TBayTel revamps to increase competitiveness.

In a bid to improve its competitive edge, TbayTel intends to enter the cable television services market as part of a new move to redesign itself as more of a dynamic business enterprise.

"We want the company to operate more as a business than a city department," says Phill Comrie, chief executive officer of the municipally owned company.

Comrie says the driving force behind the change came with recent calls from the federal government encouraging more local competition between telecom providers. The Canadian Radiotelevision and Telecommunications Commission commissioned a study that found that a small handful of companies still control the vast majority of local services across Canada. Comrie says allowing cable companies to provide Internet service and telephone companies to provide cable service created a climate where the change was feasible.

"All of a sudden there's a new landscape we're living in," Comrie says, referring to the trend towards "bundling" different services together, such as telephone, cable and Internet.

With the move, TBayTel hopes to regain some of the market share it may have lost to telecom providers, such as Bell, which offers satellite television.

Offering cable television is just one part of the company's move towards a more sustainable business model. The company is re-evaluating how it does business and how it organizes itself internally. Within the next year and a half, he says, TBayTel will be set to start on a new business model. Officials with TBayTel still have to make their case before Industry Canada on how they intend to operate the company at "arms-length" from the city government.

A new municipal services board for TBayTel was announced in November. Council appointed Donald Paterson, Tom Jones, Larry Hebert, Michael Power and Bill Scollie to the board.

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