Court Upholds PUC Fees Per Channel

Fred Lumor

Attorney Lumor says the Court of Appeal helped to settle a major issue discussed in the court below – the exact meaning of the word “channel” as used in the schedule to the 2002 Telecommunications Regulations on Licensing, Classification and Fee Structure.

Fred Lumor, Attorney for Public Utilities Commission

“It is a very important case because there is a schedule of fees and there is misinterpretation for the word channel. The PUC levies fees for the number of channels that the telecommunications use to make phone calls, internet services and so on and so forth. If the court had accepted SpeedNet’s argument, it means that SpeedNet would have been paying little or nothing for those channels. The court accepted PUC’s interpretation of the channels so that the court upheld that the over seven hundred thousand charged annually for those fees is the correct fees to be paid. So all the doubt is removed; all the confusion is removed.”

The PUC won eighty percent of its costs in the appeal. Lumor says taxpayer money will not be used to repay SpeedNet. Senior Counsel Andrew Marshalleck argued the case in both courts and colleague Liesje Chung Barrow appeared to receive the judgment on his behalf.