TORONTO – Bell Canada CEO George Cope said Wednesday the company is about to target up to a million rural homes and businesses by offering them a new fixed wireless broadband solution.
While he didn’t give specific details, Cope said the company recently ran a test in three communities, (he wouldn’t divulge where) and added Bell will launch the new broadband service in 30 others by the end of this year
Thanks to the company’s multi-billion-dollar push to get fibre as far as possible into its network, to as many LTE wireless-delivering cell sites as possible, that deep backhaul capability now also makes it possible to deliver fixed wireless broadband, using its 3500 MHz spectrum, to likely several hundred rural communities to which it couldn't provide broadband in the past.
“We can go into some of these rural markets we’ve never been able to play in before where, frankly, we have dial-up, so we might have eight percent market share there,” explained Cope at the annual BMO Media and Telecom Conference in Toronto.
Over the next three years, the company can get to another 800,000 to a million “premises where we haven’t been able to play in on the internet side, with a fixed wireless solution for our wireline business – so those 1,300 sites will have fibre to them,” he added. Cartt.ca verified with a Bell spokesperson that these communities are located in all of Bell's wired footprint, from Manitoba to the East Coast where the company provides either no broadband, or slow DSL service.
Cope said in all his business modelling over the years, it never made economic sense to deliver broadband deep into rural regions – via fibre or wireless – until now. While it’s still too expensive to do it via fibre, fixed wireless now can make sense for Bell because of the fibre backhaul and the shrunken size and cost of fixed wireless gear.
“We’re talking very rural markets that have LTE coverage now and we shrunk the cell sites. We’re not using our LTE network (for this new rural broadband plan), we’re using different spectrum and because the sites have shrunk and we’re doing fibre backhaul to the sites anyway, suddenly in these markets you can give people 50 meg services where they might be getting dial up or 5 (Mbps) from somebody else,” he explained.
“This is not fixed wireless 5G – ultimately you can migrate to that—but really it’s just the technology costs using 3.5 spectrum (3500 MHz)… the sites have shrunk, you can make the economics work for a fixed product which should be in our consumer wireline business and that, bundled with our satellite TV will help us in that marketplace.”
UPDATE: The 1,300 sites Cope mentioned are not 1,300 individual communities as some of the rural towns in question are served by several towers. "It’s safe to say we’ll serve several hundred individual communities comprising a total of approximately 800K homes with the potential to grow that by additional 200K homes as we refine our qualification and provisioning methods," said a Bell spokesperson in an email to Cartt.ca.
"A qualified coverage area is where a consistent 25 Mbps service can be delivered in a 10-kilometre radius," explained the spokesperson. "The technology being used is LTE-TDD over 3.5 GHz spectrum, which will evolve to 5G in the future. The customer premise equipment includes an outdoor unit mounted on the side of the house, cabled to an internal gateway unit to provide service to the home."
Cope also noted this new rural service “fits very much with the government’s strategy wanting more broadband in some of these communities.”
File photo by Steve Faguy.
