Bell‘s results came out this morning, on the footsteps of a couple changes in the executive suite.

Yesterday, confirming a widely expected move, Bell announced that Wade Oosterman has joined George Cope in the executive ranks, taking on the dual role of President of Bell Mobility and Bell Distribution Inc. (BDI), as well as Chief Brand Officer of Bell Canada. At the same time, Isabelle Courville has stepped aside from leading large business sales; she has been replaced by Stéphane Boisvert, formerly of Sun Microsystems Inc.

Numbers of interest: Wireless churn is at 1.1%, beating Rogers numbers of 1.27%. With number portability coming next March, we might expect a number of customers to continue to stay where they are, paying month-to-month, until they are able to take their numbers with them. Watch for special deals or hot new hardware (like the LG Chocolate or Motorola Q) to try to entice customers to lock-in prior to March.

Local lines continue to decline, but long distance minutes aren’t declining as much – which means customers are continuing to make more calls. Average rates for long distance are still dropping.

Wireless average revenue per user is up, although not as much as at Rogers. Interestingly, Bell’s mobile subscribers, at 270 minutes per month, continue to use their phones less than Rogers subscribers (561 minutes). What does this mean for relative network costs and resultant profitability?

Does this mean that Rogers is perceived as having better calling plans for heavier volume users? If so, the implications could be that Bell may need to get more aggressive with new price plans as portability in March 2007 approaches.

As we wrote yesterday, terminology in describing the industry participants is an imprecise art and it is complicated by mergers and acquisitions.

Allstream and Sprint Canada have vanished as independent national facilities based competitors and now are part of hybrid organizations. In Allstream’s case, as the national operations of MTS, it is now referenced by the CRTC as part of the ‘ILECs out-of-territory’ category. Sprint Canada, since its acquisition by Rogers, is presumably part of the ‘Cable BDU’ category.

These industry structural changes make it difficult to examine year-over-year shifts in the market. In the CRTC‘s monitoring report, the examination of the Business Internet access market (Table 4.4.6) may have been distorted by the M&A; activity.

M&A; also is a factor in looking at Table 3.1.1, Total telecommunications revenues by type of service provider. Revenues from ‘Other facilities-based’ carriers has declined from $3.4B in 2001 to less than $100M in 2005. The acquisitions by MTS and Rogers of Allstream and Sprint Canada respectively explain most of the shift.

As a result, much of the growth in ILEC out-of-territory revenue between 2003 and 2004 and in Cable BDU growth for 2005 over 2004 is actually due to M&A; activity, rather than organic customer acquisitions.