- September 18th, 2007
- 8:09 am
Bell Canada has been given clearance by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to set its own fixed line telephony rates for SMEs in 59 large urban markets across Ontario and Quebec, including Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. The incumbent telco’s rates for small businesses in smaller metropolitan areas were deemed by the regulator to lack sufficient competition to warrant deregulation. Recent deregulation in the residential telephony sector has already seen Bell, its sister telco Bell Aliant, and fellow regional incumbents Telus, MTS Allstream and SaskTel, offer discounted prices for home telephone services and introduce options for consumers to bundle landlines with other services, including ADSL internet and TV, for further discounts. The rule changes have allowed the wireline operators to compete more effectively with cablecos such as Rogers, Shaw, Cogeco, Videotron, Access and Eastlink.
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
Sasktel International of Canada has been awarded a three-year contract by the government of Tanzania to assume management control of national PTO the Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL). The new management will take over from 1 July 2007 and be responsible for all the Tanzanian firm’s operations, maintenance and expansion in order to improve its financial, commercial and technical performance. In a statement the government said: ‘The decision to put TTCL under an independent management was reached by its shareholders — the government and the Celtel International — who agreed that this was the best strategy to make TTCL operate more efficiently in the prevailing free market economy.’
According to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms database, TTCL is Tanzania’s primary provider of fixed line services but its record on providing access has been poor and it faces stiff competition from the country’s mobile operators. By the end of 2006 around 250,000 lines had been installed, with connections concentrated in the urban areas and a few semi-rural communities, but only around 160,000 were lines in service, representing a teledensity of just 0.4%. By contrast the nation’s four mobile operators — Vodacom Tanzania, Celtel Tanzania, MIC Tanzania (which operates under the brand name Tigo) and Zantel — collectively reported 5.59 million customers at the end of 2006, a cellular penetration rate of 14.6%, up from 3.40 million users the previous year.
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
Telegeography writes…More than 120,000 Canadians now subscribe to Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), according to research by Digital Home, although most are in the prairie provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. IPTV is defined as the broadcasting of television services over a high speed internet connection using fixed telephone lines. Consumers connect their televisions to a set top box that connects to their phone line. There are currently four IPTV providers in Canada: MTS, SaskTel, Telus and Bell Aliant. MTS, the incumbent fixed line provider in Manitoba, announced recently that it had signed up 70,000 customers. Its counterpart in Saskatchewan, SaskTel, reported this month that it had 51,000 IPTV customers, whilst official subscriber figures for Telus TV and Aliant TV have not been released, but the numbers are believed to be very small, according to the research. Last August, MTS became the first IPTV provider to offer a High Definition TV (HDTV) service to its customers, followed by SaskTel two months later.
Wireless Mobile Telecom
SME telephony markets deregulated (Canada)
