Rogers ramps up value-add services for telephony

At an "Innovation Forum" accompanying its annual general meeting last week, Rogers Communications Inc. unveiled details of next-generation services it will deploy to lure users to its telephony offering."We know the first thing we need to do is to be as good as the phone company in terms of delivering basic phone service," Phil Hartling, VP and GM of Rogers Home Phone, tells Network Letter. "The second thing we need to do is start to differentiate, so people can see why they should choose Rogers." Rogers has already enjoyed some respectable growth with the product: Rogers Home Phone's subscription base rose from 48,000 cable telephony subscribers at the end of 2005 to 366,000 last year.The first of Rogers' new services is common voicemail, currently in soft launch - the company won't start marketing it in earnest until later this summer. It allows subscribers to both Rogers' wireless service and Rogers Home Phone to set up one voicemail box for both platforms."I guess the best way to put it is the message waiting indicator light will blink on your home phone when you come home if you have a message on your wireless, and vice-versa," says Hartling. "To connect people's home services with their mobile services just makes a whole lot of sense. It's totally obvious. Voice is voice is voice."Another service, visual voicemail, is slated for launch in the last quarter of the year. It lets users check voicemail on one device from an email application on another, including webmail, by sending out a notification message with a WAV audio file of the voicemail message attached.Finally, a third initiative - tentatively titled call manager - offers customizable call settings and permissions for all Rogers phone products in a household from one interface. For example, the parents of a high schooler can set his or her cell phone to not accept incoming calls during weeknight hours that are supposed to be devoted to homework.Hartling says he's optimistic about Rogers Home Phone's chances for being able to gain ground on ILEC offerings here - even in light of the abolition of winback rules and other measures that hamstrung incumbents over the years - given the success of cable MSOs south of the border. He points to one, Bethpage NY-based Cablevision Systems Corp., in particular."I think is sitting at around 30% market share today," he says. "Definitely, we see 30% penetration not being a surprise - some of the MSOs are saying that they have neighborhoods where they're getting up to 50% penetration."With the changes in the regulatory regime and the maturing of VoIP technology, Hartling says Canadians can now enjoy - perhaps for the first time - true competition and an alternative to the ex-Stentor alliance companies."Consumers know that cable companies will be here, that we're strong players, and that we've invested heavily in the technology," he says. "So, the consumer's getting into a pretty good spot in terms of seeing real sustainable competition."

Rogers ramps up value-add services for telephony

News | June 8, 2007

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