Bell Canada, which has watched Videotron lure away more than 100K local phone customers in Quebec since Februray, finally made a move to stem the cable telephony tide. Bell will sell its VoIP service - Bell Digital Voice - for $35 a month with all the regular bells and whistles, excluding LD. For an additional $5, customers can get 1,200 minutes LD calling within Quebec. The service is being launched a few days after Bell won approval from the CRTC to offer different prices in Quebec than Ontario to deal with different market conditions - i.e. Videotron is killing Bell with low prices (as low as $15.95 a month) while Rogers and Cogeco are being far less aggressive in Ontario. Quebec consumers will pay $5 a month less than their counterparts in Ontario. It's left to be seen how effective Bell's offer will be given Videotron's service will still be less expensive. At the very least, it should stop existing Bell customers, who want VoIP, to jump over to Videotron.

In a much-speculated move, Nortel is selling its corporate HQ in  suburban Toronto to Rogers for C$100-million. You wonder if this will change where new CEO Mike Zafirovski will live given he said he planned to move to Toronto next summer - that is if Motorola and Mike Z. can work out a deal over that troublesome two-year non-compete clause Mike Z. signed in January in return for a $16.8-million severance package. In one sense, Nortel dumping its headquarters is another sad chapter in the company's death by a thousand cuts. The 1M square foot facilty used to be a switch manufacturing plant before Nortel spent $46-million to renovate it in the mid-1990s. In its heyday, it was a corporate crown jewel with restaurants, a bank, fitness facility, a Zen garden stone with benches and a Japanese maple tree, and a serenity loft (apparently, people were working 7/24 at the height of the telecom boom so they needed all kinds of amenities). In recent years, however, the headquarters has lost its relevance/importance north of the border  to Nortel's R&D facilities in Ottawa, as well as U.S. operations in Raleigh, N.C. and Richardson, Tex. On the other hand, having a headquarters literally in the middle of nowhere only 30 minutes from downtown Toronto and a short drive from the airport that isn't close to customers or R&D facilities, makes little sense is not that bad, I guess. I wonder how Rogers' employees will feel about moving to Brampton, particularly those who used to work before Call-Net before it was acquired by Rogers earlier this year. If they are the ones moving to Brampton, it could make a very long commute.
Update: Here's the story I wrote in the National Post on the sale of the HQ, looking at how it symbolizes Rogers' transformation into a telecom player from its roots in the cable industry.

Is the telecom equipment market finally poised to consolidate? Maybe it's about to happen amid a report in the Wall St. Journal that Ericsson plans to acquire Marconi's networking equipment business for $2.1 billion. Mind you, this will be a small dent in the supply side of the telecom market that has become increasingly competitive and margin-thin with the rise of low-cost Chinese suppliers (and possibly Indian players in the future as the market develops and suppliers such as Nortel and Nokia establish local manufacturing operations through partnerships and joint ventures.) As Om Malik quickly pointed out earlier today, Marconi's future became unclear earlier this year when it failed to win any of BT's $19 billion next-generation network contract - a huge blow given Marconi was a key supplier to BT. Given Ericsson's focus on the wireless business in recent years, it will be interesting to see how the acquisition of the Marconi business fits into Ericsson's strategic plans. And while Marconi sort of being taken out of the market is interesting, the real action will be quasi-tier one targets such as Lucent and Nortel. Lucent is clearly the more obvious candidate (Alcatel?) given it doesn't have any of the accounting, financial and management woes of Nortel. Then again, there have been plenty of rumors about Siemens and Nokia sniffing at Nortel so maybe the Ericsson strategic thrust will encourage/inspire other big moves.