Friday, May 6, 2005

CRTC VoIP Decision Attracting More Attention

Just a quick post. Spoke to Ben Charny of CNET News this afternoon about the upcoming CRTC ruling on VoIP. He ran a story today about it, and cited my May 4 blog posting as an indication that the ruling will favor the competition over the incumbents.

It's great to see such an important ruling getting this kind of attention from south of the border. No doubt there will be more to come, especially after the ruling, which is slated for May 12.

Timing is everything. Turns out I'm meeting Vonage Canada that day for lunch, and I suspect they'll be in a good mood. I'll let you know if we have steak or hamburger.

2 comments:

Jon Arnold said...

Posted by: George

Jon, would you consider it a safe move for people to completely drop traditional phone service for something like Vonage's VOIP offering? The price seems right, the service seems solid and stable enough, but is there a chance that it could all come tumbling down, and we'd have to crawling back to Bell?

Great information!!

Jon Arnold said...

Posted by: Ronald Gruia

Jon - the real issue is not how the CRTC will rule (I think everyone pretty much agrees with the fact that chances are pretty good that it will stick with its initial stance), but rather, what will Bell Canada and Telus do. Forbearance applications will be filed quickly (actually, VoIP is such a new market, I think chances are pretty good that these might be successful, because the CRTC cannot claim uneven competition before the market is actually born). But that process takes a lot of time, and in between, the Canadian ILECs will have to do a lot of creative bundling, etc.

Here's my own take: http://gruia.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2005/5/6/659519.html