TORONTO – Virgin chair Sir Richard Branson has called for the establishment of new standards for the mobile industry that would abolish “bogus” fees and force mobile companies to stop “misleading consumers”.
In an apparent response to Rogers’ plan to drop its system access fee but add a new fee called the government regulatory recovery fee, Virgin has launched a national ad campaign that it says “directly calls out Rogers’ bogus fee”.
“I’d like to congratulate Rogers for removing one fee that never made sense, but I’m perplexed to hear that they’ve replaced it with another equally confusing one”, Branson said…
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DENVER–Striving to chop energy costs, protect the environment, and placate increasingly demanding regulators, major North American cable operators are starting to take steps to cut power consumption and carbon emissions.
In a “green” general session staged here at last week’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2009, executives from four large MSOs and two prominent cable trade groups spelled out ways that cable providers are beginning to reduce their carbon footprints. They also discussed promising measures that cable operators can adopt to cut pollution further in the future.
D’Arcy Brown, director of optical transport and facilities, network planning group, for Rogers Cable Communications,…
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TORONTO – Phil Lind delights in telling everyone that Rogers Television, the big cableco’s community TV arm, is 100% local and 100% Canadian “unlike the big broadcasters who say they’re ‘intensely local’,” he said.
The executive vice-president, regulatory and vice-chairman of Rogers Communications launched Rogers Television 40 years ago and hosted a small gathering of journalists Tuesday to talk about the milestone – and given the hub-bub over local TV – to also use the little gathering to note that the cable community channels have been intensely local for a long time.
“We cover the issues the big broadcasters don’t have…
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TORONTO – High Fidelity channels Oasis HD, Equator HD, Treasure HD and Rush HD have begun a month long free preview.
Available on Rogers, Bell TV, EastLink, Sasktel and Source Cable, the company hired ad agency Endeavour to handle the campaign and the media buy, which features radio, television, and print elements.
“We know once viewers sample our exceptional programming, they love our channels and stay with us,” said High Fidelity HDTV co-founder Ken Murphy, in a statement. “We chose Endeavour to help convey the tremendous visual quality of our HD line up in a consumer campaign that targets Ontario viewers.”
To…
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OTTAWA and TORONTO – A pared-down basic programming package, with its content and pricing determined by the CRTC, could be the solution to affordability if fee-for-carriage is implemented, the CBC said.
In a submission to the Commission on Monday, the public broadcaster recommended that BDUs adopt an all-Canadian basic package which includes only the “essentials”, such as local television stations, plus “a very limited number” of other licensed programming services.
Calling it a “win-win-win scenario”, CBC said that its proposal would benefit BDUs, consumers, and broadcasters alike.
“It’s a win for cable companies because they’ll have all the flexibility that…
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TORONTO – On the same day as its biggest competitor rolled out its new HSPA network, Rogers beefed up its smart phone lineup to underscore its “network superiority”.
Just in time for the holiday season, Rogers said that it will offer the Nokia N86 smart phone which features an 8 megapixel camera and 8 GB of on-board memory to store music, movies and photos. The N86 will join the just-launched Rogers-exclusive LG Eve and the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 as part of five smart phones now available for under $100 on a three-year voice and data plan.
"Rogers customers can…
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DENVER – On its 40th anniversary, SCTE announced that the networks they have built across North America are becoming obsolete…Well, they didn’t put it that way.
Those in charge did, however, admit that the future of television, data, and voice transmission will occur via IP technology, not RF. For cable MSOs, there are many steps to complete before this transition can take place. So, while this year’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo delivered the latest and greatest technologies to the cable industry but it started with the acknowledgment that the RF world we live in, is in transition.
DOCSIS 3.0 has been at…
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OTTAWA – Videotron founder André Chagnon and one of the engineers who helped wire much of Canada with co-axial cable, Israel (Sruki) Switzer, are two of the five members of the 2009 class of inductees into the Canadian Telecom Hall of Fame and will be honoured Wednesday in Gatineau at the Canadian Museum of Civlization.
Chagnon will be inducted as a “business visionary and builder,” while Switzer (whose wife Phyllis was one of the founders of Citytv, and son Jay helmed CHUM Ltd. for many years) will go in as a cable technology pioneer and advocate. The other…
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DENVER–IPTV, multi-screen video, and converged services have emerged as the biggest themes here at SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2009 as the three subjects have dominated the discussions in the Colorado Convention Center, along with the driving snowstorm outside.
In the opening general sessions, as Cartt.ca reported, cable executives spent much time focusing on the prospects for, and problems of, delivering video signals over an IP infrastructure. They debated the best ways to migrate the industry’s current RF-based, MPEG-2 delivery system to an all-IP architecture. But, in a sea change for a major cable industry event, they all agreed that all-IP…
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DENVER – William Lim, senior technical consultant, OSS BroadNet, gave Thursday’s attendees of SCTE’s 2009 Cable-Tec Expo insight on how to monitor cable UPS backup batteries in order to predict the length of stand-by time in real-time.
Operators use battery factory specs, string configurations, and cable plant AC load to determine an appropriate stand-by time during power outages. However, there are a number of factors that can significantly reduce that time such as battery capacity, temperature, age and condition. While periodic on-site testing may expose bad batteries, continuous monitoring of select characteristics minimizes customer impact.
There are two ways to use…
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