NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE – Consumers and the broadband industry spend a lot of time thinking about and fussing over the big companies, be they service providers like Bell, or vendors like Ericsson.
However, there are millions of consumers served daily by nimble, smaller players such as Cable Cable, CCAP, and Westman who are finding cool solutions manufactured by like minded vendors such as Calix or Casa Systems, and others, backed by flexible, thoughtful, innovative solutions providers such as Hamilton’s Clearcable, which annually hosts a one-day technology summit in, or this time near, its home base.
Approximately 170 attendees were treated to an informative day full of sessions on network and data security, 5G wireless, PON, distributed architecture and remote Phy, LoRaWAN and others, with a highlight being the closing panel on the connected home.
The panel was a 45-minute session showing off the great lengths small service providers are going to deliver a well-connected home to rural customers. Each of Westman Communications (Brandon, Man.), Cable Cable (Fenelon Falls and area, Ont.) and CCAP (Lac Beauport and area, Que.) are now offering managed whole home WiFi mesh services to their now much happier customers.
“We’re just going that extra mile, giving them that red carpet treatment,” said Westman’s Graham Johnston, in describing his company’s offering, which Cartt.ca has covered prior.
Cable Cable’s Lonny Tomczak was prescient in noting that customers rarely blame their own devices or apps, or software for connectivity problems and instead turn their ire onto their broadband service provider when connectivity is a challenge – which means providing a connected home offering was a no-brainer. “I was sick of seeing Cable Cable wifi sucks on social media when we didn’t have a wifi service,” he said, adding that now, he doesn’t see those posts and trouble calls have declined.
Offering the wifi mesh service, which is seeing signifcant uptake from customers at all three companies, has meant bottom line improvments as it has meant far fewer truck rolls and customer calls, added CCAP’s Maryna Carré.
(Pictured are, from left, Johnston, Tomczak and Carré.)
These are just a few of the interesting stories of how independent operators are driving innovation in their communities we heard at the Clearcable Technology Summit.
