The IT Nerd

A few years ago, I wrote this article about how Bell had the upper hand against Rogers, and at the time I said this:

Whatever choice Rogers picks, they have to get it done quickly as Bell is on a full court press to take this advantage that they have from a technical standpoint and turn it into something that makes Rogers an afterthought when it comes to Internet access.

What I meant by that is Bell at the time was rolling out fibre as fast as it could which Rogers couldn’t or wouldn’t match. Those days may be coming to an end based on this Reddit thread where it appears that Bell is either slowing or stopping rollouts of fibre.

Now many have commented in this thread about the reasons behind this, and the one reason that has been getting the most traction online is this. The TL:DR on this is that operating revenue is up but net earnings are down for Bell based on their Q2 results. And some speculate that until that changes, Bell is taking action to slow or stop their fibre rollout to save cash. To add to this, there are claims from people who claim to be contractors that Bell was using to roll out fibre confirming in this thread that this is actually happening. But for me, this is all speculation. What matters to me and what should matter to you is what are the facts behind this? Assuming that this is true of course.

To find out what the true answer is, I reached out to Bell as I have a decent relationship with them at the moment. And the TL:DR of my email exchange goes something like this. While Bell is always looking the pace of their network deployment and rollout plans, they don’t have anything specific to share with me at the moment. But when they do have something to share, it’s typically posted on their social media channels as well as via news releases on BCE.ca.

I’ll be monitoring this story to see if there are any developments in a positive or negative way regarding this. But I for one hope those developments aren’t in the latter category. Bell has really done a great job of bringing fibre to a lot of people over the last few years, which in turn helps them to push the competitive advantage that they have over competing telcos. And it would be a shame if that changes for the worse.

This entry was posted on September 6, 2023 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.