Bell’s acquisition of the Monteregian Internet service provider Ebox caused a flight of many Quebec Internet users to other discount providers such as Oxio or even Fizz, a brand that nevertheless belongs to Videotron (Quebecor).
Kevin, whose real name we keep secret since he works in the field of telecommunications, lives in the Montreal borough of Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie. He and several of his friends are Ebox customers. Anxious to encourage independent providers, they saw fit to disconnect their Internet service when they learned that Bell, one of the three national telecommunications giants with Rogers and Telus, was acquiring it.
“I became a customer of Ebox in 2014 because at the time, its prices were low and particularly attractive in the case of packages offering a very high monthly data volume. That was before home Internet packages became unlimited,” he recalls in an interview with The duty.
Ebox also became at the time one of the first providers in Canada to market Internet access without a monthly limit to residential consumers. This is also one of the reasons that allowed it to quickly establish itself as the largest independent supplier in Quebec. The SME, which employed more than 300 people, had in recent years an annual turnover that exceeded 50 million dollars.
Ebox gradually diversified by launching a telephone service for the home and then a cable television package. In the meantime, its prices have remained roughly unchanged, which has allowed new brands to steal the title of the most affordable provider in the home Internet market.
That didn’t bother Kevin, who remained faithful until last week. A call made to his supplier to have his account closed, however, prompted him to recount his experience on Facebook, where several other ex-customers confirmed his impression: Ebox does not like to see its customers leave the ship at all.
“The call was quite intense. The first rep I spoke to already sounded pretty depressed; he was just reciting lines that seemed written in advance. Then he transferred me to another agent who added a lot. It moved me. At the end, I wished them not to lose their job [à la suite de ce rachat par Bell]. »
Other former Ebox customers reported having a different kind of discussions. Some were told that their future new supplier was going to play tricks on them by limiting their bandwidth to make ends meet or by increasing the total of their monthly bill without warning them.
Oxio’s “Best Weeks”
Of course, in transactions like the one that brings Ebox under Bell’s control, there will always be customers who will look elsewhere if the grass is greener. In this case, it seems that at least two providers are particularly benefiting: Fizz and Oxio.
Data compiled independently and then transmitted to the Homework with the PlanHub online price comparator tend to confirm this conclusion: visitors to the site were particularly numerous in comparing Ebox’s packages with those of their competitors in the few days following the announcement of its takeover by Bell.
In the case of Fizz, a brand belonging to the Quebecor group which targets a young clientele and which offers lower prices in return for limited customer service, we will know the real impact of this situation when the Montreal company publishes its next quarterly results somewhere in May.
Oxio, a young Montreal startup that aims to eventually become a national supplier, says for its part that it has had “the best two weeks” of its existence, in the past 14 days. “The Bell and Ebox transaction had a great impact on our sales,” says Oxio co-founder and CEO Marc-André Campagna. “We broke sales records. We had not seen such an influx for a long time. »
Mr. Campagna is obviously happy to add customers to his Internet service, but he somewhat regrets the context in which this occurs. “It’s always the same thing: the big suppliers protect their market, and the small independents only target the low prices. A central question is ruled out: where is the innovation in telecoms? Because there’s the monthly payment, of course, but there are so many ways to lower it. It would be enough for the big and the small to collaborate more. »
Oxio can be more daring than others: the supplier present in Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia has the advantage of being financed by venture capital. The young shoot received last July 25 million dollars from Investissement Québec, Desjardins and Xavier Niel, the founder of the French provider of telecom services Free, among others.
The young company has free rein to play the card of innovation and transparency, and this allows it to try different things. For example, Oxio announced on Tuesday that its customers could pay their monthly bill with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, a first in the country in the sector. That said, this approach does not work every time: the company published the salaries of all its employees, including its managers, 10 days ago before backing down to publish them only “internally” in order not to offend person.
Such a novelty may not convince Internet users looking for a low price like Kevin. But it diversifies the offer in a sector where, according to the government itself, diversity is greatly lacking.