By Ahmad Hathout
Rogers president and CEO Tony Staffieri said Thursday that the telecom’s completion of the first Canadian network slicing trial on its standalone 5G network will be an important component of its fixed wireless strategy.
Done in conjunction with Swedish telecom equipment maker Ericsson in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, the trial showed that Rogers will be able to proactively direct and prioritize traffic on multiple lanes over the 5G wireless network. Rogers said the network will be able to determine whether the applications need lower latency, more speed or more capacity – say, for situations where a high-concentration of people are at an event that would otherwise overwhelm the network because a live-stream is sharing the same lane as people using their phones.
While Staffieri touted on the telecom’s fourth-quarter conference call its ability to provide a priority slice, or lane, for emergency services agencies to increase reliability and provide use cases for businesses, he said the development will be an especially big boon for its fixed wireless strategy – bringing the technology closer to wired home internet.
“We are excited about…what it does for our fixed wireless access deployment strategy and creating that capacity for that initiative,” Staffieri said about network slicing, adding the telecom expects to see applications come on at around the “mid-year” mark.
“We cover two-thirds of the country with our wireline cable footprint and there’s one-third that we don’t cover with wireline, and so what you’ll see us focus on is fixed wireless access in those markets, as well as [third party internet access],” Staffieri said, adding “network slicing is an important component of that.”
Staffieri said Rogers’s purchase of Comwave in the fourth quarter gives the cableco a platform to “sell home internet and products that we could bundle with what is already our national coverage on wireless.”
Rogers also gave another update on how it’s doing post-Shaw acquisition. Staffieri said the combined entity continues to take market share, and its fastest-growth provinces on both cable and wireless in the quarter were British Columbia and Alberta.
In December, Rogers and Lynk Global completed Canada’s first satellite-to-mobile phone call. The nascent technology, which is also taking off in the United States, will allow providers to reach areas of the country that their land networks do not.
Staffieri said Rogers is on track to introduce these services to Canadians this year.
For the three months that ended December 31, and compared to the same period last year (which didn’t include the acquisition of Shaw, which closed in April), the cableco added 703,000 gross postpaid mobile phone subscribers, an increase of 166,000. Total net additions in the quarter were 184,000, down nine per cent on a year-over-year basis. Churn, or the rate of defections, was up 0.43 points to 1.67 per cent in the quarter.
The total postpaid base was up 1.1 million to 10.5 million.
The telecom added 156,000 gross prepaid mobile customers, 60,000 less than last year. On net, it lost 73,000 prepaid customers, more than the 7,000 it lost over the same period. Churn was up 0.30 points to 6.20 per cent in the quarter.
The total prepaid base shrunk by 144,000 to 1.1 million.
Average revenue per user on a monthly basis was down 73 cents to $57.96.
In total, wireless revenue was up 11 per cent in the quarter to $2.9 billion.
Rogers added 20,000 new customers on internet services this quarter, an increase of 13 per cent year-on-year. Its total retail internet base sat nearly two million higher to roughly 4.2 million.
Cable service revenues increased 94 per cent year-over-year to nearly $2 billion, mainly as a result of the Shaw buy.
Rogers lost 12,000 net video subscribers in the quarter, more than the 10,000 it lost last year. The total video subscriber base was still up 1.2 million to 2.7 million.
Media revenue was down eight per cent to $558 million, which was related to a distribution from Major League Baseball in 2022. That was offset by higher advertising and subscriber revenue.
In total, it reported a 28 per cent increase in revenue for the fourth quarter to $5.3 billion. That was driven by a nine per cent increase in wireless service revenue and a 17 per cent increase in wireless equipment revenue as more customers purchased devices, including higher-end handsets.
Net income was down 35 per cent to $328 million on a year-over-year basis due to higher depreciation and amortization associated with assets acquired from Shaw, as well as higher restructuring, acquisition, and financing costs.
