Bell Aliant fibre to the home/office project - TJ gets it wrong again
Ah, the Telegraph Journal. It's been a hard week for them with the editor fired and the publisher suspended - by his father, no less - for some creative editing that resulted in an apology to the Prime Minister of Canada that could yet turn into a serious boondogle for the federal Liberals.
That's just the latest in a long string of sorry incidents that has many readers and ex-readers questioning the credibility of anything in the Irving-owned newspapers.
The paper's business and technology coverage has never been its strong suit, as the story in today's (June 30, 2009) Telegraph Journal about Bell Aliant's plan to provide fibre Internet connectivity to homes and businesses in New Brunswick clearly demonstrates.
Here's the headline: Telecom industry is about to get much more competitive
Now here's the subhead: Market share Bell Aliant needs to focus on packages and strive to create faster, fresher services - if they don't Rogers will catch up
Knowing now aggressively NB Publishing seeks to strip freelance writers of their copyrights while defending its own (just ask blogger Charles LeBlanc who lost hundreds of articles and photos over this issue), it's time to paraphrase:
The story talks about the project - $60 million with $1 million from the province of New Brunswick to run fibre optic cable to 70,000 homes and businesses in Fredericton and Saint John by the end of 2010 - and then goes on about futuristic scenarios like watching TV and having a message pop up saying you've got a phone call. Uh, hello? This is 2009. Ever heard of streaming video and voice over IP?
Millions of people already watch - and even broadcast - TV shows and movies over the Internet, while getting messages from Mom.
The article goes on to say that Rogers has the cable TV and Internet market sewn up in New Brunswick (if true, it's due largely to the heavy lifting down by Bill Stanley and Fundy Cable and by Aliant squandering a century's worth of loyalty of the old NBTel customer base). It goes on to talk about the importance of bundles of interesting services and pricing for the new service, while missing the main point of the fibre exercise:
Fibre to the home or office - with the potential of unlimited bandwidth in both directions - is not an incremental change. It overturns the applecart. It changes all the rules. It is totally disruptive.
That's not to say that price isn't important. Rogers, for instance, has been eliminating bundle discounts for multiple services (Internet, cable TV, mobile phone, IP phone) - essentially charging more money for the same stuff. If Bell Aliant's price is attractive enough, watch for Roger's customers to exit en masse.
And once this switch, they will be wickedly difficult to pry loose, partly because in the world of land-based telecommunications, fibre is the holy grail. Bandwidth just doesn't get any better than unlimited.
- G
