MONTREAL – Cogeco Cable has bought MTO Telecom, the largest private telecommunications provider in the province of Quebec. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Cogeco said Wednesday that it plans to integrate the company into its business communications subsidiary Cogeco Data Services (CDS). With over 1500 kilometres of fibre, MTO Telecom covers the island of Montreal and offers Ethernet broadband connectivity services to carrier, enterprise and public sector customers.
“The combination of Cogeco Data Services and MTO Telecom brings together network infrastructure that enables Cogeco Data Services to expand its reach, particularly in Montréal, adding to its already…
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MONTREAL – Montreal’s Metro 14 will launch in high definition this Saturday.
The Channel Zero-owned station also confirmed that it will be launching in HD on Cogeco systems around the Montréal area later this fall. It is currently available on Videotron, Bell TV, Shaw Direct Rogers, and over-the-air in HD.
New to channel’s fall primetime lineup, which debuts September 12, are series The Insider, Hart of Dixie, and The Secret Circle, plus a new morning show that will premier in early October.
www.metro14.ca
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MONTREAL – Cogeco Cable has rolled out its Ultimate 30 and Ultimate 50 high speed Internet packages for consumers in Napanee, ON, as well as its new Business Ultimate 30 and Ultimate 50 packages for businesses.
Powered by DOCSIS 3.0, Cogeco says the packages offer advantages in speed and pricing compared to competitors in its footprint. The Ultimate 30 package offers speeds of up to 30 Mbps for downloads and up to 1.5 Mbps for uploads with a monthly download cap of 125 GB. For the Ultimate 50 package, speeds can reach 50 Mbps for downloads and 1.5 Mbps…
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MONTREAL – Cogeco Cable Inc. says it has completed the acquisition of Quiettouch Inc. that was announced on June 27, 2011. Quiettouch is a 27-year-old leading independent provider of outsourced managed IT and infrastructure services to mid-market and larger enterprises in Canada. A purchase price has not yet been disclosed.
Quiettouch will be integrated into Cogeco Data Services and complement CDS’ data centre, network and voice services offering. Cogeco says that together they will offer a wide array of services and capabilities designed to better serve the needs of the business market, including network infrastructure, managed connectivity and voice…
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MONTREAL – Cogeco Cable added two new French-language channels to its high definition lineup Thursday.
TVA-owned Mlle is a channel designed for Quebec women passionate about style, beauty and wellness, while Astral’s Cinepop airs films from the 1950s through today, uncut and with no commercial breaks.
The SD version of Mlle is available now to all of Cogeco’s digital TV customers in Quebec, and Mlle HD and Cinepop HD will be offered to “most”, the company said.
"Mlle HD and Cinepop HD further enhance the French-language HD line-up our customers in Quebec know and love”, said Ron Perrotta, VP of marketing and…
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TORONTO and OTTAWA – Law professor Michael Geist is standing by a blog post he wrote late last week claiming satellite Internet provider Barrett Xplore altered its Internet management policies after a complaint made to the CRTC under the Commission’s guidelines on net neutrality.
Geist, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, also wrote in his blog that Barrett Xplore (now known as Xplornet) “was also the source of the longest running complaint as the company took months to respond to CRTC requests to improve its disclosure practices.” This prompted a tersely…
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EVEN THE VERTICALLY integrated companies know they need a code of conduct to help guide how – as the 800-pound Canadian gorillas – they do business in a country where they own most of the content and distribution channels.
CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein said repeatedly during last month’s vertical integration hearing that he wants to see some sort of code of business practices for vertically integrated media companies set out in writing in order to try and avoid new regulatory and legal battles when the new BDU regulations come into force this September. So final replies, which were due…
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GATINEAU – Independent ISPs and some of their supporters came under significant criticism on day two of the CRTC’s wholesale usage-based billing hearing for wanting to profit off the backs of the incumbent providers and not invest in their own networks because the deal is too good.
CRTC vice-chair of broadcasting Tom Pentefountas first took OpenMedia and the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) to task in the morning session wondering whether there is actually an incentive for the independent ISPs to invest in building out networks. “Isn’t part of the issue that the deal is so…
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GATINEAU – Aggregated volume pricing (AVP) shouldn’t be seen as a penalty on independent ISPs, but as an incentive for them to manage their network congestion, Bell Canada told the CRTC during the first day of the re-hearing of the wholesale usage-based billing issue.
Bell argued its AVP approach is a better economic internet traffic management practice (ITMP) than the 95th percentile method proposed by the Canadian Network Operators Consortium (CNOC) because it provides returns on network investments and incents independent ISPs to reduce congestion in their networks.
“ ensures that incumbents receive an appropriate return on their…
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OTTAWA – Two years after establishing guidelines on net neutrality, the CRTC has fallen short on its goal to protect users, writes Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law.
Geist’s report, which also appeared Friday in the Toronto Star, says that after filing an access to information request and reviewing “hundreds of pages of documents”, he found “that virtually all major Canadian ISPs have been the target of complaints, but there have been few, if any, consequences arising from the complaints process. In fact, the CRTC has…
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