TORONTO – If you thought clicking thumbs on BlackBerrys during business meetings was annoying, now Kevin Newman is going to be making appearances in them.
Saying the video quality is iPod-like, CanWest MediaWorks will begin making its content available to Blackberry users beginning this month.
Sixty to 90 second clips of Global National will be the first of many "berry casts" the company has planned, CanWest Interactive president Arturo Duran told www.cartt.ca today. Following the news, the company will make Entertainment Tonight Canada available and is looking into packaging sports content, "like plays of the day," as well, he added….
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TORONTO – Robert Dépatie, Michael Sabia, and Darren Entwistle have been added as keynote speakers at the upcoming Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto.
Dépatie, president and CEO of Vidéotron, will be a keynote speaker while Sabia, president and CEO of BCE, and Entwistle, president and CEO of Telus, will deliver luncheon keynote addresses.
The summit will have sessions on wide-ranging telecom issues, including NextGen telecom services and platforms such as IMS, wireless applications such as mobile new media, VoIP technologies, and illegal content on the Internet.
Already announced are appearances by new Industry Minister Maxime Bernier and CRTC Chair…
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RESEARCH AND INVESTMENT BANKING FIRM Think Equity says it believes that American telco AT&T (the former SBC) will scale back its IPTV rollout for a number of reasons, the primary one being that providing a 25 Mbps service to consumers is simply not enough.
"We believe the so-called ‘Project Lightspeed’, substantially built on VDSL2, will see a scaling back in terms of homes passed over the next two to three years," says the Think Equity release. "The target had been 18 million homes in three years… We believe the fundamental reason AT&T is likely to do this, is…
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OTTAWA – Contrary to how Canada’s incumbent telcos spun last week’s local forbearance decision, the deregulation process will not take a year or more, says the chair of the CRTC.
Last week, upon release of the CRTC’s local forbearance decision (which set out the rules upon which local telephony deregulation will happen), ILECs such as Bell, Telus and Aliant were up in arms, not just about the terms of deregulation, but of the process. They claimed it could take up to 18 months from an application to deregulation.
No way, CRTC chairman Charles Dalfen told www.cartt.ca on Wednesday. Four…
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OTTAWA – Mobile phone customers will not see the video available on their phone screens impacted by regulation, the CRTC announced this morning.
The Commission determined that the services provided by Bell Mobility, Rogers Wireless and Telus Mobility, in conjunction with MobiTV Inc., fall within the Commission’s New Media Exemption Order, which applies to services that are delivered and accessed over the Internet.
The Commission also determined that mobile television services, whether or not they are delivered and accessed over the Internet, should also be exempt from regulation, and issued a public notice asking for the input of Canadians…
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TORONTO – Covering all segments of the Canadian telecommunications and IT industry, The Canadian Telecom Summit brings together the leaders of all industry sectors – service providers, manufacturers, applications providers, policy makers and regulators.
With two major pronouncements from different government bodies regarding the state of competitiveness of Canada’s telecommunications industry – the Telecom Policy Report and the CRTC’s local forbearance decision, which in some clauses appear to contradict each other – it will be very interesting to see how the new Minister of Industry, Maxime Bernier, juggles the interests of all industry players, consumers and the business sector.
He…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – A local market won’t be considered competitive until one-quarter of the households in it get their home phone from a newcomer, the CRTC said Thursday.
The 44,000-word decision made the newcomers like cable and third party VOIP providers very happy but angered the incumbent telcos, who erupted with anger and say they won’t stand for the decision.
“Aliant fully intends to appeal this decision,” said Heather Tulk, vice-president of residential markets at Aliant, the company whose application for deregulation launched the review.
There are three main aspects to the decision. 1) Competitors must gain 25% market…
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OTTAWA – Who needs to be tethered to a home phone anymore when the phone can be tethered to you wherever you are?
The proportion of Canadian households relying only on cell phones for their communications instead of land line phones has more than doubled in just over two years, according to new data from the Statistics Canada’s Residential Telephone Service Survey.
As of December 2005, just over 615,000 households, or 4.8% of the total, reported having only a cell phone, compared with just 1.9% in mid-2003. Households in the two westernmost provinces, British Columbia and Alberta, are leading…
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TORONTO – New Canadians are avid users of mobile phones and alternative long distance calling options — and spend more on wireless and home phone combined, according to a new study by Solutions Research Group, a Toronto-based market research firm.
Among the key findings of the wireless and telecom module of the Diversity in Canada study are:
• Major ethnic groups in Canada are somewhat more likely to have cellular phones (61% have one, vs. 59% average among 15+ population in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver). Highest penetration is among Chinese Canadians (74%).
• Rogers is the leading wireless company…
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TORONTO – By the end of 2006 Canadian cable companies will have 12% (1.57 million) of residential telephone subscribers in Canada and 27% by year-end 2009 (3.35 million), says a new report released today.
This is up from 6% at the end of ’05 (835,000), says the latest installment of The Convergence Consulting Group’s "Battle for the North American Couch Potato: Bundling, Internet, TV, Telephone."
While the inroads traditional cable companies are making in voice are strong, the report doesn’t have a similar forecast when it comes to the traditional ILEC’s push into video. Telcos will have 2% (220,000)…
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