Bell Canada will invest $1.14 billion to bring gigabit fiber to the home service to more than one million homes and apartments in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) over the next three years.

It will be the largest fiber build ever attempted in North America, and will serve every home and business in the GTA, beginning with 50,000 homes and businesses that will be upgraded to all-fiber service this summer.

“This is something that quite frankly none of us could have imagined just a few years ago,” Bell Canada president and CEO George Cope said at a press conference this morning. “This will be 20 times faster (than average Internet speeds) and it really is building for the consumer what large, large enterprise would have had just a few years ago for their corporations.”

Toronto will be the fastest broadband city in North, Central, and South America when Bell is finished laying 9,000 kilometers of fiber underground and on 80,000 Bell and Toronto Hydro utility poles. At least 27 Bell telephone exchanges will be fully upgraded to 100% fiber service, eliminating huge swaths of older copper wiring. At least 2,400 new jobs will be created, but Bell and Toronto city officials are convinced an all-fiber optic network will attract even more jobs and help broaden Toronto’s digital economy.

Bell’s project in Toronto will be vastly larger than AT&T U-verse with GigaPower, Comcast’s 2Gbps fiber service, and Google Fiber because:

• It will actually exist, unlike fiber to the press release announcements of phantom fiber upgrades from Comcast and AT&T that serve only a miniscule number of customers;
• Will not rely on “fiberhoods” and will deliver fiber service to every home and business and every neighborhood across the entire GTA.

No pricing has yet been announced but Bell promised it would be competitive with other gigabit broadband projects in North America. That likely means Toronto residents will pay between $70-100 a month for gigabit service. No details about usage caps or allowances were included in the announcement.

Bell is already upgrading some of its existing Fibe network in other cities to deliver gigabit speeds on a more limited basis in Atlantic Canada (Bell Aliant) and in select cities in Ontario and Quebec as part of a $20 billion network upgrade.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CP24 Bell Gigabit Announcement 6-25-15.flv[/flv]

CP24 carried this morning’s press conference introducing Bell Gigabit Internet across Toronto. (19:51)

Two cable industry trade associations have asked the Federal Communications Commission to start collecting more fees from satellite television operators to cover the FCC’s regulatory expenses — a move satellite providers argue will cause consumers to suffer bill shock from increased prices.

The American Cable Association and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association have filed comments with the FCC asking the commission to impose the same regulatory fees on satellite subscribers that cable companies are likely to pay in 2015 — 95 cents a year per subscriber.

The FCC has proposed initially charging satellite operators $0.12 this year per customer, or about one cent a month. The two cable lobbying groups want that 12 cent fee doubled to 24 cents and then raised an additional 24 cents each year until it reaches parity with what cable companies pay.

“The FCC is off to a good start by declaring that Dish and DirecTV should pay regulatory fees to support the work of the agency’s Media Bureau for the first time and proposing setting the initial per subscriber fee at one cent per month in 2015,” said Matthew Polka, president and CEO of the ACA. “But given the FCC proposes that cable operators pay nearly 8 cents per month, per customer, it must do more, including requiring these two multibillion dollar companies with national reach to shoulder more of the fee burden next year that is now disproportionately borne by smaller, locally based cable operators.”

The satellite industry has filed their own comments with the FCC objecting to any significant fee increases, claiming it will cause consumers to experience bill shock and that satellite companies pose less of a regulatory burden on the FCC in comparison to cable operators.

The ACA counters that even if the satellite companies were required to pay the full 95 cents this year — the same rate small independent cable operators pay — it would add a trivial $0.08 a month to customer bills — less than a 0.4% increase on the lowest priced introductory offer sold by satellite providers.

The ACA reminded the FCC it did not seem too concerned about rate shock when it imposed a 99 cent fee on IPTV providers like AT&T U-verse in 2014 without a phase-in.

DirecTV and Dish argue the FCC has jurisdiction over cable’s television, phone and Internet packages — a more complex assortment of services. Satellite providers currently only sell television service, so charging the same fee cable companies pay would be disproportionate and unfair, both claim.

Despite the sudden introduction of the IPTV fee last year, AT&T managed to use the opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade.

AT&T added a “Regulatory Video Cost Recovery Charge” on customers’ bills after the FCC assessed a 99 cent fee on IPTV services like U-verse in 2014. But AT&T charged nearly three times more than what it actually owed. U-verse customers were billed $0.24 a month/$2.88 in 2014 for “regulatory fee cost recovery.” But AT&T only paid the FCC $0.99 for each of its 5.7 million customers. It kept the remaining $1.89 for itself, amounting to $10,773,000 in excess profit.

This year the FCC expects to collect $0.95 from each U-verse subscriber, a four cent decline.

Comcast initially announced its 2Gbps broadband service would be available in May.

Three Comcast customers have told Stop the Cap! the cable company has informed them their wait to sign up for 2Gbps service will be a bit longer than planned.

“First it was May, then June, and now I’m being told ‘sometime in July,’ at least for Comcast’s central division, and even then they were not sure,” reports our reader Bruce Nuñez in Atlanta. That same answer was also received by Tom Davis who contacted Comcast this morning about the service.

“They still won’t release any information about anticipated installation costs, although the representative was fairly certain there would be a charge, and they won’t tell anyone the monthly price either,” said Davis. “The representative did tell me it was safer to assume the service will premiere in July and not hold out for June.”

A third potential customer in Miami was also given a vague availability date of “sometime in July” after being told there was no longer a scheduled launch date in June because Comcast wanted to simultaneously launch the service in several cities at once, and there were unspecified delays.

