Presentation to CRTC Public Hearing Friday, 21 February 2020
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Presentation to CRTC Public Hearing Friday, 21 February 2020 Intervener #477 in the matter of: Review of mobile wireless services, Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2019-57, 28 February 2019 As part of panel: 12. Railway Association of Canada 13. CN Railway Outaouais Hearing Room Conference Centre Portage IV 140 Promenade du Portage Gatineau (Québec) Please check against delivery.
[MARC BRAZEAU, President & CEO:]
PR1. Thank you, Madame Hearing Secretary,
PR2. M. le Président, Madame Vice-Présidente, Conseillers distingués; personnel du Conseil;
et collègues de l’industrie des télécommunications,
PR3. Good morning. My name is Marc Brazeau. I am the President and CEO of the Railway
Association of Canada. Before we start, I would like to present our panel.
PR4. To my left is Tanis Peterson, our Senior Director, of Operations and Regulatory Affairs.
To my right is Daniel Lafrenière, Director of Spectrum and Telecommunications. We
work together as part of the RAC’s small but mighty team here in Ottawa.
PR5. Behind Daniel is Bram Abramson. He has joined the file as our outside regulatory
advisor.
1. C’est un honneur de comparaître devant vous ce matin sur ce panel conjoint avec nos
collègues du Canadian National, qui s’adresseront à vous immédiatement après notre
présentation.
2. Ce matin, nous vous parlerons de ce que nous considérons être une occasion
considérable d’améliorer l’intensité concurrentielle du secteur sans-fil. Et surtout,
d’améliorer le cas d’affaires pour desservir ceux et celles vivant en zones rurales et
éloignées.
3. Pour ce faire, nous vous demanderons de vous adresser à un manquement de nature
réglementaire qui freine actuellement la capacité de nos membres d’avancer et de
négocier les solutions dont ils ont besoin. Il s’agit de quelques mots des Lignes directrices
canadiennes relatives à l’attribution des identificateurs internationaux de stations
mobiles (IISM) – en anglais, les Canadian IMSI Assignment Guidelines – qui limitent
l’accès de nos membres aux codes de réseau mobile, aussi connu sous l’acronyme MNC,
pour Mobile Network Code.
[TANIS PETERSON, Senior Director, Operations & Regulatory Affairs:]
4. It won’t surprise you to hear that we are the industry association representing nearly 60
freight, intercity, commuter, and tourist railways in Canada. Our members move close to
88 million people and more than $310 billion worth of goods across the country every
year.5. But our members are also among Canada’s biggest telecom operators, and employ more
than 2,100 telecom professionals to do it.
6. That is nothing new. CN established the national broadcast network that became the
CBC. CN and CP together created a national telecom network that kicked off telecom
competition in this country, with your historic 1979 decision to mandate its
interconnection with Bell Canada. Eventually CNCP became Allstream.
7. We are today out of the service provider business. But we continue to be extremely active
in the Radio Advisory Board of Canada, which we co-founded. In 2000 Industry Canada
awarded us the first spectrum license to be granted to a user. Our role coordinating
activity under that licence has helped carry forward the intensive use, investment, and
innovation in national wireless networks that is core to the safety and efficiency of our
railways.
[DANIEL LAFRENIÈRE, Director, Spectrum & Telecommunications:]
8. Our members are not done investing or innovating.
9. En tant que Directeur, Spectre et télécommunications à l’ACFC, je passe beaucoup plus
de temps avec nos collègues de chez ISED, qui sont responsable de la gestion du spectre,
que devant le CRTC. Et ce, pour la simple raison que ni notre association, ni nos
membres ne sont des fournisseurs de services de télécommunication. Nous détenons une
licence de spectre à titre d’usager, mais l’étendue et la qualité de notre réseau se compare
à ceux des plus grands fournisseurs de service de télécommunications canadiens.
10. In the past our members’ networks have operated parallel to the networks used by most
Canadian consumers, with a few exceptions for non-mission critical applications.
[MARC BRAZEAU:]
11. But the railway communications grid is changing. So are the kinds of networks we are
building. Our mission-critical applications now need higher speed and higher-volume
data transmission. The density of connected, fast-moving, wireless, always-on devices we
rely on is continuing to grow.
