Bell Aliant aims to pass 1M homes with fibre-to-the-home

BCE Inc. subsidiary Bell Aliant Inc. plans to bring its fibre-to-the-home service to one million homes “in the coming years,” Glen LeBlanc, the company’s executive vice-president and chief financial officer, said Wednesday. At a CIBC investors’ conference in Montreal, LeBlanc said Bell Aliant is on track to meet its target of passing 650,000 homes with its FibreOP service by the end of 2012, and that it totalled 574,000 homes by the end of the second quarter. “It’s going extraordinarily well and our biggest challenge has been keeping up with demand,” LeBlanc said. Bell Aliant has announced fibre-to-the-home service rollouts in Ontario and Canada’s Atlantic regions but the rollouts have been marked by long wait periods for some territories, LeBlanc said. “It was training our technicians to install it and getting our workforces built up to the demand,” he said. At the beginning of the month, the company said it would invest $2.75 million to expand its fibre-to-the-home service into Gander, N.L. Bell Aliant said the investment would allow it to extend its FibreOP service to 5,600 homes and businesses in the region. The company said it also has plans for builds in Corner Brook and Grand Falls-Windsor, N.L. LeBlanc said the fibre-to-the-home rollout has gone “extremely well” and the company is inside its targets from a cost perspective. He said that, on household penetration, the company is above what it envisioned. “We can get ourselves to a million homes quite comfortably, and that would be our target,” LeBlanc said. He said it would take Bell Aliant another “couple $100 million” to complete that plan. LeBlanc said the company wants to reach its one million home target “sooner rather than later” and that a balance should be struck for the pace of the service rolled out. Bell Aliant's FibreOP service provides next-generation fibre Internet and Internet-protocol TV connectivity. LeBlanc said 73 per cent of Bell Aliant's operating territory is competitive, a number which rose from 70 per cent in the last 18 to 24 months. He said that slowing of growth is good news for the company. “We’ve really seen a slowing, which is exactly what we expected to see, because the remaining 25 to 27 per cent is very rural and difficult for our competitors to get to economically,” LeBlanc said. “That’s good news for us.” Bell Aliant, which operates in the Atlantic provinces and parts of Ontario and Quebec, competes with Quebecor Media Inc., Rogers Communications Inc., Eastlink, Cogeco Cable Inc., and other small players. The company said this summer it had 906,200 high-speed Internet customers, 75,500 fibre Internet subscribers, and 95,100 IPTV customers as of the end of June. LeBlanc said its fibre-to-the-home service has allowed Bell Aliant to stabilize itself in terms of line losses and gain a “sizeable win” in communities where it has competed for a long time, such as Halifax, N.S. “Our strategy is simple, and that is to continue to roll out fibre as aggressively as we can and to stabilize the core business with that,” he said. Bell Aliant first launched its fibre network in the New Brunswick trial markets of Fredericton and Saint John in 2010. LeBlanc said competitors are offering giveaways such as tablets, gift certificates, or six months of discounted service at a discounted price. “Our promotions are quite simple,” LeBlanc said. “We offer three months at $99 and we haven’t had to sweeten that.” dgrenier@thewirereport.ca

Bell Aliant aims to pass 1M homes with fibre-to-the-home

News | September 19, 2012

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Bell Aliant aims to pass 1M homes with fibre-to-the-home

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