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“The proposal to cap additional fees once they hit $50 creates so many technical and practical problems that it is, with respect, impossible,” said Raj Doshi, senior vice-president of products at Rogers.

Ken Engelhart, senior vice-president of regulatory for Toronto-based Rogers told the panel it would be feasible to cap certain services individually, but “aggregating everything with a real-time usage and rating engine would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.”

While capping individual services such as data roaming or domestic data would be possible, he urged against it, arguing customers are better served by flexible packages that automatically bump them up to the next, more expensive level if they go over their monthly limits.

“Our advice to you is that capping is very disruptive,” Mr. Engelhart said.

“People are using these services and rely on them so we think it would be a very large customer irritant to be in the middle of a data session when you’re roaming — or even domestically — and that your service basically be suspended at $50,” Ted Woodhead, senior vice-president of federal government and regulatory affairs at Vancouver-based Telus, said in an interview.

He added that setting up a system to allow customers to set individual caps would be “enormously expensive.”

Telus executives told the panel headed by CRTC chair Jean-Pierre Blais that the company already has a cap of $200 on fees incurred anywhere outside Canada, above which customers must explicitly agree to continue their usage.