Earlier this week, Internet reseller, TekSavvy, presented to the CRTC panel regarding sales tactics of Canada’s incumbent telecos.

According to Janet Lo, VP Privacy & Consumer Legal Affairs, TekSavvy, she says the company “believes in doing what is right for our customers and strives to treat consumers fairly and honestly.”

TekSavvy says it achieves this by advertising the best price possible, transparent both to their consumers and the marketplace. The company also does not use sales incentives or targets for employees for completing sales.

According to Lo, TekSavvy has a “unique perspective” as it is a wholesale-based service provider, while it is also impacted by the sales practices of incumbent competitors.

For TekSavvy, they claim major telcos take advantage of wholesale transactions because installations are usually completed by incumbent installers. It is at this point in time where installers are able to use this opportunity to “mislead and inappropriately poach TekSavvy’s end-user to the incumbent’s retail services” inside a customer’s home.

For consumers, TekSavvy believes they are “harmed where unfair pressure is used to complete a sale or upsell, where misleading or false statements about competitors are used to win a customer, or where consumers experience unsolicited sales in their own home when they are expecting service installation or repair.”

Lo concluded the competitive marketplace is “distorted” and wholesale-based companies are harmed based on incumbent installers and their interactions with customers at installation points.

TekSavvy concludes, “incumbents have a conflict of interest when they control wholesale inputs, including dispatching technicians to install service for a wholesale-based provider’s customer, and they compete with their wholesale customers for the same retail customer.”

Shaw and Rogers had their turn to respond to the CRTC this morning. Bell is responding as we speak. More to come on responses from incumbents later.

Update: A Rogers spokesperson emailed iPhone in Canada to note the company’s reply to TekSavvy’s allegations, which they call “simply untrue”. The full response by Rogers to the CRTC and TekSavvy can be read below: