Historically, Bell Canada has been one of Canada's most important and most powerful companies and, in 1975, was listed as the fifth largest in the country. The company is named after the inventor of the telephone,
Alexander Graham Bell, who also co-founded
Bell Telephone Company in Boston, Massachusetts. Bell Canada operated as the Canadian subsidiary of the
Bell System from 1880 to 1975. However, unlike the other
regional Bell operating companies, Bell Canada had its own research and development labs.
Inception In the mid-1870s,
Alexander Graham Bell, who was Scottish-born but lived in Canada, invented an
analogue electromagnetic telecommunication device that could simultaneously transmit and receive human speech. In March 1876 he successfully
patented his invention in the United States under the title of "Improvement In Telegraphy" (). His device later adopted the name now used worldwide, the
telephone. Bell also patented it in Canada and transferred 75% of the Canadian patent rights to his father,
Alexander Melville Bell, with the remaining 25% being awarded to Boston telephone manufacturer
Charles Williams Jr. in exchange for 1,000 telephones to be provided to the Canadian market. This order could not be fulfilled due to surging demand in the United States. For a few years, the senior Bell and his friend and business associate Reverend
Thomas Philip Henderson collected royalties from the lease of telephones to customers in the limited late-1870s Canadian market, who either operated their own private telephone lines or subscribed to a third party
telecommunications service provider. In 1879, Bell's father sold his Canadian rights to the
National Bell Telephone Company, formed in
Boston, Massachusetts earlier that year by the merger of the Bell Telephone Company and the
New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, which in 1880 reorganized as the American Bell Telephone Company, initiating the
Bell System. That same year the Canadian division was renamed to "The Bell Telephone Company of Canada Ltd.", eventually to be headed by U.S. executive
Charles Fleetford Sise from
Chicago who served as its first general manager. Among Cowherd's designs was a transmitter fitted with a triple mouthpiece allowing three people to talk, and sing, simultaneously. James Cowherd's untimely early death due to tuberculosis was noted in major technical journals and led to the closure of the Bell Systems' manufacturing supplier in Brantford. Telephone production later resumed in Montreal, eventually leading to the creation of Northern Electric in 1895, later renamed Northern Telecom and then
Nortel. A
Brantford Expositor article later noted of the historic factory building's demise: "[In 1992 Brantford] City officials and heritage committee members... learned that a building that once housed the first telephone factory in the world had been approved for demolition. The embarrassing oversight came to light too late to stop wrecking crews, who were already tearing down the aged building at 32 Wharfe St.... The building, where equipment for
Alexander Graham Bell's first telephone was made, had even been pictured and written about in a city-printed brochure about the great inventor. A plaque erected by [the]
Telephone Pioneers of America heralding the building's significance had been stripped from the structure in the mid-1980s and given to the Brant County Museum". • F.A. Field. "The First Telephone Factory",
The Blue Bell, January 1931. Retrieved April 22, 2012. With a government-granted monopoly on Canadian long-distance telephone service, The Bell Telephone Company of Canada was serving 237,000 subscribers by 1914. Since its early years The Bell Telephone Company of Canada, Ltd. had been known colloquially as "The Bell" or "Bell Telephone". On March 7, 1968, Canadian federal legislation renamed The Bell Telephone Company of Canada, Ltd. to Bell Canada.
Competition and territory reduction in Montreal was once the head office of Bell Canada. Bell Canada extended lines from Nova Scotia to the foot of the
Rocky Mountains in what is now Alberta. However, most of the attention given to meeting demand for service focused on major cities in Ontario, Quebec, and the
Maritime Provinces.
Atlantic Canada During the late 19th century, Bell sold its Atlantic operations in the three Maritime provinces, where many small independent companies also operated and eventually came under the ownership of three provincial companies. Newfoundland and Labrador joined Canada with several private companies, and a government operation that was transferred to the control of Canadian National Railways. Bell acquired interests in all Atlantic companies during the early 1960s, starting with Newfoundland Telephone (which later was organized as
NewTel Communications) on July 24, 1962. Bell acquired controlling interest in
Maritime Telephone and Telegraph Company, later known as MT&T, which also owned PEI-based
Island Telephone, and in Bruncorp, the parent company of
NBTel in 1966. The purchase of MT&T was made despite efforts of the Nova Scotia legislature on September 10, 1966, to limit the voting power of any shareholder to 1000 votes. Bell-owned MT&T absorbed some 120 independent companies, most serving fewer than 50 customers each. Bell-owned NewTel purchased the CNR-owned
Terra Nova Tel in 1988. In the late 1990s, Newtel, Bruncorp, MT&T and Island Tel merged into Aliant, now
Bell Aliant which owns many services in rural areas of Ontario and Quebec formerly owned by Bell Canada. On January 1, 2011, Bell acquired xwave from Bell Aliant for $40 million, an information technology company offering sales and services in Atlantic Canada.
Quebec and Ontario in Montreal, Quebec. ,
Thornhill, Ontario Independent companies appeared in many areas of Ontario, Quebec and Maritime provinces without adequate Bell Canada service. During the 20th century Bell acquired most of the independent companies in Ontario and Quebec, most notably the purchase of Nexxlink Technologies, a Montreal-based integrated IT solutions and telecommunications provider founded by Karol Brassard. Alongside the acquisition of Charon Systems, Nexxlink now operates today as Bell Business Solutions—a division of Bell Canada. Quebec, however, still has large swaths of relatively rural areas served by Telus Québec (formerly Québec Telephone, later acquired by
Telus Communications) and
Télébec (now owned by Bell Canada via Bell Aliant) and by some 20 small independent companies. As of 1980, Ontario still had some 30 independent companies, and Bell has not acquired any; the smaller ones were sold to larger independents with larger capital resources.
