VOIP
Good news out of Ottawa today for telecommunication customers. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has ruled against the big monopoly phone companies and stated they will regulate VOIP.
What this means is the phone companies will not be able to stop cable companies from offering VOIP, nor will they be able to use predatory pricing practices to drive the competition out of the market. This regulation will be a very large nail in the death of the monopoly telephone companies. They will have to compete head on with cable companies and anyone else that is a registered communications carrier in Canada for VOIP business.
That’s the good side to this. There is a down side as well. ILECs like Telus and Bell Canada rely on their phone line revenue and LD revenue to subsidize the maintenance of their network infrastructure. If these companies start to go out of business, and don’t kid yourself VOIP could spell the loss of billions of dollars of revenue per year for them, they will not be able to maintain those networks.
How they choose to treat this will determine whether they survive or not and if they do survive what form that survival will take. From my perspective the smart ones will start to cannibalize their investment in their copper network by bringing fiber to the home which gives them the abilit to offer many more services to the end user and compete head on with the cable companies for television viewers. Another perspective they may decide to take is to make money off their fiber backbones. Telus for example has abundant fiber to every community in BC and Alberta, no exception. In a bid to kill off upstart regional non -profit networks Telus has recently agreed to give each community access to a 100Mbps port in each community. You want your data to get out of the community though and you’re going to have to buy access to Telus’ backbone and that won’t be cheap.
Whatever they choose to do it is going to be interesting and we’ll just have to hang on for the ride 
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