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TSI Marc
Premium Member
join:2006-06-23
Chatham, ON

TSI Marc to Radar73

Premium Member

to Radar73

Re: Start.ca VS Distributel

said by Radar73:

said by TSI Marc:

Oish. More widely available? How do you figure that? Unless you're on aggregated we largely have the same footprint.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but start is aggregated, hence more widely available than TSI at the moment, is that not right?

There are a few factors here. The first is that each incumbent is different and not all independent ISPs have infrastructure to all incumbents. We have Aliant, Bell, Telus, Vidéotron, Cogeco, Rogers and Shaw. So on that alone, I would say that few are as widely available as us if any. We've stopped that expansion more than a year ago but once things settle down, we will surely continue to expand that.

Now, within each one of those, that's where you get into the aggregated vs. non-aggregated on the Cable side. For the DSL incumbents, we already have their entire footprints. Similarity with Vidéotron, we have their entire footprint.

That leaves us with Rogers, Cogeco and Shaw.

Each one of those have specific reasons for the state they are in.

For Rogers, its a simple matter of rapid growth. A couple years ago, when we first started up with them, the only thing available was non-aggregated. At the time, you had to build or buy connectivity to each POI you wanted to serve. At the time I think there were something like 50 POIs just for Rogers. We connected to 19 of them. The majority of all the major centers they serve except for Barrie (don't ask me how we managed to miss that one). Today they split one of them into two and created the Comstock POI, so we now server 20 POIs I believe. Today we have over 75 gig links (with 10 more on order) going to all those 20 POIs and they all aggregate back to something like 6-8, 10 gig links.

Cogeco, we have a single gig link to the Chatham POI and it back hauls to our office in Chatham where we have multiple links going back to our main POP in Toronto and out to the web from there.

For Shaw, we have a single gig link with a second on the way aggregating to our POP in Vancouver.(We also have a POP in Halifax where we aggregate all of Aliant.)

All three are currently on the non-aggregated TPIA since they were all setup prior to the big CRTC decision. (Remember that late last year a CRTC decision was made to change the way we interconnect with the Cable co's networks.. That's where this aggregated vs. non-aggregated business started)

For Shaw, the result of the decision is that they now have more aggregated POIs than they used to have non-aggregated.. Odd result but that's what happened. We're in the process of migrating but we're not sure yet what coverage we'll have

For Cogeco, we are essentially very close to go live BUT, the usage is so crazy high, that the roughly 1000 users we have in Chatham would take something like a $10/mth price hike just to break even, not even making any profit. So, we're reluctant to go live with it now that we've done the math even though I said we would, I'm now inclined to wait until the new year (there are also other factors that are delaying this that will become known soon).

For Rogers, we simply have a massive migration to do and it's just not simple. We have agreements that need to be dealt with for the existing gig links that would all be dropped if we migrated.. Rogers is working with us to come up with a plan. We met with them last week and we have a plan to begin by enabling the rest of their POIs first, sometime in Feb or March, then start migrating one POI at a time over to the aggregated model and by end of year we should be fully migrated.

So really, we should have all of their entire footprints in the first few months of the new year... Getting back to your original question, I don't know where others are at but at least now you know where we are at hope that helps.