Wireless providers question 'bill shock' protection

Proposed measures to protect cellphone customers from unexpectedly high wireless bills are bad for customers and will stifle competition, wireless providers have told Canada's telecommunications regulator.

"I think a lot of customers don't want a cap [on their monthly bill]," David Fuller, chief marketing director for Telus Corp., told a Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) hearing Tuesday in Gatineau, Que., on proposed rules governing wireless contracts and fees.

"If they want a service that's capped… that's what a prepaid service can provide."

A draft version of the "wireless code" being proposed by the CRTC proposes allowing wireless customers to set a limit on their monthly bill, which would be $50 by default. If the customer exceeds that amount, the wireless provider would have to automatically suspend any services that would cause the customer to keep racking up costs.

Other proposed measures to protect customers from "bill shock" include:

Requiring providers to notify the customer when he or she consumes 50 per cent, 80 per cent and 100 per cent of his or her usage limit for a particular service, such as voice minutes or megabytes of data.

Requiring providers to provide tools that allow a customer to monitor usage of different services online.

Telus argued that such notifications for voice and text usage would be difficult to build, because the rate depends on the time of day and the number dialed, and are unnecessary, since customers usually understand how much they have used.

With respect to data and roaming, Fuller said that as long as wireless carriers were providing such notifications and online monitoring tools, as Telus already does, a monthly bill cap is unnecessary.

But CRTC commissioner Candice Molnar disagreed.

"Not all customers want to spend their time sorting out how much data they have left, particularly in something like a family plan," she said. "I'm a customer and that's not what I want to do."

She added that data usage is new to many customers, estimating usage is complex and the CRTC's public consultations indicated that customers want some protection against high data charges.

Molnar also questioned the suggestion that customers who want that should get a prepaid plan, which doesn't offer some of the services under postpaid contracts. She noted that customers on prepaid plans can't get their handsets subsidized, for instance. Telus itself also acknowledged that it doesn't offer roaming to prepaid customers, and therefore they can't use their wireless service outside Canada.

Fuller said if the CRTC thinks monitoring tools alone aren't sufficient, then it should consider the fact that letting people choose individual amounts for the cap on their bill would be technically complex and therefore "very expensive" for carriers to implement. He suggested that allowing customers to opt in to a predetermined cap of $150 or $200 would make more sense.

"We firmly believe $50 is far too low," he said.

During Monday's hearing, the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, which represents "virtually all of the major companies" that offer wireless service in Canada, said that while it supported all the proposed options to prevent bill shock, it believed they should be optional.

Bernard Lord, president and CEO of the association, told the CRTC that the poposed requirements "limit a consumer's option… and interfere in the operation of competitive market forces."

The hearings, which opened Monday, will continue through Friday. The CRTC is inviting the public to submit comments to an online discussion on the draft code throughout the hearings.