Bell Canada: is a new uprising nigh?
p2pnet news view P2P | Freedom:- Is yet another Bell Canada travesty about to spark yet another CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission) submission?
“The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan is a huge institutional investor, with $108.5 billion in assets as of Dec. 31,” said the Motley Fool of the Bell Canada Enterprises deal.
It went on: “It has interests in a diverse roster of companies, including oil and gas company Nexen, supermarket chain Safeway , Deutsche Telekom, and pharmaceutical giants Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer. Its $52 billion leveraged buyout of BCE represents the biggest acquisition in Canada’s history, and the world’s largest LBO ever.”
It’d been predicted that once the the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and its partners had acquired BCE with Michael Sabia retiring as CEO, we’d see price hikes and layoffs since this buy-out puts the union and Bell Canada $52 billion into dept.
Sabia said he’d step down once the “teachers” deal was a go, and he was true to his word, his place being taken by one George Cope.
It seems one of the first things Cope did was to trim the number executives down from 17 to 12.
So the jobs cuts start. And more are likely to follow shortly to help Bell quickly reduce its newly acquired debt.
We can also confidently expect the nickel and diming and cut-throat tactics aimed at weeding out the competition to really start.
Bell Canada has apparently announced to its wholesale competition that it’ll open up 10 & 16-meg internet to them at the end of the month.
But it gets worse.
The company has also apparently announced it’ll start charging wholesalers for bandwidth used by their customer bases.
Or to put it another way, Bell will start levying charges for internal bandwidth used by the wholesale competition before the data even hit the net!
As it is, it charges the wholesale competition $21 to $24 per user for use of “last mile” access, and in some cases around $7 to $15 more per user for what’s called a “dry-loop”.
And so the World According to G. Copes begins.
Will the wholesale user-base and the wholesalers revolt?
Will we see another CRTC case hitting the fan?
I think so.
Stay tuned as this situation develops.
Ottawa Gal – p2pnet
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July 18th, 2008 at 6:59 am
Cope is also going to slash 2000 Bell managers in the comming days/weeks.
July 18th, 2008 at 7:49 am
Dept -> Debt, btw. Sorry, I’m a little anal.
Good article, btw, I’ll definitely stay tuned. Keep it up, Ottawa Gal! Raise Hell!
July 19th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Thanks OttawaGal, You get all the good bits about Bell…
But really what is Bell’s end game in this?
Between throttling, capping their retail users and pissing off their wholesalers; what are they up to?
I bet Bell is looking for a hand out from the government, say from the money from the spectrum sales. This money would to pay for upgrades which should have been done a long time ago. As hostages, they will use the ISPs, their debts and Net Neutrality. I could see the meeting at Industry Canada. “Yes, internet is crap, but look we don’t have any money for updates, so we have to throttle everyone, plus we have to carry all theses ISP, we need more money….”
And even if they don’t get the money from the feds, they will just choke to ISP off until there is no competition left in Canada… Okay, I’ll get my tin foil hat on now….
July 20th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
The telco’s already got 650-million dollars from the “deferral account” to be used to bring broadband to rural area’s. By bringing braodband to more area’s they indeed did use this 650-million dollars (which came from your pocket BTW) for the increased capacity. Don’t be fooled and don’t let them play you with their spin on things.
650-million, think about it. Add some federal and provencial incentive to that too.
THATS A LOTTA MONEY.
No capacity?
Capacity issues?
5% of the users causing problems so great that it brings all broadband to a screeching halt?
My butt.
What I want to know is where and how this 650+ million dollars was spent.
check PAIC’s site for info on the deferral account
http://www.piac.ca use their search funstion to search for “deferral”.
July 21st, 2008 at 6:19 am
@KChan
If i were to take a guess on the end game, its control of the wholesaler, control of the Net and a fight to control IP services (cell, and TV included).
I can go into “assumed” details on many points, but it would all be an assumption.
This would make an interesting topic/article if I can get a couple of ISP’s together and discuss it.
But in the end its control of the network and IP services, which is the money maker.
July 23rd, 2008 at 6:17 am
Re Deferral Accounts, I believe that Bell Canada is dragging its feet since the Federal Court of Appeals ruled (in March) they have to folllow the Telecom Decisions 2006-9 and 2008-1 to spend the last sums in the deferral accounts. The CRTC agreed to delay the deadline for a roll-out plan until the decision was taken at the FCA. They also indicated that the CRTC would then issue new instructions concerning the roll-out procedures to be followed, i.e. a timetable for specific locations. To my knowledge the CRTC has NOT followed up on the FCA ruling so Bell is not rocking the boat and those of us beyond DSL distance (but with good lines of sight to cell towers for potential WiMax) in the rural areas are being penalized by the Department that is supposed to be looking out for our interests, or so it seems.
By the way, my underserviced Municipality, Dunham, Quebec, has been judged as without sufficient competition to be deregulated and so we stay under the direct supervision of the CRTC.
My suggestion to the CRTC is simply…DO something.
August 13th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
As an insider for many years, Bell is beyond repair, short of a major surgery, unqualified individuals are spending many millions on equipment that does not work, and no one above knows any better, back stapping and theft of credits is rampant, it will have to get worse, much worse before it’ll get better, George or Not, no quick fixes here, the damage is simply too severe, Teachers! are you listening!