Article: A network Canadian businesses can count on
By Bell Business Markets team
A network Canadian businesses can count on
Over the past couple of months, we’ve had numerous conversations with business leaders across Canada about network diversity and resiliency. They all tell us the same thing: reliable connectivity is foundational to their ability to digitally transform their companies and achieve their business goals. It has become clearer than ever that a high-performing network is no longer a “nice to have”. With an ever-growing number of devices, sensors and remote workers in play, the network has become essential to everything they do.
We know Canadians place an enormous amount of trust in Bell to keep them connected and we take that privilege and responsibility very seriously. So what is it that we do to deliver on that responsibility and continue to earn that trust?
Record-setting network investments
First, we make significant investments in our networks every single year. In the last two years alone, we have invested close to $8 billion in our networks. Over this same time, our wireline and wireless networks have consistently delivered a high level of availability so Canadians can be confident in their ability to connect and do business with the world.
Moving forward, we continue to invest close to $4 billion annually to make our networks even better – boosting their capacity, making them more resilient, and expanding them into more rural and remote communities across the country. In fact, we are currently in the midst of our boldest network buildout program ever including approximately $5 billion in capital investments planned for 2022 – the largest single-year investment in the history of Canada’s telecommunications industry. By the end of this year, we will have invested approximately $14 billion in our network since 2020.
How the network is designed and operated matters
Spending money on expanding our networks is just part of our commitment. To give businesses the reliability they depend on every day, we also design and operate those networks in the smartest ways possible. We believe that’s what makes us stand apart. At Bell, we build diversity, redundancy and resiliency directly into our networks by leveraging advanced architectural principles and embedding rigorous operational governance into our culture.
That includes:
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Bell’s wireless and wireline networks use different network infrastructures. This means a major disruption on the wireline network does not take down the national wireless network. Additionally, our standalone core separates routing control traffic away from customer traffic, preventing Internet traffic instability from overloading our core network. Combined, this results in a reliable and stable network.
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Our national transport network is divided into multiple geographic zones, each connected by at least three separate transport routes. Optimized traffic routing provides multiple paths for network traffic to travel across. If one route fails, traffic will be automatically transported to one of the other two routes. Even the very unlikely event of a double failure would not prevent the flow of mission-critical business traffic and data. We are the only service provider in Canada with this level of diversity of network paths (we call it the “triversity”), providing a high level of protection against unpredictable natural events such as hurricanes, tornadoes and ice storms.
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The majority of our cell towers are connected with fibre. This provides unlimited network capacity and consistent data speeds. Fibre is also much less susceptible to the impacts of extreme weather, unlike alternative technologies like microwave, resulting in a more reliable network architecture.
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We have strict corporate-level disaster recovery protocols and business continuity planning procedures. They include having diverse network operations centres (NOCs) in Montréal, Halifax and Toronto, ensuring business continuity of our core network elements even in the event of an outage at one NOC.
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Our Wireless Backup service provides significant redundancy. In addition, our customers benefit from incremental diversity options across our Internet, IP VPN, Ethernet and Wavelength services.
The expertise to build better networks
To help you achieve your network goals, Bell has the best people in the business to collaborate with your team. We employ 3,000+ highly trained and certified professionals who are designing, engineering and deploying complex network solutions on behalf of businesses across Canada. That includes advanced security certifications such as CISA, CISM, CISSP, OSSTMM, PCI QSA, GIAC and CCIE. Additionally, we ensure our experts follow global best practices and possess certifications in SCRUM and SAFe agile framework for process development, as well as partner certifications in cloud and big data.
Our team also has the expertise to recommend and implement ways in which businesses can improve the redundancy, availability, security and uptime of their connectivity. They can perform health checks on the network infrastructure elements that affect quality of service the most, and evaluate business continuity and disaster recovery plans – all to ensure our customers’ networks are performing exactly as they should.
Our strategic partnerships with industry-leading vendors give our customers access to best-in-class services and technologies. In particular, our award-winning partnership with Cisco and our certifications in Master Networking and Security Specializations demonstrate our commitment to deliver exceptional network solutions. Additionally, we’re the only communications provider to be recognized by IDC MarketScape as a Canadian leader in security services five times in a row.1
Keeping Canadians connected
When we think about Bell’s role in supporting businesses, it’s really quite simple: it’s to live our company purpose to advance how Canadians connect with each other and the world. And we are well positioned and fully committed to fulfilling that purpose. Thanks to our expertise, strict operational governance processes and the investments we are making in our networks, we have successfully built the largest and fastest-growing fibre network in Canada, reaching more places in Atlantic Canada, Québec, Ontario and Manitoba than ever before.
We are so proud of our amazing team for their hard work and commitment to constantly improving the diversity, resiliency and redundancy of our networks. And we want everybody from coast to coast to coast to know that we will do everything we can to deliver world-class network performance and reliability for businesses all across the country. We are confident that Bell is the partner you can trust to keep your business up and running.
Find out what Bell’s reliable networks can do for your business. Visit bell.ca/businessnetworks today.
Source:
1. Based on Bell’s positioning in the IDC MarketScape: Canadian Security Services vendor assessment reports – 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2022 (the report was not published in 2016, 2020 and 2021).
