TORONTO – From regulations to new technology, the Olympics to his hopes that cutting the cord won’t be quite so prevalent in Canada, Bell Canada’s president of residential services Kevin Crull covered a number of topics in his closing keynote at the Canadian Telecom Summit on Tuesday and in an interview with Cartt.ca and Bloomberg afterwards.
On last week’s CRTC hearing into mandated wholesale broadband access for third party ISPs:
“What if the people who run the Olympic hockey tournament had said to our guys: ‘everyone knows your team is the favourite to win gold, plus you have home ice advantage and you’ve invested in great junior programs which developed superstars like Sidney Crosby.
“‘So here’s a new rule – to make things more interesting. Crosby won’t be allowed to go across the blue line into the offensive zone in the first period of any game, the crowd has to cheer for the visiting team in the second period and one more thing: he’ll play for the other team in the third period of any medal game. That’ll make it more even because we have to help the teams that aren’t as good, those who haven’t invested in preparation for the games, don’t we?’
“Of course that’s silly, right? We live in the real world, don’t we? Then again, watching the goings-on in Ottawa last week, well, it does make you wonder.”
On the competitive landscape:
“Let’s put to rest the persistent myth that our communications industry is a cozy old boys’ club. Just look at the broad range of speakers, panellists and even billboards as you drove to the Toronto Congress Centre – all to provide ample evidence that Canadians are living in an era of intense, head to head competition in communications.”
On Bell’s fibre push:
“This spring we broke ground on a three year program to upgrade 270,000 homes and businesses in Quebec City with fibre right to the premises. It’s the largest such installation in the country, delivering speeds of at least 100 megabits per second – and we’re deploying FTTP to all new suburban housing developments throughout Ontario and Quebec.
“Bell Aliant is doing the same for 70,000 homes and businesses in Fredericton and Saint John (NB).”
On what’s next after launching IPTV in Montreal and Toronto this summer:
“We’ve said our fibre to the node project will cover 5 million homes by 2012. (which makes the Bell network capable of delivering IPTV). Certainly I’ve pushed hard to have that happen faster, but we don’t want to repeat AT&T’s first 18 months (where a stable IPTV system and installation snafus damaged its launch in 2006).
“That’s going to be the gating factor on our scaling.”
On opening up foreign investment but separating carriers from broadcast:
“I do agree it’s very hard right now to separate broadcast and distribution (but) I think there’s plenty of evidence that the operating environment and the home country cultural protection can be maintained in wide open ownership rules. There’s ample evidence of that in Europe.
“I’m not worried if Comcast were to come up and buy Rogers (for example)… It wouldn’t change the way we think about competing.
“Cost of capital matters so I think with our performance today… (free cash flow and dividend growth and strong capex spend) I don’t think we have any problem raising capital from within Canada but the cost of capital is absolutely a function of good business decisions.”
On whether or not a carrier needs to own content to more fully leverage its next-gen networks:
“Do you need to? No, I don’t think you need to. But there are offensive and defensive reasons where you might want to. You might think for defensive reasons, to keep a level playing field – if some of your big competitors have content you need to buy you also need to have some. That’s one rationale.
“On the offensive side, I believe that content owners and aggregators are motivated to have the broadest possible distribution and so I don’t think you’ll see dramatic exclusives where content only finds its way to one wireless carrier or one BDU or one IP distributor.”
“But there are so many new rights distinctions on release windows and VOD and catch-up rights, etcetera, so I do think that distributors will play around with uniquely packaging those rights for themselves versus others.”
On cutting the cord and how Canadians don’t seem as predisposed to do it:
“I’m encouraged by the fact we’re, so far, different in Canada. (In the U.S.) telcos there threw up their hands and said ‘whatever, let them all go wireless.’ Here, we think very differently. They both have a place.
“I’m not saying it’s not going to happen but I hear people say all the time ‘Can I call you from my land line?’
“I’m optimistic that with the right marketing positioning – and we have to make sure that wireline value stays just ahead of that curve where you’re motivated to connect it for three cost reason – my hope would be that we never catch the U.S. in homes that have disconnected their wireline.”
(Right now surveys say about 25% of Americans have dumped their land line phone for cell, but in Canada that number stands at about 8%. Crull hopes we’ll stay at about half the U.S. rate.)
On video to the handheld and consumption costs:
“The Olympics showed the potential and an indication of where we’re going – and we haven’t even seen the iPad effect yet. (When he watched a busload of people watch an Olympic hockey game on a smartphone) that changed my view for the potential applications.”
“I think we will see packages for (video) applications. Bell could have 5-to-10 buck a month subscription plan for mobile TV – outside of their data plan. Right now it’s all crunched into your data plan… (and) I don’t think we’re going to be able to figure out how to price data buckets that reflect instant messaging and e-mail, along with video.
“We’re going to have to separate those two.”
