Senate ‘one-size-fits-all’ spectrum deployment bill is counter-intuitive: CWTA, CanWisp, ISED

Telecom experts say that a Senate bill that would force spectrum licence holders to deploy service to at least 50 per cent of its geographic population within three years of acquiring a licence will harm Canada’s connectivity goals rather than strengthen them. The Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met Tuesday and Wednesday evening to discuss Bill S-242, which was introduced last March by Senator Dennis Patterson. The committee began its study in February. “We share the goal of connecting every Canadian. This bill will not help achieve this objective. In fact, it could, unfortunately, have the opposite effect,” Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association president and CEO Robert Ghiz told the committee Tuesday. The bill, if passed, would require a licence holder to deploy its spectrum to provide service to at least 50 per cent of the population within its geographic area within three years of the licence’s issuance. The bill will not apply to licences operating within a Tier 5 area. Ghiz said the department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) requires a flexible framework that allows it to tailor its processes and spectrum licensing conditions to suit the unique characteristics of the spectrum band licence. “A one-size-fits-all requirement limits the department's ability to do so and risks undermining the department's and the industry’s shared goal of improving network quality and coverage,” he said. Nisga'a Lisims Government president Eva Clayton appeared before the committee Wednesday evening. Clayton noted her community is 90 per cent connected. However, the service quality is so poor that small businesses said they cannot do business online. She noted that her community cannot contribute any financial costs toward the connectivity project. Clayton was in favor of the use-it-or-lose-it repercussions in the bill. Legal recourse will force service providers to be accountable to remote communities, she said. “It will not only help communities access critical services but also help alleviate the community’s financial burdens to stay connected,” she told senators. Clayton weighed in on the five-year deadline, arguing that it should be separated based on urban and remote areas because it is more difficult to connect the latter. Canadian Association of Wireless Internet Service Providers (CanWisp) executive director Jonathan Black, who is an advocate for the use-it-or-lose framework, said the bill “in its current form will not encourage rural connectivity as it hopes to do.” Black and CanWisp director Neil Smellie appeared before the committee last month. Smellie said that the test for connectivity should be based on Tier 5. Using the example of a Tier 4 area covering Kingston, Ont., he noted that a licence holder can meet the 50 per cent deployment requirement simply by covering urban Kingston. “So if someone buys Tier 4, they should have to meet the deployment requirements for all of the Tier 5 areas that are nested within that Tier 4,” he argued. ISED officials were also present at the Senate study last month and did not look at the bill favorably. “As we release more spectrum, we continue to increase our deployment requirements using more ambitious targets as well as smaller licence areas to ensure that coverage can be targeted to rural communities,” Matthew Kellison, ISED’s acting director general of the Spectrum Policy Branch said. Kellison noted that deployment targets have to be set taking into account factors such as population density, terrain, and build-out costs. He added that ISED used a two-tier deployment approach during the 3,500 MHz auction. Companies that already offered mobile services were given five years to deploy spectrum within their existing networks. There were also general population-based coverage requirements, which increase over time. “Both conditions apply across 172 different service areas covering Canada, ensuring that rural Canadians are connected along with urban markets,” he said. Kellison also noted that ISED will be issuing a couple of decisions in the next few months that can strengthen the “use it or lose it” approach to spectrum. Recently the department consulted on a non-competitive process that will allow simple local licensing for 5G spectrum to small internet service providers, Indigenous communities, and industrial users such as miners. It also consulted on what to do with its unused licensed spectrum in rural and remote areas. – Reporting by Jenna Cocullo at jcocullo@thewirereport.ca and editing by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca

Senate ‘one-size-fits-all’ spectrum deployment bill is counter-intuitive: CWTA, CanWisp, ISED

News | March 9, 2023

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Senate ‘one-size-fits-all’ spectrum deployment bill is counter-intuitive: CWTA, CanWisp, ISED

News | March 9, 2023

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