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Bell did not respond to requests for comment from The Canadian Press. The CRTC site did not have a public posting from Bell as of late Monday.

Canada’s wireless carriers were told last June that they had until Dec. 1 to comply with a number of regulations, including how they set caps on wireless data usage and who is authorized to accept extra charges for accounts with more than one device user.

The delays will likely affect only a small category of consumers — such as families with shared data plans or some vacationers travelling outside Canada, independent telecommunications consultant Mark Goldberg said Monday.

Carriers are already required to send warnings about potential overage fees to individual devices, but not necessarily to the account holder who’s responsible for paying the bills for all the devices, he added.

“The twist that has come in is that the CRTC wants notifications to the account holder, not the wireless handset user when they’re roaming or going over a limit,” Goldberg said in an interview.

“You’ve now, basically, touched the billing and administration system and have it interacting with the switching system in a way that they hadn’t done before.”

Critics of the current system have said account holders can face shockingly high bills if the carrier’s overage warnings are sent to an account’s secondary device — possibly carried by a spouse or child — rather than the primary device.

Goldberg said that the CRTC will likely agree to the delays requested by Rogers and Telus, because they’d said early this year that they may need more than six months to put in place changes that the CRTC announced in mid-June.