TIVERTON, Ont. – While wireless newcomers like Wind and Public and DAVE get all the press as they launch in the big Canadian cities this year, the people in places like Collingwood, Owen Sound, Kincardine and Tiverton, Ont., will also have a new mobile competitor in 2010.
Their nearly 100-year-old ILEC, Bruce Telecom, plans to add wireless this year – to go along with the next generation service it launched in 2009, digital television.
“We have a fairly wide product offering,” new CEO Eric Dobson told Cartt.ca in an interview Wednesday (his third day on the job), “and in the second quarter of this year we will be launching a wireless product.”
Bruce is one of a seven-company southwestern Ontario wireless partnership where independent telcos Quadro Communications, Hay Communications, Tuckersmith Communications, Hurontel, Mornington Communications and Brooke Telecom are all offering, or about to offer, wireless service to their mostly rural customer base.
And Dobson is thinking big, too. “We hope to offer the iPhone,” he added, and perhaps Google’s Nexus One “which I read about on your site,” he said.
The new man atop Bruce came to the company from CLEC Fibernetics after former CEO Michael Andrews left late last year (and who is now VP operations, Ontario South at telecom contractor Pickard Construction).
Dobson has also been senior vice president of Rogers Enterprise Telecom division and prior to that ran the carrier services division of Sprint Canada. He’s worked in telephony for almost 20 years, including “short stints at Bell,” he said.
“But this is my first CEO role,” he added. “This is a situation where I think I can come in and really have an impact.”
Bruce Telecom employs 83 folks and serves 14,000 households but it “faces some real competition for the first time in its history and my background is nothing but competition,” said Dobson. “I’ve worked mostly on the CLEC side and I think this is a good opportunity for me to bring that competitive experience to an ILEC to hopefully put us in a position to beat our competitors in the market.”
Those competitors include some small cable operators, larger ones like Rogers and EastLink, and Bell Canada.
“Our number one challenge is competition,” he added. “The big focus (in 2010) will be making our product line more competitive, expanding our product offering with television and wireless… With the television product our geographic coverage is limited so we’ll be expanding where we can offer that.”
The company is also reeling a bit, too, as local media have noted Bruce Telecom “will have a fairly big budget miss for 2009,” said Dobson.
“It was a combination of things,” he explained, which has lead to the red ink. “There were some revenue misses due to competitive losses, some spending that went over budget and we also had a large inventory of some television hardware, for example. Because we launched late we weren’t able to deploy that inventory and now it’s aging so we’ll have to write it down.
“So getting our financial performance back on track will be a big focus as well,” he continued. “We will do the usual things: Watch what we spend money on, focus on products that are profitable. We’ll have to find ways to compensate for any competitive losses by winning new customers with new products in new areas as well.”
One thing Bruce is not, is for sale.
“That’s not on my radar right now. My focus is to turn around the operating results and the launch of wireless,” said Dobson.
One of the best aspects of the company, and one which the new CEO will rely on as it rebuilds its finances and expands its services, is Bruce’s strong local brand.
“We have great brand recognition and a good reputation,” explained Dobson. “I think for some of the new entrants, like EastLink, which has been very successful with their telephony offering in their home territory, may find that they’re up against a tougher competitor here.”
