Bell Aliant (Toronto: BA-UN.TO) on Wednesday unveiled plans to bring its FibreOP fiber to the home service to 13 more communities in the Annapolis Valley market in Nova Scotia.
The service provider said it is investing almost CAD 7 million (USD 10.6 million) to connect 12,500 premises to its FTTH network.
One of the early adopters of FibreOP is New Minas resident Stephen Wilsack, whose company, Innovative Systems, is using the service to provide large file data transfer services including video production and streaming.
"The speed and response time allow us to work in real time and, from a business perspective, that's a really big deal," he said in a release about the latest network expansion.
In addition to Annapolis Valley, Bell Aliant currently offers FibreOP services in other Nova Scotia towns and cities, including Halifax, Truro, New Glasgow, Sydney, Bridgewater, Digby, Antigonish, Yarmouth, and Lunenburg.
Last November, it extended FibreOP service to Amherst, an area that includes about 5,400 residential and business customers.
As one of Canada's early adopters of FTTH, the telco said that it is on track to extend the network to about "800,000 homes and businesses in its territory."
At a time when Bell Aliant continues to see its traditional landline business erode due to wireless substitution and cable competitors, FibreOP has been a growth engine for the telco.
In Q4 2012, it added 20,200 new FibreOP Internet customers, ending the month of December with a total of 112,000 FibreOP Internet customers.
Complementing the growth of its broadband data service is IPTV.
During the fourth quarter, FibreOP TV customers grew by 17,400 in the quarter to reach 96,800, a figure that includes customers that migrated from Bell Aliant's FTTN-based TV service. The service provider added a total 15,600 IPTV in Q4 2012, compared to 8,900 a year earlier.
For more:
- see the release
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