Segway's in the Street as Bell Aliant Rolls out FibreOp in Fredericton
"Call it FTTT - fibre to the tent," quipped one Bell Aliant exec as company reps in their new blue windbreakers and white shirts bearing the FibreOp logo showed of the new service to prospective customers in a tent set up at the corner of Queen and Carleton Streets in downtown Fredericton on Friday.
Across the street, helmetted Segway riders in their blue uniforms rode their rolling billboards through the Friday afternoon crowds - this is Harvest Jazz & Blues week in the capital city - inviting people to stop by the fibre wired tent and check out 35 MBPS downloads that are part of the fibre optic roll-out.
While Friday was the official launch, Aliant crews have been highly visible first on the city's northside and now throughout the southside bringing optical fibre from the main switching stations to the home.
Is this a big deal? You bet it is.
Fibre - as far as fixed location telecommunications delivery goes - is the holy grail. It just doesn't get any faster. And by bundling its currently disparate copper wire (telephone/Internet) and satellite (TV) services into one delivery mechanism, Aliant is raising the bar very, very high indeed.
In New Brunswick, Rogers is the dominate TV delivery player thanks to the groundbreaking work down by home-grown Fundy Cable that ultimately sold the business to Shaw which later did an east-west swap with Rogers at around the time provincial telco NBTel was being merged into Aliant with the rest of Atlantic Canada's phone companies.
Rogers has recently cut deeply into Bell Aliant's core business, namely its land-line telephone services, as it continued expansion of its cable-based Internet services throughout the province. Aliant has faced similar competition from Nova Scotia's Eastlink.
Now, with a $60 million investment from Bell Canada, Bell Aliant is trying to turn that situation around with pilot projects in Fredericton and Saint John to deliver fibre to homes and businesses.
Joe Mosher (who may well be stuck with the nickname 'Mojo' from this day forth) is Bell Aliant's VP of Marketing and, as he explained at a reception Friday afternoon for long-time customers and local bigwigs in yet another tent, "It's been a long time coming, and it's going to change everything."
He's right.
And from what I hear, Rogers is concerned. So they should be.
What cost Bell Aliant so much business in New Brunswick during its first decade was the erosion of the rabid loyalty most customers in the province felt towards NBTel. This isn't the time or place to go into all of the gory details, but suffice to note that pissing off loyal Maritime customers may be the only way to drive them into the arms of the competition.
In today's world - where people are watching their pennies as well as their dollars and customer loyalty is an anomaly - it's a lesson Rogers should have learned. Ask a dozen of their current customers what they think of their communications provider, and you'll likely get nine people who are already mad at them and one who'll be that way by the end of the conversation: the hideous voice jail system, rude phone reps, the elimination or downgrading of bundling discounts now that we've got ya, the recent announcement that local community stations throughout the province will close for some mysterious reason related to Rogers own fibre plans.
While this might superficially be considered a battle over technical superiority, it's actually all about market share. Bell Aliant sees an opportunity to leapfrog Rogers cable system with clearly superior technology and, so long as they don't overprice or under deliver, customers who switch are highly unlikely to ever switch back.
- G
