Rogers' Telephony Plans: Underwhelming
Now that I've escaped the Nortel AGM, I've had a chance to take a look at Rogers' cable telephony plans. They may be financially disciplined but they're underwhelming. Aside from the fact none of them include LD, there are no Web-based features such as voice-mail to e-mail, call me/follow me, and online account management. If you want LD, it costs 8 cents a minute in Canada, which is premium pricing, which is higher than what Rogers' Sprint Canada unit charges. Rogers' new plans are just regular local phone service provided by a cableco, rather than Bell. Nevertheless, UBS Securities expects Rogers will have 30,000 customers by the end of 2005 and 286,000 by the end of next year.
So how will Bell respond? It could be aggressive and highlight the fact there is little difference between its service and what's being offered by Rogers. Bell could also do nothing, and let Rogers win some market share as part of a plan to convince the CRTC to deregulate the local market. And/or Bell could roll out its own VOIP service with the standard bells and whistles. I suspect Rogers will probably win over customers who already have other services as part of a bundle. Then, there will be the Bell-haters, who may already by Sprint customers.
Let the wars start - albeit one that does not involve a price war…yet.
June 30th, 2005 at 10:51 am
Is this the Rogers VoIP service they've been touting? Or just Sprint in a new dress?
June 30th, 2005 at 1:29 pm
Rogers' new plans are just regular local phone service provided by a cableco, rather than Bell.
Exactly.
The thing is, they never claimed otherwise. Some of the reporters have hyped it as a fancy VoIP offering, but Rogers was talking about this for a long time now — and PacketCable is just the protocol they eventually settled on to implement this.
The fact is, comparing this to access-independent services like Primus, Bell Digital Voice, Vonage, or Skype is like apples and oranges. Those are Internet applications. This is a dedicated service, complete with truck roll. The Internet applications are a heck of a lot more exciting; Rogers doesn't appear to be interested in that space at this juncture.
June 30th, 2005 at 2:38 pm
There's no real such thing as POTS “from that point on” anymore. The access and termination points are of course dependent on Rogers and the terminating carrier.
But the in-between part is pretty much a dog's breakfast, and that goes for Bell POTS, SBC, Rogers, or anyone else. To understand why, see a minutes trading marketplace like Arbinet. A pretty impressive proportion of “POTS” LD traffic was transiting as IP and, in many instances, over the public Internet as of years ago. And it's been a long time now that TELUS announced that it had converted its network core to IP.
Fundamentally, what matters is whether the carrier is managing its own traffic on a dedicated network, or whether it's leaving it up to someone else to deal with. The latter describes the Internet. The former describes internal traffic engineering — IP over ATM over fibre, TDM over ATM over fibre, TDM over frame-relay over satellite, whatever. “POTS”, after all, is not a protocol, only a service specification.