Venoa aims to beat Bell to Toronto IPTV market

Independent DSL provider Venoa Communications Inc. of Toronto is aiming to be the competitive IPTV provider of choice for Torontonians with its new Class 1 BDU licence.Venoa CEO, president and founder Vladimir Niman says his firm is targeting all 1.8 million households in the Greater Toronto Area, but will initially have a footprint covering between 70% and 80% of them.In making its pitch to the CRTC at a public hearing in January, Venoa told the regulator that cable still dominates the BDU industry, especially in dense urban areas where dish positioning and building by-laws make DTH a less viable option."Clearly, the practical reality for consumers in Ontario and Quebec is that there is no viable terrestrial distribution alternative; cable companies remain dominant in the markets that they serve. Indeed, in major urban areas, the incumbents remain an approximate 90% market share, some seven years after the broadcast distribution sector was opened to competition," reads a August 24, 2006 supplementary brief to Venoa's application.And with Ontario's incumbent telco Bell Canada taking its time in rolling out its IPTV service, the commission may believe that independents such as Venoa provide the check-and-balance to the cable and DTH hegemony.Unlike Bell, however, which has been testing its offering for years with small-scale deployments in multi-unit dwellings around Toronto, Niman says his service won't need lengthy trials and should be ready for a full commercial launch within three to four months. "I was testing this technology 20 years , so I know what I'm doing," he says.While it didn't oppose Venoa's application outright, Rogers Communications Inc. did note several discrepancies in the newcomer's proposal. While Venoa did specify it would adhere to all requirements for Class 1 BDUs, Rogers noted that its distribution grid included local stations and the CBC's English-language service, but not dual-status services as required of other Class 1 licensees.Rogers also pointed out that Venoa should be required to carry all seven digital conventional services available over the air in the Toronto market, as well as local campus, community and Aboriginal audio programming services. For its part, Venoa deferred and said it would comply with all the above and any other conditions incumbent on Class 1 BDUs.In the supplementary brief, Venoa also stated that it would acquire pay-per-view content from a licensed pay-per-view service. But Niman is proposing his own service, dubbed Venoa PPV, which has yet to acquire a licence - that move triggered some objection from Rogers, who noted that a service such as Viewers Choice might be a more appropriate one to include.However, Niman and Venoa say the system will be able to carry thousands of channels, and capacity won't be a problem. In fact, in addition to 28 Gbps Internet access and digital TV, the firm also plans to offer local and long-distance digital telephony, and eventually wireless and applications such as videoconferencing.The IPTV offering will employ ADSL 2 Plus and VDSL technology, and the company plans to lease 1 GB optical lines from Toronto Hydro Telecom (THT), then build its own short-distance fibre networks to carry data between its own headend, the THT network, and Bell's central office.Other than that, the exact details of Venoa's network architecture are a secret for now, Niman says. "Naturally, it depends on what infrastructure you're using and how you configure your features and routers and what kind of companies' you use."

Venoa aims to beat Bell to Toronto IPTV market

Broadcast | May 10, 2007

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