Gig speeds mainly about marketing for now: analyst

Media | 07/30/2015 8:37 pm EDT

Canadian companies’ recent embrace of gigabit Internet isn’t meeting a need that exists in the market, but it is setting telecoms up for the day customers start demanding such speeds, according to Greg MacDonald, telecommunications analyst with Macquarie Capital Markets. “I think a lot of it is marketing to date,” he said in a phone interview. “There are not a lot of households, even, let alone individuals that will use a gigabyte speed. Having said that, if you look at the usage patterns, they’re going up fairly substantially.” Earlier this...

Mandating wholesale FTTH would be ‘another risk factor’: Bell

telecom | 11/26/2014 9:53 pm EST

GATINEAU, Que. — BCE Inc. told the CRTC Wednesday that many of its customers could be delayed from upgrading to an Internet connection faster than what's available through fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) if smaller Internet service providers receive the right to buy wholesale space on fibre-to-the-home networks (FTTH). Bell chief legal and regulatory officer Mirko Bibic said that while mandated access won’t “immediately grind investment [in FTTH] to a halt in every location in Canada,” it “will have an impact.” “Mandated access rules will affect the pace of deployment and breadth of deployment. That’s essentially the issue,” he said,...