Wednesday, August 02, 2006

 

The vanishing utilities

ElectricityAccording to the CRTC's monitoring report, the Ontario phenomenon of municipal electric utility companies in the telecom business may have peaked.

Table 3.1.1 of the report shows revenues having peaked in 2003 at $132.3M, declining to $95.5M in 2004 and only $68.5M in 2005. That seems to indicate a 50% drop in sector revenues in only 2 years.

Is this a reporting problem from the CRTC or is this an indication that utilities are changing their minds about the attraction of telecom?

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Comments:
Very good question. You should ask someone at the CRTC, and post what you find -- it's an important indicator and, if falling as much as all that, it would be very interesting to find out why.

A thought: Allstream (former AT&T Canada) would, technically, have been a utility. They were birthed from CNCP. Their network was based on the old railway assets (ROW and so on).

Is it possible that a big chunk of the drop results from shifting Allstream out of the utility telco sector, and into the ILEC (MTS) sector?
 
You know, now that I look at it, the non-cable/non-utility portion is even more dramatic: from $3 billion in 2003, to $1 billion in 2004, to just $84 million in 2005. I know there has been a lot of consolidation. But still?

That said, my Allstream comment is probably off -- they alone would have more than accounted for all of that shift.
 
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