By Ahmad Hathout
Bell CEO Mirko Bibic said Thursday that the higher rate of customers switching to other carriers is “concerning,” but that the telco is mitigating that with bundled offers.
Last week, Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri blamed competition from aggressively priced mobile wireless offers in the market and ease of switching for its postpaid churn rate rising to 1.1 per cent in the quarter compared to the same period last year. While Staffieri said he expects the trend to continue, he added the company isn’t worried about it.
Bell’s postpaid churn rate for the first quarter that ended…
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Telus announced Wednesday its 19th annual Telus Days of Giving, the Vancouver-based telecom’s month-long initiative rallying its employees, retirees and partners around the world to volunteer and give back to their local communities.
“From cleaning local shorelines and parks, donating blood, planting trees, recycling old mobile devices, or volunteering at neighbourhood food banks, TELUS Days of Giving enables team members, their families, customers and retirees to foster deeper connections with each other while helping make a meaningful difference in their own backyard,” reads a Telus press release.
Driven by its…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Bell’s joint request of the CRTC to permanently block the three largest telecommunications companies from accessing its bundled fibre facilities is an attempt to nullify the competitive impact of the interim access regime, Rogers and Telus argued earlier this month.
The country’s largest telco partnered with wholesale competitors to ask the regulator in a procedural request to clarify that the Big 3 are ineligible to access the bundled middle- and last-mile facilities of Bell and Telus before the May 7 deadline to implement the interim regime in Quebec and Ontario. The CRTC did not explicitly…
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The Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS) released Thursday its 2024 mid-year report, which shows a 43 per cent increase in the number of complaints from telecom and TV customers in Canada between Aug. 1, 2023 and Jan. 31, 2024, compared to figures in the CCTS’s mid-year report a year ago.
For the six-month period, the CCTS accepted 10,663 customer complaints, compared to 7,451 complaints at last year’s midpoint, the new report says. Of the complaints received during the report’s timeframe, 9,272 were concluded, having raised 19,879 issues.
Wireless service issues remain the leading…
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Quebecor said it will rethink pricing strategy as a result
By Ahmad Hathout
Quebecor will need to accept Telus’s rate to connect to its wireless network, the CRTC ruled Monday, eliciting a scathing response from the Montreal company that included a promise to reconsider its low-cost pricing and suspend the launch of certain plans in Manitoba.
Telus and Quebecor could not come to an agreement on the price-per-gigabyte component of that access, so they each presented their respective prices and asked the CRTC to make that determination via final offer arbitration.
While it said both offers would allow Quebecor’s mobile virtual network…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Bell will argue before the Federal Court of Appeal that the CRTC was not right to rely on the government’s policy direction to order telcos to provide interim access to their bundled transport and last mile fibre facilities because it is inherently contradicted by the Telecommunications Act.
Section 10 of the 2023 policy direction to the CRTC requires the commission to mandate the provision of an aggregated wholesale high-speed access service. At the same time, section 8 of the Telecommunications Act provides the government with the ability to order the regulator to make decisions of “general application on…
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Telus has launched an initiative that will see the telecom plant a tree for every new or certified pre-owned Android device purchased.
The Buy One, Plant One initiative, which will run from April 18 to May 16, will apply to Android devices purchased by either new or returning retail or business customers. It is available as a promotion at Telus and Koodo stores, online or through customer service representatives.
Telus said it aims to plant up to 50,000 trees, but will plant an additional tree for every pre-owned device traded in.
“This latest offer further highlights TELUS as a leader in sustainability…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Telus is proposing an additional recurring charge for the implementation of a new feature for its next-generation 911 system that will allow smartphones to provide more accurate location information to emergency dispatchers.
The Emergency Location Service (ELS) is a Google location service that allows Android-based devices – relying heavily on Wi-Fi sensors, but also using GPS and cell towers – to provide enhanced location data directly from the device to the public safety answering point (PSAP) where 911 calls are received. The result, it is said, is accuracy, speed and reliability of location information for emergency calls.
The ELS…
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Telus announced Wednesday it is committing $135 million in Calgary this year to expand and improve its infrastructure, operations and services in the city.
The investment will focus on building next-generation networks, fueling innovation and sustainability, and driving economic growth, according to a Telus press release.
“We live in a digital world, and this investment continues TELUS’ legacy of making vital contributions to advance the economic strength and social vitality of Calgary and the province of Alberta,” Navin Arora, executive vice president of Telus and president of Telus Business Solutions, Telus Health,…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Cogeco is still working toward securing a deal with the national carriers to launch its mobile virtual network operator business on their networks, the telecom’s senior vice president and chief financial officer said Friday.
“Where we are right now is we’re still in negotiations…at the same time building what is required to launch as well,” Patrice Ouimet said during the company’s fiscal second-quarter conference call with analysts. “I would say the situation is not that different from what I said last quarter. That being said, we are making progress.”
Ouimet said he couldn’t go any deeper because these are…
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