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Bell Canada's financials and UBB

Anyone know what NAS means (network access service) in the context of these conference calls? In plain language please...

I had the same question about NAS. To me it appears to be a fancy word for POTS based services.

It does mean "Network Access Service", and based on what my buddy Mr Google says, it is based on the copper service to a home. But I am not sure how much includes. (for instance, if you are on a CLEC, do the unbundled loop fees contribute to NAS revenus ?).

It would appear that services such as voice mail that are attached to POTS would count towards NAS. (which is why Bell could claim rising ARPU there).

The reason Bell counts NAS is because there isn't a 1:1 relationship between telephone numbers and subscribers. You could have 1 phone number aimed at 23 PRI channels, or you could have 5000 phone numbers aimed at 10 DID trunks.
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MNSi Internet - »www.mnsi.net

reply to jfmezei
As we all suspected, Bell's UBB is actually a REVENUE generator. It is clearly not the end of the world if Bell's UBB was taken away.

"Turning to slide 9, our residential services had an excellent revenue quarter from a data perspective, as well, with data revenue growth of 5%, driven principally by the bandwidth usage revenue being up 83% year-over-year."

This should be posted everywhere and pointed out to at the CRTC's next proceeding.

reply to jfmezei
Also found this gem in the second transcript:

Maher Yaghi, Desjardins Securities
Yes, thank you for taking my question. I just want to maybe talk about your NAS losses in the quarter. You mentioned that you saw some improvement due to a contract signing on the wholesale side. Can you quantify what that contract would have represented in the quarter just so that we can have a better understanding what the underlying fundamentals are in terms of NAS losses on the residential side?

George Cope, Chief Executive Officer, BCE
We’re not going to disclose the number but let me try to help you a little bit. If you look at our historical decline we’ve seen in NAS year-over-year, if you were to look back at that, that’s generally where we have been and the wholesale transaction helped that. So, you know, if the number looks more than it’s normally been, you can back into… assume that the retail side of our consumer saw the steady decrease that we’ve seen historically. And that’s probably as far as we’re going to go on that because it’s got competitive elements to it for us and for the wholesaler who is doing that work.

So wholesale is a money maker and they still want to get rid of it. Makes no sense to me.

reply to jfmezei
Geist is reading the financials also

BCE CEO Cope Says UBB Accounts for Almost All Internet Revenue Gains
»www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5697/125/

Nice to see Geist is reading this forum. He has also posted The UBB Deception video on his blog today.

»www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5694/196/

I guess this is where capitalism meets socialism.

Belll Canada's goal is to enrish its CEO and shareholders and extract as much money from consumers as it can get away with. It doesn't realy have a "social responsability" to the nation. (except perhaps leftovers from the Bell Canada act).

So, when it sees the internet, it isn't interested in providing fixed fee service while other companies like Google will become rich beyond belief. Bell Canada wants in on the act. (as would any large corporation, including cable companies).

As a nation thought should we regard the internet as a public access highway that is critical to the rest of the economy ? Or should this be regarded as a private highway that can be runned any way the onwer wishes ?

The problem with the purely capitalist view is that I am not sure you can really have competition in the internet access business, especially not in the last mile. And without sufficient compeition, the "milk the customers as much as you can" mentality of large corporations will be detrinental to the nation as a whole because our internet will be too costly.

So, if you physically cannot have sufficient compeition to keep prices low enough to make Canada competitive in a global economy, what do you do ? Nationalise last mile (as in australia) ? Regulate it ? Or just pretend there is sufficient competition and let the market loose as the CRTC has been doing ?

Nationalizing the last mile would work as long as the people involved are dedicated in seeing it work, just like what was accomplished with Hydro Quebec.

Back in the Thirties, the two major Quebec power companies, Montreal Light, Heat and Power and Shawinigan Water & Power Company, colluded together to rig the pricing of electricity. The government had enough of the shenanigans and eventually bought out the two power companies along with many smaller ones, and created a single public utility called Hydro Quebec.

Today, not only do we have one of the most advanced and reliable power grids in the world that we both own and control, we also have some of the lowest electrical rates in all of North America.

Unfortunately, we're back in the same position as back then, but instead of having issues with our electric companies, our issues are now with the telecommunications companies.

The national network I'd like to see implemented would have to be a "dumb pipe" type network where you can feed just about any type of data through the system. Private companies would lease access to the national network (no auctions please) and would be entirely responsible for the type of data flowing through the system (phone, TV, Internet...). They can even encrypt the information any way they'd like so that the government can't access anything specific, ensuring privacy is maintained.

Having the network as a public utility would ensure that all companies, big and small, would have equal access to the network, and no single company would be able to squeeze anyone else out of the system as we've seen with the auctioning off of new cellular spectrum a few years ago.

reply to jfmezei
What *is* galling about this is that Bell and all its officers have a legal responsibility to provide accurate information to the investing public (via the analysts) during these conference calls. There are financial and possible criminal sanctions for not doing so.

Yet these same cretins can stand before the CRTC and spout falsehood after falsehood without repercussions, or if there are possible repercussions that they are never enforced.

It's high time for all testimony before the CRTC to be sworn under oath, with severe penalties for false/misleading statements.

1) Corporate Death Penalty - ignore a CRTC ruling once, get fined $1mm/DAY; ignore the same or another ruling twice, get fined $10MM/DAY retroactive to the date of the first ruling; ignore a new or the same ruling a third time, the corporation's charter is cancelled and corporation is placed in receivership - shareholder's equity wiped out, corporation executives & directors placed on trial for contempt with all penalties payable personally.

2) Powers of Investigation to be added to IC/CRTC mandate - includes audit teams capable of surprise technical inspections, power to demand technical information on-the-spot, power to remove equipment/records for study. penalties for failure to comply are same as 1) above.

I've been complaining about that for a while too. The equivalent of Sarbanes–Oxley applied through the CRTC would work fine.

Geo

reply to jfmezei

Gotta love Georgie and his high priced managerial team...they were bleeding Bell customers for millions through UBB - but oh no it's not enough. So someone, probably Mirko sez "Hey this is great but we can do better - lets stick it to the indies. Call KvF" Idiots.

reply to El Quintron
It's also Shaw being candid with investors and liars to the CRTC.

»www.shaw.ca/uploadedFiles/Corpor···inal.pdf

Slide #5 (numbers at lower left)
In the future, we believe our usage based billing plan will enable the further monetization of our Internet business as data usage becomes more prevalent and common amongst our customer base (ie. streaming of video)

Slide 19
Over-the-top applications (i.e. Global TV website, Hulu etc.) relating to the viewing of traditional broadcasting will become more common in the future and management of content will help mitigate this risk to our core business

Let's be clear in all this:
Monetizing / monetization are code words for "profit centre", and not "cost recovery" or "behaviour modification".

reply to MaynardKrebs

reply to jfmezei
Metered Internet just a matter of "fairness" (and profits) - »arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news···fair.ars