By Ahmad Hathout
VANCOUVER – As the country’s cable companies move toward incorporating the next DOCSIS technologies that allow for fibre-like internet speeds over older cables, Telus executives touted its fibre infrastructure as a differentiator in its pursuit of more subscribers on higher speeds.
“By any measure, PureFibre exceeds DOCSIS and will endure to deliver exceptional reliability and symmetrical speed advantages to our customers as investments in Docsis aim to catch up,” Zainul Mawji, executive vice president and president of Telus Consumer Solutions, said on the company’s first quarter conference call Thursday.
Last month, Rogers announced that it was in a trial phase of the new DOCSIS 4.0 cable modems, which produced speeds of at least 8 Gbps download and 6 Gbps upload. But the legacy telcos Bell and Telus have long been skeptical about whether the technology that runs on a hybrid fibre-coaxial system can compete with their pure fibre infrastructure.
Amid decommissioning its existing copper cables, Telus said it is generating a higher average revenue per user, lower subscriber exit, and a lower cost to serve customers on the pure fibre infrastructure. It added that the 1 Gigabit per second and higher plans now comprise the largest segment of its internet base.
“For 10 years, we’ve made generational investments in PureFibre and 5G at a lower cost of capital, which have accelerated premium loading and upsell,” Mawji said.
For the first quarter that ended March 31, the Vancouver-based company increased revenues by 15.9 per cent to $4.9 billion compared to the same period last year. Net income, however, declined by 44.6 per cent to $224 million over the same period due to higher interest, depreciation and amortization, restructuring and other costs.
The company reported net increase in mobile phone subscribers of 2.2 per cent to 47,000 in the quarter compared to the equivalent period, internet subscribers up 16.7 per cent to 35,000, television subscribers down 10 per cent with gains in the quarter of 9,000, connected devices was up 26.1 per cent to 58,000, and landline losses 20 per cent with a decline of 8,000 subscribers.
Telus said 32 per cent of its mobile base is on 5G.
Total mobile phone customers by the end of March were up 3.8 per cent over the year to 9.68 million, internet subscribers up 9.4 per cent to 2.5 million, television subscribers were up 4.6 per cent to a base of 1.3 million, the connected devices base was up 21.5 per cent to 2.6 million, and the landline base was down 2.2 per cent to 1.08 million.
