TORONTO – Manitoba Telecom Services president Cheryl Barker said Tuesday that the company recently added its 45,000th digital television customer, meaning the Manitoba telco now serves over 20% of all TV customers in Winnipeg.
During a panel session at the BMO Nesbitt Burns Media and Telecom conference Tuesday in Toronto Barker said that the company hit the mark on September 5th (leaving unsaid the sizable dent the figure put in Shaw Cable’s customer rolls in the city).
MTS TV is a digital subscriber line delivered digital TV service which offers three streams of digital TV and high speed Internet to customers within about 20 Mbps of bandwidth. MTS also launched video on demand earlier this year.
Also on the panel though was Cogeco CEO Louis Audet, who pointed out cable’s advantages when it comes to delivering megabits to the home. He said Cogeco now delivers 30 Mbps and when DOCSIS 3.0 is finalized in 2006, that number may rise to 200 Mbps.
Barker said of her own service that 85% of Winnipeggers are passed by the MTS VDSL system and said that “in the next few months” it will be boosted to 26 Mbps. To get there, fibre will stretch to within 650 metres of Winnipeg homes, enabling the delivery of two HDTV streams, one standard definition stream and five to seven Mbps of Internet service.
It will also allow the company to launch a new service which will let MTS TV customers read e-mail on their TV screens, within about six months, she said.
“26 Megs service is robust for the next couple of years,” she insisted.
As for Audet, he added, a bit later in the session (which also included Bell’s SVP technology Trevor Anderson), “it’s five times less expensive to bring phone service over cable than to do TV over a phone line.”
– Greg O’Brien
