace with technological integration, leaving society in a state of unease.

The roots of this unease are not technological. They are political and structural. For more than a decade, AI has been deployed faster than governments could regulate it, faster than institutions could explain it, and faster than communities could evaluate its impacts. The result is a public that is surrounded by AI but not empowered by it. People feel AI is happening to them, not with them or for them. They see systems making decisions that affect their lives, but they do not see the guardrails that should accompany those decisions. They see benefits, but they also see risks — and they do not see a governance framework capable of managing either.

What makes the Atlas so revealing is that the public’s expectations are not vague or contradictory. They are remarkably consistent. People want to know when AI is being used and how it affects them. They want systems that undergo meaningful risk assessment before deployment, not after something goes wrong. They want human oversight across all applications, not just the ones deemed “high‑risk” by technical experts. They want independent governance rather than industry self‑policing. And they want mechanisms for public input — not symbolic consultations, but real opportunities to shape how AI is designed, evaluated, and monitored.

These expectations align closely with emerging global norms, from the EU AI Act to the OECD AI Principles to Canada’s own evolving regulatory frameworks. Yet in North America, policy development remains slow, fragmented, and reactive. The public sees this. And they are losing patience. The trust recession is not a failure of public understanding. It is a failure of public policy.

Healthcare offers the clearest illustration of what is at stake. It is the sector where optimism and anxiety collide most intensely. People believe AI can improve diagnosis, accuracy, and access. They see the potential for faster triage, earlier detection, and more personalized care. But they also fear privacy breaches, algorithmic bias, accountability gaps, and the erosion of human judgment. These concerns are not hypothetical. They reflect real experiences with opaque systems, inconsistent safeguards, and unclear lines of responsibility. The tension in healthcare is not unique to healthcare. It is simply more visible there. The lesson is that AI’s benefits are real, but so are its risks, and governance determines which one prevails.

One of the most important contributions of the Atlas is its focus on Indigenous perspectives. Indigenous respondents emphasize data sovereignty, distinctions‑based design, and community‑driven governance. These principles are not peripheral. They are central to building trustworthy AI systems. Indigenous data governance frameworks — including OCAP® and the CARE Principles — offer a model for how AI can be developed in ways that respect autonomy, protect communities, and embed accountability. In a trust recession, these approaches are not optional. They are essential.

The broader message of the Atlas is that the trust recession is a policy gap, not a technological one. The public is not afraid of AI. They are afraid of unregulated AI. They are afraid of systems that make decisions without transparency. They are afraid of algorithms that affect their lives without oversight. They are afraid of institutions that deploy AI without accountability.

These fears are rational. They reflect a decade in which AI innovation outpaced public policy by orders of magnitude. We built the systems and deployed them, but we did not build the guardrails.

If AI is now part of our societal infrastructure, then trust must be treated as part of that infrastructure too. Like other infrastructure, trust requires investment, maintenance, and stewardship. The report suggests that a policy response to the trust recession must establish transparency standards to make it clear when and how AI is being used. Will we create independent oversight bodies with real authority, or advisory committees with symbolic mandates? Will we require pre‑deployment risk assessments to evaluate social, ethical, and community impacts? Will we embed public participation into the governance process, not only as a courtesy but as a democratic necessity? Will we establish rights‑based frameworks to protect individuals from algorithmic discrimination, wrongful automation, and opaque decision‑making?

These would be some of the practical foundations of a trustworthy AI ecosystem. In their absence, we risk a deepening of the trust recession, and the perceived legitimacy of AI‑enabled systems will continue to erode.

The snapshot of public opinion in the AI Trust Atlas is a warning that the social contract around AI may be fraying. The trust recession will not reverse itself or be solved by better marketing, more optimistic narratives, or promises of future benefits. It will only be solved by policy — thoughtful, enforceable, transparent, and inclusive policy. While AI is reshaping society, society has not yet reshaped the governance structures needed to manage it.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Canada’s AI advantage, referencing a three pillar framework: Sustainable-by-design; Sovereign-by-design; and, Responsible-by-design. Do we need to inject a fourth element: Trust-by-design?

Last October, the Government of Canada launched a public consultation to assist in the development of a national AI strategy. Last month, a report was issued [pdf, 305KB] summarizing the 64,600 submissions. Michael Geist has an excellent post talking about what didn’t make it into the report. On the subject of “trust”, Dr. Geist observed

Just about everyone agrees that trust is essential for AI adoption, but the implementation of regulation draws different views. Some want to move quickly, while others warn that overly broad regulation will slow deployment, disadvantage domestic firms, and regulate technologies Canada does not control. Those disagreements largely disappear in the government’s summary, where trust is presented as a settled consensus objective, rather than a contested policy domain with real trade-offs.

Everyone agrees that AI trust is essential. Can we develop a policy framework that bridges the AI trust gap, avoiding the risks identified in the submissions?

The post AI trust appeared first on Telecom Trends.

The CRTC says telecom needs more “dynamism.” There are many ways the industry has been taking big risks for decades — but as I wrote earlier this week, there are signs suggesting CRTC regulation is cooling investment.

