Rogers vs. Bell: Reliability the issue
TheStar.com - Rogers vs. Bell: Reliability the issue
TYLER HAMILTON
Come July 1, millions of cable customers throughout Ontario will have the option of getting home telephone service from Ted Rogers, the man most associated with cable and cellular phones.
Rogers, founder and chief executive of Rogers Communications Inc., is aiming for July 1 because it's the 20th-anniversary of Rogers Wireless and, well, it doesn't hurt that it's Canada Day — uncle Ted being a die-hard Canadian and Rogers' logo sporting the colours of our national flag.
It all stands in contrast to those faceless blue management types over at Bell Canada, who themselves are trying to muscle into Rogers' television business.
Assuming all goes as planned, and there are no promises that it will, people will be able to sign up for a telephone service that transmits our voices through a high-speed cable modem, onto Rogers' cable backbone and across Canada — sources say — through Allstream Corp.'s national network.
This phone-over-cable approach is similar at its most basic level to the Voice over Internet Protocol services offered by Vonage and Primus Canada. Where it's supposed to differ dramatically is on quality.
Rogers is promising eight hours worth of back-up power in case of outages, as well as 911 calling in the event of an emergency. And unlike services from Vonage or Primus, which are designed to piggyback high-speed access services they don't control, Rogers will be in solid control over the access points and network its telephone customers will rely on.
Shaw Cable, Videotron and Cogeco Cable have their own phone-over-cable plans. Shaw is expected to come to market with a service within a few weeks, beginning in Edmonton.
Will these cable companies be able to deliver the "carrier-grade" quality and reliability being promised?
It's easy to have doubts. The Star still gets emails — not so infrequently — from Rogers' high-speed customers whenever their service goes down. Earlier this month, a few hundred people scattered throughout Rogers' territory didn't have high-speed service for nearly an hour.
Not a major deal, but something that simply doesn't happen with Bell's local phone service.
"It's going to be interesting to see how they do voice over Internet protocol telephone if they can't keep the high speed up," wrote one reader.
Good point. Cast back to early 2001, when disruptions or slowdowns or outages on Rogers' high-speed network were so frequent they were hardly newsworthy. It became such an annoyance to customers that a $75 million class action lawsuit was filed, though it never went anywhere.
Many of those problems were rightly blamed on Rogers' relationship — and dependence — on Redwood City, Calif.-based At Home Corp., which remotely managed many of the services Rogers' customers relied on. Then-CEO John Tory, now Conservative leader for the province, eventually severed Rogers' alliance with At Home and spent more than $300 million reclaiming control over the service, with a focus on improving quality.
Much has changed, no doubt. At Home Corp. is dead. The outages and disruptions are much, much fewer. But they still crop up now and again, enough to raise concern over a future telephone service. Rarely does Bell's local service go down, and it's even less likely that it would happen to hundreds or thousands of people at the same time — ice storms the exception.
"It has to be 100 per cent reliable," says Kona Shio, a media and telecom analyst with Conscius Capital in Montreal. "If you're going against Vonage, it's another story, but if you're going against BCE, you have to offer a comparable service."
Can Rogers achieve the so-called "Five Nines" of telecom, meaning your service works 99.999 per cent of the time?
"They're going to have their challenges," said Iain Grant, managing director of the Seaboard Group, a telecom research firm and consultancy. He says there will be many growing pains for Rogers, and early adopters of the service could face frustrations.
Dermot O'Carroll, senior vice-president of network engineering and operations for Rogers Cable, is fully aware of the challenges and says a plan is in place to reach the Five Nines.
First, Rogers isn't going to run voice packets through the same channel as other high-speed data. Two different channels are being created, and the voice channel will be given priority. Subscribers to the phone-over-cable service — both new customers and existing high-speed subscribers — will be issued an upgraded modem to handle the channel division.
Under this setup, "You could have Internet outages for a wide variety of reasons, none of which would affect the telephone service," said O'Carroll.
This priority for voice also flows down to Rogers' backbone. Again, voice packets — that is, our voices broken down like a puzzle into different bits of data — are given higher priority than other types of data, such as requests for Web sites or email, which aren't as time-sensitive. This will prevent latency in conversations or jittery sounds.
Rogers is also adding redundancy to what it calls its CMTS, which stands for cable modem terminating system. This is a point in the network that communicates with a particular cluster of cable modems being used in a neighbourhood — usually there are about 500 per cluster. Consider it a kind of gateway or traffic cop, directing high-speed traffic onto and off of Rogers' larger backbone.
"That redundancy should eliminate the majority of outages," says O'Carroll. "We're also building redundancy on the backbone itself and right across the network, so we minimize the outages that would impact voice."
This is a reason why Rogers has committed to spending $200 million to bring such a service to market. Testing is supposed to begin in April.
"The phone companies have been doing it for 100 years," said Ted Rogers, when he first revealed snippets of his plan last February. "After our first hundred days I think we'll be in the same league."
The pressure is on. As Mr. Rogers must surely know, after the first 100 days the service could also be a public relations disaster capable of hurting the entire Rogers brand.
It's a major gamble, and while one could argue that going into wireless was a risky bet that paid off for the Rogers family, the difference here is that many view local phone service as essential — as a lifeline.
When a worried mother with a sick baby picks up the phone in the middle of the night to call TeleHealth, the damn thing better be working. In such situations, the fancy features promised by VoIP services won't matter. Neither will a credit on next month's bill.
January 24, 2005 at 08:12 AM in Telecommunications | Permalink
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