12. We still rely principally on narrowband communications to do that. You’d be surprised at
what we have been able to squeeze out of that spectrum. We keep upgrading how we use
our transmission facilities. We keep pushing forward our own orderly development of a
trackside communications grid that safeguards and strengthens the key social and
economic role that telecom enables us to play in all of Canada’s regions – moving people
and cargo. Those changes are moving us from parallel narrowband towards participation
in an interconnected, interoperable network of broadband networks.
-3-[DANIEL LAFRENIÈRE:]
13. Railways have never done that without managing their own networks, assembling their
own connectivity, and interconnecting with other networks core-to-core. As Critical
Infrastructure Operators, the stakes are just too high for our sector, and for achieving
high-resiliency, always-on networks coast to coast.
14. We think that will help the Commission with delivering on some of its goals in this
proceeding. You want to see lower barriers to competitive entry, and a better business
case for financial rural and remote broadband wireless. And we are talking about lowering
the cost of wireless deployment by being in a position to share a radio access network with
mobile network operators or public safety operators wherever it needs to be built –
whether they are members of the Big 3, regional disruptors, or anyone else looking to
partner on deployment.
15. But here’s the problem. In narrowband, we’re doing just fine in parallel. But in
broadband, we face a barrier to interconnecting with Mobile Network Operators core-to-
core. That’s because interconnection is subject to using a Mobile Network Code by
which we are identified to other networks, and which we can use to route traffic to each
other.
16. These Mobile Network Codes, or “MNCs”, are basic building blocks of the LTE and 5G
worlds. Without MNC access, we can’t route our own traffic. It is as if, rather than
binding together upstream connectivity to make a very strong rope, we’re hanging by a
thread from a single carrier. It would mean outsourcing a core function that we need to be
able to deploy, manage, fix, reconfigure, and control in order to meet railway industry
standards and run our business. We can’t outsource that. So we’re here to ask for
removal of a regulatory barrier preventing us from moving forward.
17. I would like to be clear. This is not about Mobile Network Codes, not eSIMs. Different
Critical Infrastructure Operators design and build different telecom networks, yet lack of
MNC access to do our own routing is a key building block holding all of us back” The
Railway Association of Canada’s members are all on the same page, and we think you’ll
find the Canadian Electricity Association’s members are too. We are asking that you
direct the Canadian Steering Committee on Numbering to revise the Canadian IMSI
Assignment Guideline to enable critical infrastructure operators to access Mobile
Network Codes so that we can migrate to broadband.
[MARC BRAZEAU:]
18. This wouldn’t be the first time the Commission has done exactly this.
19. In your 2015-177 wireless regulatory framework you took care, at paragraphs 161 and 162,
to direct the CISC Numbering committee to revise the IMSI Assignment Guideline to let
-4-Full MVNOs be issued Mobile Network Codes. We respectfully submit that the case is
even clearer here. You are grappling with a very heated debate, in this hearing, about
whether and how to mandate wholesale unbundling of access facilities for MVNOs. We
don’t have a dog in that fight. But we can make it a much better fight, all with one small
change in regulation. MNC access is blocking critical infrastructure operators from
buying lots of connectivity from those who can sell it to us, and from building shared radio
access networks where there’s nobody to sell it to us.
20. So this is a very small move that could create significant positive change within the sector.
Directing the Numbering committee to revise the IMSI Assignment Guideline to enable
Critical Infrastructure Operators whose core mission includes running telecom networks
to gain access to MNCs will deliver three key benefits:
• First – safer, more efficient, and more secure ways of moving people and freight
across the country. Those “ribbons of steel” you heard about are becoming digital
railways.
• Second – unlocking shared wireless builds in rural and remote areas, enabling their
deployment at a lower cost structure.
• And third -- fuelling competitive intensity across the industry, once we are able to
move into broadband, and buy connectivity in a way that rewards the best
performance and value.
21. Il nous fera plaisir de répondre à vos questions, avec nos collègues du CN, une fois leur
présentation terminée.
*** End of Document ***
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