Competition advances IT industry. (Timmins Special Report).

Though a private consultant's report once panned the federal government for imposing a telecommunications monopoly in Timmins, the city has always been served by a state-of-the-art network with competitive rates, says the director of the city's community-based network.

In a March 2000 Timmins strategic planning document, known as Building our Future, consultants KPMG said the monopoly imposed by the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) was not serving the Timiskaming-Cochrane district very well.

In long distance services, the report said although the CRTC's policy may be well-founded in serving the public interest, Timmins businesses were not benefitting from significant competition through deregulation in recent years.

"And we understand," the report stated, "long-distance costs in Timmins are significantly higher than in other Canadian cities."

Maggie Matear, director of NEOnet Inc., the city's community-based network; has her doubts on how informed an opinion the report was based on, explaining the Timmins area has had "exceptional infrastructure" considering the extensive territory the providers have had to cover. She disagrees that the lack of competition was ever a barrier to business growth.

At the time, the so-called government-imposed monopoly was a well thought-out policy delivering competitive and modern telephone and telecommunications service to small and remote that otherwise would not have a business case to support it.

Considering the millions of dollars in infrastructure investment laid out in the Cochrane-Timiskaming district, she says, Northern Telephone and O.N. Telcom have done an "excellent job" in making do with only 60,000 subscribers in covering an area of more than 200,000 square kilometres.

"Competition has to be introduced gradually in certain areas while people adjust, and there's an amount of churn to make sure the incumbent's investment in infrastructure is not lost.

"In some areas in the U.S., when they introduced competition everybody folded and prices skyrocketed."

Timmins is in a unique situation, says Matear, because its long distance supplier is a Crown corporation--O.N. Telcom-which is the telecommunications division of the Ontario Northland group of companies, while the New Liskeard-based Northern Telephone was the local telephone dial tone provider. Until deregulation was eventually introduced, the two did not cross over.

Matear says at the time when there were complaints emanating in the community, cited in the KPMG report, there was poor communication on everyone's part in understanding the situation.

Perhaps bowing to public pressure, the CRTC allowed for long distance competition starting in January 2002, which provided an opportunity for Northern Telephone to get into the toll market and offer long distance as well.

"For all the complaints that we need more competition, these guys are doing a bang-up job," says Matear.

On long distance calls, Matear calls NEOnet's rate of 35 cents for 10 minutes and three-and-half per minute "just incredible."

"And we pay the lowest connectivity costs in North America," she says, mentioning NEOnet's monthy business rate for DSL or cable is $39.95, while most other areas pay more than more than $42 to $45.

Added competition has manifested itself by contributing to the city's ability to promote its telecommunications infrastructure with "rock-bottom prices" on DSL and high-speed Internet, she says.

"But I also think it bears mentioning that despite the fact there was no official competition for a while, we had TeleTech choose Timmins as a location."

The Spruce Street call centre added 200 more personnel this spring to handle the added volume of incoming calls.

John Wickie, site manager, says since plugging in on Feb. 28,2002, the inbound customer service centre has experienced some explosive growth in ramping up from initially 300 people to 850 with some new hirings this past spring.

"We've had some wonderful growth, we've had some great success and we've also been recognized for our community involvement twice in the last year by our corporate offices for extensive community partnership in Timmins.

Telecommunication expenses have never been a stumbling block for them, he says.

"We don't complain as far as telecommunication rates go, our partnerships with local providers, businesses and government have been positive and it's really been a mutually beneficial partnership."

The centre services Fortune 100 clients in the financial sector, travel industry and telecommunications including a large U.S. wireless provider.