MARKHAM – The 39 member companies of the Canadian Independent Telecommunications Association (those stubborn, often innovative, mostly rural, holdout telcos who never ever sold to Bell or Telus or another bigger outfit) are gathering this week in Markham for their annual general meeting and showcase and seminar program.
Some members have launched IPTV, all offer Internet service, some have wireless, some are big into business services – and all face similar challenges as compared to the big traditional telcos. A number of member companies are city-owned or are co-operatives.
Seminar topics on Monday covered bandwidth requirements, whether fibre to the home is a good idea, and an analysis of how consumers are changing in a multi-screen world. Tuesday’s topics include regulatory, information sharing and FTTH “real-life” experiences.
Fifty-five vendors filled a small trade show floor at the Hilton Suites Toronto/Markham Conference Centre.
Member companies – which include the likes of Bruce Telecom (Tiverton, Ont.), Hay Communications (Zurich, Ont.), Quadro Communications (Kirkton, Ont.), Sogetel (Nicolet, Que.), and Ontera (the telco owned by train and bus company Ontario Northland Transportation) – listened to vendors and others talking about the future, and discussing their companies’ future needs in an oh-so-connected world.
“We live in an exponential era,” said Geoff Burke, director of marketing for manufacturer Calix. Competition is coming from many directions and in 2008, noted Burke, one in six Americans gave up their traditional land line in favour of wireless or VOIP phones. In 2012, that will accelerate to one in three, he added.
That means plain old wireline phone – while still very viable in rural settings like the ones served by many CITA members – is a shrinking business. “All new revenue generating services are enabled by broadband,” said Burke.
And with high definition video coming (either from a service provider right now or over the Internet in coming years) along side all forms of video on demand and interactive applications, if you have a network, you have to be ready, or customers will switch to something better, somehow (however, often the CITA members are the only network in town). Burke spoke of some homes he has seen where the in-home net offers 100mbps worth of bandwidth.
Homes like that “need a fast, secure, reliable connection,” he added. And while it may take longer for a home like that to materialize in Prince Rupert (home of City West Cable and Telephone), those types of customers will come to CITA-member company territories.
And as more time passes and more applications on the Internet get more bandwidth hungry, fibre will move closer and closer to the customer. “The end game is becoming more Ethernet over all-optical,” Burke believes.
And without deep fibre, services like video on demand will be difficult to deploy, said Dave Bartalone, vice-president, technology for VOD content aggregator TVN Entertainment, whose models showed fibre almost to the home.
Bartalone outlined how much VOD content can be squeezed by TVN down a 25 Megabit pipe, but it was hard to imagine who in the audience had their networks built to that specification and who would be able to send such streams, given the nature of many of the CITA members networks (many of whose customers live in farmhouses spread far and wide) and their overall age.
That isn’t to say these small telcos are waiting around just hoping for the best. Watch Cartt.ca for more on these companies and their progressive plans in the days and weeks to come.
– Greg O’Brien
