Toronto keeps on jacking up the price of pole attachments. If they were serious about fibre one incentive they could give is to instruct Toronto Hydro (via their Board seats) to reduce/waive the cost of pole attachments for a fixed number of years.
Waiving the fee (including any increases) for 10 years would save $420 (plus future increases). PV that and it's around a $150 incentive for Bell/Rogers to covert people to fibre (assuming 2 houses per pole).
It costs around $1000 per home so a 15% reduction in the cost.
Just to be clear, i would like to point out that Rogers has rolled out gigabit internet across most of its footprint using DOCIS 3.0 technology which allows for 1.4 Gbps download and over 250 mbps downloads.
Rogers has stated it in its annual reports incremental cost to switch a single house to gigabit internet is negligible. Roger will not install fiber to home in established communities. However, they are Installing fiber in new sub divisions in the suburbs.
For future rogers has confirmed that its current network can be upgraded to DOCIS 3.1 at incremental cost of $50 per home as per demand. DOCIS 3.1 has the capacity to deliver 10 Gbps connection using existing coaxial cables. So i dont see why rogers would ever replace its existing network with fibre to home.
Bell on the other hand is handicapped and it has to spend billion if it want to compete with Rogers.
The race to upgrade broadband Internet networks to enable gigabit-per-second download speeds has intensified in recent months as telephone companies BCE Inc. and Telus Corp. announced plans to expand their fibre-optic infrastructure and eventually offer gigabit services in Toronto (BCE), Edmonton and Vancouver (both Telus). As part of the rollout of its “Gigabit Fibe” service, BCE started offering download speeds of up to 940 megabits per second this summer in parts of Toronto in as well as other cities in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada.
Meanwhile, cable operator Rogers Communications Inc. said in early October it would start offering gigabit download speeds in parts of Toronto later this year and expand to the entire area it serves next year.
Atlantic Canada’s Eastlink also said it will start offering gigabit speeds to residential customers beginning with Halifax in November.
Louis Audet – chief executive of Montreal-based Cogeco, which offers television and Internet services in parts of Ontario and Quebec through its Canadian cable business – said Thursday his company is “fully capable of bringing 1 Gb per second … [but] right now we don’t think it’s necessary.
“But if it ever does become necessary, it’s relatively easy for us to do that and far less expensive than what our competitors are trying to do,” he said, later adding, “Really it’s a matter of bragging rights at this stage, isn’t it?”
Analysts say there is a big difference in the costs telephone companies must incur to install fibre that goes directly to customers’ doors (known as fibre to the home or FTTH) compared to what their cable-company rivals need to spend to upgrade. That’s because cablecos can get faster speeds out of their existing copper-wire infrastructure by migrating to newer versions of DOCSIS (data over cable service interface specification) technology.
Rogers executives said last week they estimate it will cost less than $50 per household on average for the company to upgrade its entire footprint to DOCSIS 3.1. They also noted that they have been able to deliver gigabit speeds with their existing DOCSIS 3.0 technology.
