FTTH to cover 90% of Bell footprint in 10 years: Cope

BCE Inc. will cover about 90 per cent of its wireline footprint with fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) in a little less or a little more than a decade, though the issue of whether smaller Internet service providers will get mandated access to such networks will affect the build-out in an unspecified fashion, Bell CEO George Cope said Thursday. "I don't know if it will be eight years, I don't know if it will be 12 years, but we will have glass to 90 per cent of the homes, that being fibre to 90 per cent of the homes," he said during the Scotiabank Telecom & Cable Conference held in Toronto. That would be up from about 20 per cent now, he said. When asked about the CRTC ruling this year that will give smaller service providers a right to wholesale access to fibre networks, and the appeal Bell made to the federal government regarding this ruling, Cope kept his comments in check. " clearly an important issue going forward, because it creates jobs in the country and investment," Cope said. "I think it's very consistent with what our new government's talking about, which is infrastructure investment. So I would think anything that's an impediment to that ... we're hopeful that people listen to that story as it unfolds. That's probably as far as I'll go today, given that we've done that filing and we'll wait to see how that unfolds in the future." During a panel discussion on Wednesday at the Canadian ISP Summit in Toronto, Jonathan Daniels, vice-president of regulatory law at Bell, was challenged over comments the company has made about how the CRTC decision on fibre access will have no material impact on the company's finances but at the same time affect decisions on network investment. Daniels responded: "If you read our appeal, we don’t say that we’re financially going to have a disaster, but we said we’re not going to invest in some communities that otherwise would get the investment.” Oh Thursday, Cope said there are many good reasons to be ramping up FTTH now. "We have 2.2 million homes finished and we have all the evidence that our churn is better, our operating costs are better and the customer wants to migrate to those speeds over time," he said. Cope explained that FTTH connections allow customers to solve more of their own problems and change features through applications rather than contacting call centres, which brings the company's operating costs down. "We know exactly where the market is going," Cope said. "We've gone from one or two devices attached to the Internet ... three or four years ago to what, six, seven? Everybody walks in the home, they flip to their WiFi on their smartphone, they've got devices all over the home, and then we're going to get into the connected home. We can see exactly where it's going to go, and we're going to need those capabilities. "If we start this build-out six years from now, we'll be too late." Cope said the investment in FTTH is manageable, representing about $1 billion a year out of annual capital spending of $3.7 billion. He was followed at this conference by Patrice Ouimet, chief financial officer of Cogeco Cable Inc., who dismissed current fibre-to-the-home projects as being mostly about perception rather than functionality. "There's a lot more marketing and hype about fibre than reality," he said. "We're all companies that have fibre up to the node — we're all the same on that front — and the question is the last mile." He said about 90 per cent of Cogeco's footprint provides Internet speeds of at least 120 Mbps or more, and most customers are unwilling to pay for access that fast. He noted that Cogeco's U.S. subsidiary Atlantic Broadband announced last month plans to launch gigabit service in Connecticut next year "for political reasons," though he noted this will be done with DOCSIS (data-over-cable interface specifications) 3.1 rather than fibre-to-the-home. Ouimet added that Cogeco lays out fibre-to-the-home in new neighbourhoods, "but it does not make sense for us to rebuild our whole network with FTTH when we can actually achieve those speeds with our current network." During another investors conference in September, Cogeco CEO Louis Audet said the company sees no need to invest in gigabit Internet speeds now, given a lack of demand. However, he said when demand does develop, the company can upgrade its capacity "very easily" to as much as 500 Mbps or a full gigabit with "relatively modest incremental capital expenditures." Scotia Capital telecom analyst Jeff Fan said in a research note in August that cable companies can build out the next generation of broadband infrastructure with DOCSIS 3.1 for about one-tenth the cost per customer of what telephone incumbents have to pay for fibre-to-the-home. — With reporting by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca and editing by Shruti Shekar at sshekar@thewirereport.ca

FTTH to cover 90% of Bell footprint in 10 years: Cope

News | November 12, 2015

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FTTH to cover 90% of Bell footprint in 10 years: Cope

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