Bell Canada: "Users will NEVER need more than 10Mbps to the home"

This piece in Canada's Globe and Mail truly defies belief. Bell Canada is trying to offer some type of justification for why they are slowing down on rolling out fiber to the home. Well, I should say... they are trying to offer some justification other than the fact that they are now $30 billion in debt due to the recent buyout to take the company private. Anyway, along the way, they provide this gem:

Mr. Crull said rivals cannot guarantee those high speeds and their service deteriorates depending on traffic volume. Furthermore, he said, the majority of customers have no use for speeds above 10 Mbps.

Wow.

Obviously Bell Canada executives missed the memo about people getting more and more of their video across the Internet... and wanting to stream HD video, etc. And maybe they missed the memo about Asian countries that are now delivering 100 Mbps into homes.

And then there's this little detail of how we are evolving more and more of our services "into the cloud"... and for that we need big, fat, dumb pipes.

I guess the good news is that if you are in Canada and are a Rogers shareholder, odds are pretty good that you'll see increased revenues as more people leave Bell Canada DSL for Rogers cable...

Technorati Tags: bell canada, canada, rogers, bandwidth

Comments

[Vlok Stone]

Too bad they went private, cuz executive mindshare like this makes for a perfect short sell.

[Jon Arnold]

So glad you picked up on this Dan! I posted about it today, and built on Alec's post from yesterday, so it's not going unnoticed.

[Dean Bubley]

There's an ISP in Hong Kong that is offering residential Gigabit Ethernet connections - symmetrical too, I think.

Astonishing short-sightedness in my view.

There's plenty of arguments for 10Mbit/s *mobile* connections, never mind fixed-line.....