Cellcom Communications is the largest franchisee of Bell Canada, currently operating 25 Bell stores in both Québec and Ontario regions.
Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan At separate times, the three Prairie provinces acquired Bell Canada operations and formed provincial utility services, investing to develop proper telephone services throughout those provinces; Bell Canada's investment in the prairies had been scant or insufficient relative to growth, and all three had various local telephone companies. The Alberta government's Alberta Government Telephones Commission and Manitoba Government Telephones purchased the Bell operations of their provinces in 1908. Saskatchewan's Department of Railways, Telegraphs and Telephones, established in June 1908, purchased the Bell operations on October 1, 1909; all three provinces' government operations eventually acquired the independent companies. Having achieved a high level of development, Manitoba moved to privatize its telephone utility and Alberta privatized
Alberta Government Telephones to create
Telus Communications in the 1990s. Saskatchewan continues to own
SaskTel as a
crown corporation. Edmonton was served by a city-owned utility, Edmonton Telephones Corporation, that was sold to Telus in 1995. BCE re-gained ownership of the Manitoba system, now known as
Bell MTS, on March 17, 2017.
British Columbia British Columbia, served today by
Telus Communications, was served by numerous small companies that mostly amalgamated to form British Columbia Telephone, later known as
BC Tel (the last known acquisition was the Okanagan Telephone Company in the late 1970s), which served the province from the 1960s until its merger with Telus. (The amalgamations produced one anomaly:
Atlin is surrounded by the territory of
Northwestel, implying that the company that established service there was acquired by a company serving territories further south.)
Northern Canada Although Bell Canada entered the Northwest Territories (NWT) with an exchange at
Iqaluit (then known as Frobisher Bay, in the territory now known as Nunavut) in 1958, Canadian National Telecommunications, a subsidiary of
Canadian National Railways (CNR), provided most of the telephone service in Canada's northern territories (specifically, Yukon, northern BC and the western NWT). CNR created
Northwestel in 1979, and Bell Canada Enterprises acquired the company in 1988 as a wholly owned subsidiary. Bell Canada sold its 22 exchanges in the eastern region of the NWT to Northwestel in 1992, and BCE transferred ownership of the company to Bell Canada in 1999. Northwestel's operating area was in 2001 opened to long-distance competition (which has materialized only in the form of prepaid card business, and service to large national customers with some operating locations in the north) and in 2007 to resale of local telephone service (which has not yet occurred). Northern British Columbia, northeastern Ontario and the James Bay region of northern Quebec were served by independent companies, though Bell Canada eventually provided service in more far-flung reaches of Ontario and Quebec, acquired ownership interests in companies serving large swaths of northwestern Quebec and northeastern Ontario, and in Northwestel.
Divestiture and deregulation The Bell System had two main companies in the telephone industry in Canada: Bell Canada as a regional operating company (affiliated with
AT&T, with an ownership stake of approximately 39%) and
Northern Electric as an equipment manufacturer (affiliated with
Western Electric, with an ownership stake of approximately 44%). Northern Electric renamed itself Northern Telecom in 1976, which in turn became
Nortel Networks in 1998 with the acquisition of Bay Networks. Bell Canada acquired 100 percent of Northern Electric in 1964; starting in 1973, Bell's ownership stake in Northern Electric was diminished through public stock offerings, though it retained majority control. In 1983, as a result of deregulation, Bell Canada Enterprises (later shortened to
BCE) was formed as the parent company to Bell Canada and Northern Telecom. As a result of the stock transaction used by Northern Telecom to purchase Bay Networks, BCE ceased to be the majority owner of Nortel, and in 2000, BCE spun out its share of Nortel, distributing its holdings to its shareholders. Between 1980 and 1997, the federal government fully deregulated the telecommunications industry and Bell Canada's monopoly largely ended. Bell Canada currently provides local phone service only in major city centres in Ontario and Quebec. In July 2006, Bell and former subsidiary Aliant completed a restructuring whereby Aliant, renamed
Bell Aliant Regional Communications, took over Bell's wireline operations in much of Ontario and Quebec (while continuing to use the "Bell" name in those regions), as well as its 63% ownership in rural lines operator Bell Nordiq (a publicly traded income trust that controls
NorthernTel and
Télébec). These are in addition to Bell Aliant's operations in
Atlantic Canada. In turn, Bell has assumed responsibility for Bell Aliant's wireless and retail operations. Bell Aliant, now an income trust, is 44% owned by Bell. On April 30, 2007, the
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced its decision to allow pay phone rates for Bell Canada, Telus, Bell Aliant, SaskTel, and MTS Allstream to increase from 25 cents to 50 cents, starting as early as June 1. The CRTC also permitted local rural rates to increase by the lesser of the annual rate of inflation or five percent, and removed price caps on optional rural services, such as call display and voicemail. On June 2, 2007, Bell Canada increased the cost of a local pay phone call to 50 cents when paid in cash and one dollar when paid by calling card or credit card, Bell's first increase in pay phone rates since 1981. Bell has deployed
MPLS on their nationwide fibre ring network to support consumer and enterprise-level IP applications, such as
IPTV and
VoIP. On March 17, 2017, BCE Inc. completed its acquisition of
Manitoba Telecom Services. == Criticism ==