One phrase stood out: the Vice-Chair described the Commission’s decisions as ‘regulatory hypotheses’ that will ultimately be tested by evidence.

We go through proceedings to crystallize issues and identify the strategically important outcomes that our decisions need to promote. And then we take the evidence on the record and use it to form a regulatory hypothesis—that by taking a certain course, we will see a certain type of outcome.

That framing is welcome. Regulatory policy should absolutely be judged by its real-world outcomes.

But the speech also contained a premise that deserves closer scrutiny: the suggestion that telecom companies need encouragement to take bold commercial risks to inject dynamism into the market.

If anything, the opposite is true.

Canada’s telecom sector has always been about big bets. Canada’s telecom networks exist today because companies repeatedly took enormous risks on new technologies.

In the 1980s, operators invested heavily in cellular networks long before there was certainty that Canadians would adopt mobile services. At the time, many observers believed mobile phones would remain a niche product for executives and emergency services.

Fast forward a few decades to see tens of billions of dollars poured into nationwide LTE networks, fibre-to-the-home deployments, and now 5G. The shift from copper to fibre alone represents one of the largest infrastructure upgrades ever undertaken in Canada’s communications sector.

These investments weren’t made because regulators encouraged companies to ‘take risks.’ They were made because companies believed that, if they made the right bets, the regulatory and policy environment would allow them to recover the enormous capital required to build those networks.

That distinction is important.

Telecommunications is one of the most capital-intensive industries in the economy. Networks require billions of dollars in upfront investment with payback periods measured in decades as confirmed by one of the CFOs at the Scotiabank event. Companies only deploy that kind of capital when there is a reasonable expectation of regulatory stability and an opportunity to earn a return on investment.

The issue isn’t willingness to invest — it’s the risk environment associated with those investments.

The Vice-Chair’s speech repeatedly emphasized affordability and competition as policy goals. Few would disagree with those objectives. But, the real balancing act in telecom policy is ensuring that regulator’s competition frameworks don’t undermine the incentives driving facilities-based investment.

Investors pay close attention to regulatory risk. When policy signals suggest that long-term returns could be constrained, capital allocation decisions adjust accordingly. Those signals don’t take years to show up. In fact, as I wrote earlier this week, the CRTC’s own Canadian Telecommunications Market Report (CTMR) demonstrates we are seeing early evidence. Several Canadian carriers have pulled back on capital spending plans.

At the same time, financial analysts have begun openly questioning whether further reductions in capital expenditures (capex) are warranted. For example, analysts at Scotiabank recently wrote “wouldn’t it make more sense for incumbents to materially reduce capex” given the evolving regulatory environment. Those comments didn’t come from industry lobbyists. They came from the investment community that finances telecom infrastructure.

Another theme in Mr. Scott’s remarks was the suggestion that large network operators might prefer a world without wholesale competition. That framing misses the real debate.

Canada’s telecom providers compete intensely every day. They spend billions expanding networks, upgrading technology, and fighting for customers in one of the most capital-intensive sectors of the economy.

The question has never been whether competition should exist.

The question is how to structure competition policy and regulation in a manner that preserve strong incentives to build and upgrade infrastructure.

Facilities-based competition — companies building and operating their own networks — has been the foundation of Canada’s telecom success. Fibre networks, nationwide wireless coverage, and now 5G infrastructure exist because companies – competing companies – invested billions of dollars to build them.

Resale-based competition can play a role in the market. But if it significantly weakens the economics of building networks, the long-term consequences are felt in slower investment and delayed upgrades.

Let’s return to the description of Commission policies as regulatory hypotheses that will ultimately be tested by evidence. As we heard in his address,

We have advanced regulatory hypotheses that now serve as blueprints for the future. The architect’s job is done, and the plans have been handed over to the builder. Might we need to adjust as we go? Sure, that’s normal, prudent, and expected. A good regulator, like a good builder, will adjust to conditions on the ground. We will need to, and are in fact required to, actively gather the evidence that will inform us as we go.

The hypotheses are already being tested and evidence (in the form of the CTMR) is already in the hands of the Commission. Price movements are one piece of evidence, but they are far from the only one. The more important indicators are the signals coming from capital markets and the investment decisions being made inside telecom companies.

When analysts begin advising operators to reduce network investment, that should get policymakers’ attention. Those policymakers might want to explore whether their hypothesis needs to be adjusted, recognizing the “conditions on the ground.”

I’m not convinced the regulator’s job as architect is done and that it is now up to the industry to build.

Ultimately, whether the industry continues building at the pace Canadians expect depends upon the blueprint regulators have drawn.

Telecom operators have never lacked the willingness “to make big bets,” to take risks “to differentiate their offers and bring new value to consumers”.

But, even the most ambitious builders need a regulatory framework that supports long-term investment, not one that makes such investments harder to justify.

How should the CRTC promote dynamism in telecommunications? By architecting a policy framework that supports long-term investment by carriers to build facilities and infrastructure.

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