TORONTO – Launching next Thursday for customers of Bell, Telus, Bell Aliant and EastLink is the traditional TV industry’s latest salvo in the battle to retain customers by providing more content to television subscribers on more devices at any time.
This morning at the Bell TIFF Lightbox, the company officially revealed CraveTV, a $4-a-month service which will give subscribers to a traditional TV package access to more than 10,000 hours of content on their handsets, tablets, PCs and their regular set top boxes. It will also be available soon on other platforms such as AppleTV, Chromecast and Xbox.
Costing…
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GATINEAU – Wholesale access rates that are too low, as Rogers Communications contends they are now, will not lead to further competitor investment in networks, the company said on Tuesday to the CRTC. Rather, it will continue to encourage independent ISPs to lease capacity from the incumbents in perpetuity.
Rogers said its wholesale business – customers who pay 45% less than retail consumers – has grown from essentially zero to nearly 15% of customers in the last four years. If the current growth trajectory continues, it will top 30%. Company executives appeared before the Commission as part of its look…
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TORONTO – Wind Mobile has added a new, unnamed domestic partner network in a move that has allowed it to expand its coverage area by 14% nationwide.
The new wireless entrant said Tuesday that it has added 177,000 square kilometers of coverage outside of the Wind Unlimited zone, meaning it now covers 1.2 million square kilometers across Canada and reaches 97% of the population. According to sources, that new partner is Telus.
“Our data shows that Canadians living in our Unlimited coverage areas do tend to travel outside of their home zone for work or pleasure,” said chief marketing officer, Mirko Rugarli,…
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GATINEAU – With a cost profile four times higher, an unclear applications future and potentially new access technologies, fibre to the premise (FTTP) carries far too high a risk profile to allow competitors to ride on the networks at low mandated rates, Telus told the CRTC on Monday.
The communications giant kicked off the second week of a hearing into wholesale wireline services by arguing the question about mandating access to competitors isn’t about whether such a decision will cause Telus and others to stop investing, it’s about how and where that capital would be deployed.
“These networks require care and…
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TORONTO – An Ontario Court is allowing class-action lawsuits against Bell and Telus to proceed.
According to a Toronto Star report Friday, the lawsuit concerns a practice in which calls are rounded up to the farthest minute. For example, a call that lasts one minute and one second is rounded off to two minutes for billing purposes.
The suit alleges that while Bell and Telus had previously billed customers on a per-second basis, they changed their practices in mid-2002 so that customers were billed on a per-minute basis, with calls being rounded up to the farthest minute. This change was…
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MONTREAL – Bell, Rogers, Telus and Videotron flipped the switch on the first phase of the new $50 million mobile network for the Montreal metro.
The green line segment, which runs through the downtown area between the Guy-Concordia and Saint-Laurent stations, is now equipped with mobile technology including 3G, 4G and 4G LTE, allowing customers of all four wireless providers to browse the Internet, watch videos, listen to streamed music, make and receive calls from within the metro cars and throughout the tunnels and stations.
The project, first announced in September 2013, will take five to seven years to fully…
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GATINEAU – The current wholesale broadband access regime has made it very difficult for new IPTV providers to compete against incumbents, argued independent ISP/IPTV provider VMedia in appearance before the CRTC’s Fibre Hearing on Friday.
Company representatives said that costing under capacity-based billing (CBB) doesn’t make sense for them and the resulting inconsistent rates affect its ability to offer a triple-play bundle of voice, Internet and TV at prices that are competitive with the incumbents.
In its opening remarks, VMedia provided details about rates it would be required to pay to access facilities from an incumbent to replicate current incumbent IPTV…
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OTTAWA – While official spectrum license transfer applications were filed by Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications in early September, sources tell Cartt.ca senior officials at Industry Canada have let Rogers executives know they’re unlikely to be granted control of Shaw Communications’ unused AWS wireless spectrum.
In January of 2013, as part of a larger deal, Rogers bought an option from the Calgary-based company to acquire its AWS spectrum in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba and Northern Ontario to be exercised when the moratorium on its sale expires. It ended September 1st and the two companies applied to…
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GATINEAU – The argument which says the incumbent telcos would simply stop investing in fibre networks if competitors were granted access to them is just not true, according to the Canadian Network Operators Consortium (CNOC) and Primus Telecommunications Canada.
Chris Tacit, legal counsel to CNOC, told the CRTC on the second day of the hearing that telcos will continue to build because they need to compete with the cable companies (and vice versa, for that matter).
“First of all, they have a natural incentive to build wherever there is a cable carrier because otherwise the cable carrier will eat their lunch,”…
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TORONTO – Once viewers are convinced to try the various TV Everywhere platforms being made available by carriers and broadcasters, keeping them engaged with great content and a seamless user experience reduces subscriber churn and leads towards making a profit from the significant investments that broadcasters have made in TVE apps and services.
A panel moderated by Cartt.ca’s Greg O’Brien at the CTAM Canada Broadcaster Forum held Wednesday at Toronto's Sony Centre saw experts from Vidéotron, Corus Entertainment and the CBC offered insight into their organizations’ current TVE services, while TVE platform experts from U.S. technology providers Accedo…
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