Rogers Communications may be best known in the consumer market but company executives say they want a larger share of the business voice and data market.
“Our whole plan is to re-enter the Canadian business space,” said Terry Canning, senior vice-president of business network services at Rogers Business Solutions, at the Canadian Telecom Summit.
In previous financial reports, after seeing a revenue drop in business solutions division, Rogers said it “suspended most sales and marketing initiatives related to acquiring new medium and large business customers other than purely on-net opportunities within cable’s footprint.”
But during a keynote address at the conference Wednesday, Canning said Rogers wants to partner with international telecommunications carriers so it can provide network access for Canadian companies or multinationals with branch offices in Canada.
For example, he said, Exxon “is likely going to build a global network” to monitor refineries and gas stations worldwide, including those of its Canadian subsidiary Imperial Oil. He cited Exxon as a hypothetical example when asked by Michael Sone, one of the conference organizers, to give specific examples.
Under that scenario, he said, “the decision of how the Canadian network gets provided will get made in Texas.” He added Rogers does not have “ambitions that we can bid on the Exxon global network” but they could get local access business as a subcontractor of the principal carrier, which he speculated could be AT&T Corp.
In an interview after his speech, Canning said the access would be provided by a combination of its cable network and the fibre plant Rogers inherited when it bought Call-Net Enterprises Inc. in 2005.“There’s no point in bringing coax into businesses when we can bring fibre at the same cost,” Canning said. “The real focus is to take the voice and data in through Ethernet.”