Comcast had previously announced the service would launch sometime in May. While not ready to actually provide the service, Comcast has been busy promoting markets where Gigabit Pro will eventually be available:

(Image: DSL Reports)

• California: Chico, Fresno, Marysville/Yuba City, Merced, Modesto, Monterey, Sacramento, Salinas, San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Barbara County, Stockton, Visalia
• Colorado: Colorado Springs, Denver, Fort Collins, Longmont, Loveland
• Florida: Jacksonville, Miami
• Georgia: Atlanta
• Illinois: Chicago
• Indiana: Northwest Indiana suburbs near Chicago
• Minnesota: Minneapolis, St. Paul
• Oregon: Portland
• Tennessee: Chattanooga, Knoxville
• Texas: Houston
• Utah: Salt Lake City
• Washington: Everett, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma

Customers will have to live within one-third of a mile of existing Comcast fiber infrastructure to qualify for the service.

Initially leaked price information seemed to indicate Comcast was planning to sell the service for $300 a month. At that price, Comcast will likely limit customer demand. Comcast’s Metro Internet service, offering 505Mbps, has been priced at around $400 a month. But to sign up, one must agree to pay a $250 installation and $250 activation fee. The service also is provided on contract, with a very steep $1,000 early termination fee.

Following the footsteps of HBO Now, CBS Corporation is preparing to offer a broadband-only streaming video version of Showtime.

Variety reports a formal announcement is due this week for the service and just like HBO Now, it will initially launch as an Apple TV exclusive, with other platforms added later.

No information about the depth of the online Showtime on-demand catalog is available yet, but the pricing for the service is: $10.99 a month. It will launch July 12. HBO Now costs $15 a month.

CBS has gotten experience in the streaming video market with its $6/mo CBS All Access service, which offers on-demand viewing of decades of CBS programming and all episodes of current CBS series. In markets where CBS owns its local affiliate, live streaming is also available.

Showtime will also be expanding into Canada for the first time in January, to be made available on Bell Media platforms including Fibe TV and its direct to home satellite service.

This article updated to reflect pricing and launch date of the service.

Without dramatic changes in wireless pricing and more careful usage, owning a smartphone will cost an average of $119 a month per phone by the year 2019.

Ever since the largest players in the wireless industry decided to monetize wireless data usage by ending unlimited use data plans, the average monthly phone bills of smartphone users have been on the increase. In 2013, the average cell phone bill was $76 a month, according to Bureau of Labor statistics. That’s up 50% from the $51 a month customers paid in 2007, the first year the iconic Apple iPhone was offered for sale.

Although wireless companies claim their current 4G (largely LTE) networks are robust enough to sustain the growing demand for wireless data until more spectrum becomes available, the transition to next generation 5G technology will dramatically increase the efficiency of wireless data transmission, delivering up to 40 times the speed of existing 4G networks. But if providers are not willing to slash prices on 5G data plans, average usage and customers’ phone bills are likely to soar to new all-time highs, costing a family of four smartphone owners an average of $476 a month.

A study by Wafa Elmannai and Khaled Elleithy at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Bridgeport found wireless carriers have given up on monetizing voice and texting services, including unlimited minutes and text messages as part of most basic service plans. The real money is made from wireless data plans which traditionally cost customers between $10.79-16.72 per gigabyte, depending on the carrier and whatever fees, surcharges and required add-ons are necessary to get the service.

Wireless carriers defend their pricing, claiming they have cut prices on certain data plans while granting some customers extra gigabytes of usage at no extra cost. Some evidence shows that carriers have indeed reduced the asking price of delivering a megabyte of data by 50 percent annually. But their costs to deliver that data have dropped even faster, particularly as networks shift traffic away from older 3G networks to 4G technology, which is vastly more efficient than its predecessor.

The end of unlimited data plans by AT&T and Verizon Wireless was key to shifting the industry towards monetizing data usage. The more a customer consumes, the more revenue a carrier earns. But as web pages and applications become more complex and bandwidth intensive, customers will naturally consume more and more data each month, forcing regular usage plan upgrades to avoid confronting overlimit fees. Unless providers pass along more of their savings on traffic costs to consumers, bills will rise.

At current usage estimates from Cisco, the average customer will consume at least 57% more wireless data by 2019 than they do today. To sustain that usage, wireless providers are bidding for additional spectrum rights and are working towards upgrading to next generation 5G technology. But some carriers, including AT&T and Verizon, are also investing in new applications for their networks that include in-car telematics, home security and automation, and online video. Using some of these technologies guarantees an even greater amount of data usage, particularly for online video. Unless customers are careful about their usage and avoid high-bandwidth applications, they are in for a much bigger bill in the future, much to the delight of wireless providers.

While most analysts expect wireless companies will choose to give customers a larger data allowance instead of resorting to fire sale pricing, Elmannai and Elleithy expect that will not be enough to keep cell phone bills stable.

“We will need to reduce the bit rate to (1/1000th) of today’s level in order to receive x1000 of data capacity [at the] same cost [we see today],” the authors conclude. That would mean a low end 1GB data plan on a 4G network would cost just $0.03. Larger allowance plans would cost less than one cent per gigabyte.

The authors of the study expect carriers to price 5G data plans more or less the same as 4G plans, but will probably boost usage allowances to deliver a perception of greater value. But as web applications continue to gravitate towards higher data usage, bills will continue to rise, assuring providers of growing returns even with modest to moderate levels of competition.

At the moment, despite some evidence of price competition, some carriers are still raising prices. Verizon increased the price of its 10GB plan by $20 to $100 a month and T-Mobile raised the price of its unlimited data plan by $10 a month last year.