Summary

  • The CRTC is examining Northwestel Tariff Notice 1283, filed 3 July, on site space, commercial power and tower attachment rates. Its 5 October information request asks for invoices or quotations, regional cost explanations and electronic models with formulas and linked files.
  • Northwestel obtained until 3 November to answer, instead of 20 October. The extension settles a filing deadline, not the proposed rates.

A radio tower is a good place to share a view. It is a harder place to share an electricity bill. Northwestel has proposed revised charges for third-party equipment at its northern sites, and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission wants the arithmetic behind them.

The application, Tariff Notice 1283, was filed on 3 July under Special Services Tariff Item 702. In its 5 October letter, CRTC staff said no intervention had been filed but asked for more evidence anyway. Its questions cover Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and British Columbia. For rectifiers, batteries, generators, grounding and inverters, the regulator wants to know whether supplier prices are actual or forecast, and where the receipts, purchase agreements or supplier quotations sit. It asks Northwestel to separate equipment prices from engineering and installation costs in each region.

That is only the first pass through the ledger. The regulator also wants explanations for differences between 2024 and 2026 installed first costs, evidence for changes in each region’s electricity cost per kilowatt-hour, and the electronic rate models themselves. The models must retain formulas and linked workbooks; unexplained hard-coded inputs will not do. Data vintage and modelling assumptions must be identified. In other words, a number in a cell needs a route back to a real cost or a defensible forecast.

Northwestel was asked to respond by 20 October. On that date it sought until 3 November, and CRTC staff granted the extension, saying complete and accurate responses would help it set just and reasonable final rates. The letter sets no decision date and approves no new charge. The cost studies cited in the request are not reproduced there, so the public letter cannot establish the proposed rates or their size relative to today's bills.

There is useful history in CRTC Order 2025-278. It approved changes to the definitions of what could be attached to Northwestel towers, including some non-antenna equipment, with no rate change proposed in that case. The special tariff covers equipment owned or leased by outsiders when there is capacity beyond normal growth needs. Commissioner Bram Abramson dissented over discretion in accepting attachments, thin supporting evidence and the lack of targeted notice to likely users. That was a dispute over terms; the present file is about the costs behind rates. Both show why a tariff is more than an operator’s private spreadsheet.

No public intervention in this rate file tells us little about whether potential attachers agree. What matters next is whether the evidence arriving by 3 November lets the CRTC test each regional input and publish a reasoned rate decision. A tower may stand on rock. Its price should stand on something readers can trace.

Sources