Say so long to your Bell set-top box.
Bell Canada’s parent company is going all-in on its digital transformation, including a plan to scrap the box — the ubiquitous in-home digital interface that connects fibre networks to televisions — in favour of direct streaming on a smart TV or device a customer already owns.
The announcement by BCE Inc., was one of several made by the company Tuesday at an investors day event held in the ballroom of the Delta Hotels Toronto that laid out the company’s plans for growth.
The set-top boxes will be phased out starting in January for new customers. People renting boxes from Bell can return them if they have a smart TV that can download and stream Bell’s Fibe TV app.
The company also announced plans to launch the ‘unbreakable internet’ in the spring, which will continue to connect you to the web during power outages through a combination of wireless backups, enabled by Bell Mobility 5G smartphones, and the fibre network’s passive optical technology which can transmit data without power.
“We see an insatiable appetite for data,” Mirko Bibic, president and CEO of Bell Canada, told an audience of financial advisers and shareholders. “Consumers want access to rich content any time, anywhere, on any device. In short, the world is moving to ultra-connectivity.”
Bell made a number of other announcements on Tuesday, including new tiered wireless plans with rates based on services, and said it will launch internet services in British Columbia and Alberta in the coming weeks.
The event was a three-year look ahead for the company, which estimates it’s current annual revenues of nearly $25 billion will increase two to four per cent between 2025 and 2028, not only by growing internet, digital and mobile services as well as cybersecurity, but through products such as Bell AI Fabric, which it launched this year.
Bell is building six data centres in Canada in order to provide enough computing power to complete AI high-performance tasks, and is partnering with Canadian chip manufacturer Groq Canada on Bell AI Fabric, for use by government and large Canadian organizations.
The company also expects to save $1.5 billion in the next three years through efficiencies, including using artificial intelligence to enhance customer experience, something it hasn’t always been known for.
“This is an area where we’ve historically fallen short as an industry and certainly here at Bell,” said Kris Somers, Bell’s senior V-P of investor relations.
Somers said the company started to make meaningful changes after receiving the highest proportion of complaints among the Big Three telecoms to the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Service in 2019.
The commission, an independent organization, resolves customer complaints about Canadian telecommunications and television service providers.
Somers said Bell now has the lowest proportion of complaints.
The company developed an AI virtual repair system in 2022 that has eliminated more than a million technical support calls and has an AI virtual assistant to direct customers to the right department.
Bell also announced that in January, it will no longer sell Virgin internet or Virgin’s affordable television streaming service, but the company said that existing subscribers will continue to have the service.
