Bell accelerates FTTH deployment with $854M plan for Montreal

MONTREAL — BCE Inc. will invest $854 million to bring fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) to all of Montreal’s homes and businesses within five years, the company said Monday. “By the end of the year, 40 per cent of the entire province will actually have fibre, which will make it the most-connected province in the country in terms of fibre penetration today,” Bell CEO George Cope said at an event announcing the investment. Martine Turcotte, Bell’s vice-chair in Quebec, told reporters following Cope’s presentation that the company already has FTTH connected to 130,000 homes and businesses on the island of Montreal. “And over the next five years, we should have completed the vast majority of the program,” to connect a total of 1.1 million locations, she said. Turcotte confirmed the $854 million is in addition to the roughly $1 billion per year in capital spending the company has already earmarked for FTTH deployment, though she declined to comment on whether the announcement indicates Bell will further accelerate its rollout or has similar plans for other cities. The announcement comes a week after Moody’s Investors Service predicted an “investment race” in wireline networks between Canada’s cablecos and telcos. It said telcos should spend aggressively on their fibre networks given the advantages cablecos have in reaching higher speeds using the DOCSIS protocol without having to install FTTH. Greg MacDonald, an analyst with Macquarie Capital Markets, said in an email Monday that if the $854 million is spread equally over the five years, the announcement means a 17-per-cent increase in Bell’s current FTTH deployment spending. Overall, it makes for a four-per-cent increase in overall capital spending. “This is manageable to the point where they are likely maintaining overall capex guidance,” he said. “However, it clearly demonstrates the demands being placed on the industry due to demand for data.” He noted that Macquarie forecast a year ago that “changing viewership habits and cable gigabit capabilities may force telcos to accelerate their FTTH capex budgets,” and said that prediction remains “central to our investment thesis.” The deployment in Montreal will include the installation of more than 7,000 kilometres of fibre and upgrades to 25 central offices, the company said in a press release. “More than 90 of Bell’s network in the city is on aerial structures already in place, which will help to speed the deployment of new fibre links,” the release added. Bell’s CFO, Glen LeBlanc, said at an investors’ conference in late 2016 that its FTTH rollout had reached about three million premises, with about 11 million homes and businesses on track to be completed within eight to 10 years. The company launched a gigabit Internet service over its FTTH network in mid-2015. Quebec City was the first city in which the company rolled out FTTH so comprehensively, Turcotte noted. “It allowed us to test, to see the technology, how it works, how we marketed it,” she said, adding that experience will “accelerate the deployment” in Montreal. — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Charelle Evelyn at cevelyn@thewirereport.ca CORRECTION: A previous version of this story stated Bell has already connected to 300,000 homes and businesses in Montreal.

Bell accelerates FTTH deployment with $854M plan for Montreal

News | March 27, 2017

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Bell accelerates FTTH deployment with $854M plan for Montreal

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