Ottawa Business Journal is reporting that Mitel has signed an agreement with Rogers Business Solutions Inc. to provide its web-hosted telephone system to nearly 100,000 small businesses across Canada.
It is my understanding that the Mitel hosted solution is powered by Ottawa-based Natural Convergence. It iwll be interesting to see the traction RBS can find in the small business market.
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Rogers, Mitel, Natural convergence, IP telephony
Regular readers know that I have sometimes – rarely, of course – kvetched about customer service that is less than stellar… it is therefore appropriate that I applaud a superb experience.
In the interests of privacy, I will not give her full name, but Jana S, with rep ID 602xxx1, stand up and take a bow.
Your friendly and thorough approach put a smile on my face, which is not easy to do.
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Bell Canada
The inspiration for today’s blog posting incubated as I read an article last week about BT extending its commitment to climate change initiatives. It developed as I read about Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s 3 E’s (economy, energy and environment), listened to a BNL interview on Newsworld, and found that the environment was leading parliamentary Question Period. I started thinking about what Canadian telecom companies could and should be doing to enhance their adoption of green.
It seems to me that, like BT, Canadian telecom companies need to look at their own activities as a start and develop specific goals and programs to reduce harmful environmental impact. Further, the companies should set objectives to require suppliers to demonstrate commitments to similar initiatives.
As an easy start, why not provide better financial incentives for customers to move away from paper billing? How about reductions in travel and commuting for employees and aggressively promoting the green benefits of teleconferencing services. These are the services telecom companies sell! Facilitate recycling of batteries from cel phones and computers. Why can’t I bring all my used batteries to those cel phone kiosks in the malls? Let’s see commitments to green sources of power. Conversion of vehicle fleets to hybrids or trucks that use alternative energy sources.
By its very nature, telecom services should be seen as offering environmentally friendly solutions for any business. As a result, the telecom industry can be expected to benefit from increased consumer concerns about climate change. It should therefore show leadership in elevating the level of adoption of such solutions.
Comments? Other ideas?
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green
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.
I have often said that companies aren’t investing sufficiently in their regulatory departments. Regulatory decisions can produce multi-million dollar swings that go straight to the bottom line. There are some who have earned their 2007 bonus already, only a few weeks into the year.
The regulatory folks at MTS Allstream, fresh off a major win on Thursday, filed an application on Friday afternoon calling for changes to the way the ILECs sell their Centrex services. The objective is to open up the level of competition for local services market for the business community. Despite facilities-based competition being readily available for consumers, some argue that it is much harder for telecom competitors to cost-effectively reach businesses.
We wrote about problems with ILEC Centrex rate hikes when they were proposed last summer and when the CRTC gave approval in October. At the time, I said:
There are three ways for Bell to succeed on this filing: unit revenues for Centrex go up 10%; competitors get hurt; and, customers are incented to migrate to Bell’s portfolio of VoIP solutions, some of which may win forbearance under the CRTC’s pending VoIP reconsideration
Allstream has asked for two types of relief in its application:
The first form of relief corresponds to what I wrote over the holidays about System Access Fees:
Either protect customers under contract from system access fee rate hikes or release them from their contractual obligations. That would be fair.
The second part of the relief says, in effect, that customers should be able to go ‘month-to-month’ after the first term is over. Let them shop around. After all, the initial costs of acquiring the customer were recovered during the intitial term.
There is a new sheriff in town. We’ll see what a new Commission has to say about these issues.