Videotron is having a briefing this morning together with Cisco to to provide details about their Wideband Internet pilot, deploying DOCSIS 3.0 compatible equipment into the field with live customers. The technology will permit download speeds of up to 100Mbps.
Mark Evans recently wrote about the Golden Goose of Broadband. In that piece, he wrote:
The lack of competition based on price has much to do with the lack of competition. The carriers and cablecos realize they have a sweet thing going on so why upset the apple cart by offering discounts to attract customers.
In Quebec, Videotron continues to demonstrate its willingness to ‘upset the apple cart’ and keep the market quite competitive for Bell.
As I have discussed before, Quebec has historically had the lowest cable penetration rates of any province in Canada. Videotron’s added services (internet, phone and wireless) often help to pull through more basic TV customers onto their network, improving capital efficiency for the entire quadruple play.
Update: [January 29, 10:05 am]
During the briefing, Manon Brouillette of Videotron spoke in terms of customer entertainment experience and Dan Hessian of Cisco spoke of their Connected Life theme. The solution is Cablelabs standards compliant and uses multiple vendors’ cable modems – Linksys and Scientific Atlanta. The test has already succeeded in bonding 8 QAM channels – delivering up to 320Mbps downstream. A single upstream channel would provide 8Mbps.
Videotron has already upgraded a live CMTS (software and one hardware component) – and it has had real customers on the network since December. Videotron expects the trial to need a few months in order to determine pricing, demand for upload speeds, etc.