ARCHIVED - Telecom Commission Letter Addressed to Dean Proctor (SSi Micro Ltd.) and Dallas Yeulett (Northwestel Inc.)

Ottawa, 24 February 2015

Our reference: 8661-S93-201411850

BY EMAIL

Mr. Dean Proctor
Chief Development Officer
SSi Micro Ltd.
356B Old Airport Road
Yellowknife, Northwest Territories X1A 3T4
regulatory@ssimicro.com

Mr. Dallas Yeulett
Senior Manager, Regulatory Compliance
Northwestel Inc.
301 Lambert Street
Whitehorse, Yukon Y1A 4Y4
dyeulett@nwtel.ca

RE: Application by the SSi Group of Companies under Part 1 of the CRTC Rules of Practice and Procedure concerning Northwestel’s Wholesale Connect rates – Requests for Information

Dear Sirs:

On 18 November 2014, the Commission received an application from the SSi Group of Companies (SSi) concerning Northwestel Inc.’s (Northwestel) Wholesale Connect (WC) rates. In its application, SSi requested that the Commission immediately set interim rates for WC service at the rates previously approved in Telecom Order CRTC 2013-93. In addition SSi requested that the Commission re-examine Northwestel’s cost study for Wholesale Connect and establish new rates at the conclusion of that review.

SSi is requested to respond to the requests for information in Attachment A and Northwestel is requested to respond to the request for information in Attachment B by 10 March 2015.

Yours sincerely,

Original signed by

Lyne Renaud
Director, Competitor Services & Costing Implementation
Telecommunications Sector

c.c.:  Tom Vilmansen, CRTC, tom.vilmansen@crtc.gc.ca
Greg Milosek, CRTC, gregory.milosek@crtc.gc.ca

Attachment A - Requests for Information directed at SSi

1. For each of your current retail Internet service plans that are delivered using terrestrial backbone facilities (i.e. fibre and/or microwave transport links), and on average across all current retail Internet service plans, identify how much backbone capacity (in kilobits per second (Kbps) or megabits per second (Mbps)) you allocate to each end-user at peak capacity^{Footnote 1}.
2. Provide the information in the table below using SSi’s actual monthly revenue and cost information.

   	Type A Communities	Type B Communities	Type C Communities
   Total number of retail Internet service end-users that rely on Wholesale Connect (WC)
   Total monthly retail Internet service revenues from end-users that rely on WC
   Total WC capacity purchased (in Mbps) to deliver retail Internet service
   Total monthly WC costs

3. Provide the percent distribution of end-users for each of your current retail Internet service plans.
4. Refer to Paragraph 15 of the application, where SSi submitted that it “has been forced to shut down retail Internet service in a number of Northwest Territories communities where it could not provide a competitive broadband offering relative to Northwestel, despite SSi having previously established a significant broadband market presence in those same communities”
   1. Identify the communities where SSi has been forced to withdraw its retail Internet service offerings
   2. Identify the factors that contributed to SSi’s decision to withdraw retail Internet service in each community. Discuss whether the change in Northwestel’s WC rates that resulted from Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2013-711^{Footnote 2} was a factor in SSi’s decision to withdraw retail Internet service in each community.
   3. For each community, identify how many retail Internet service customers that rely on WC SSi had in each of the three months prior to when the WC rates established in Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2013-711 took effect, and in each of the months subsequent to the revised rates taking effect, until such time that SSi withdrew its retail Internet service offering in that community entirely.

Attachment B - Request for Information directed at Northwestel

1. For each of your current retail Internet service plans that are delivered using terrestrial backbone facilities (i.e. fibre and/or microwave transport links), and on average across all current retail Internet service plans, identify how much backbone capacity (in Kbps or Mbps) you allocate to each end-user at peak capacity.

Date modified:

2015-02-24