Ontera is a

telecommunications company A telephone company, also known as a telco, telephone service provider, or telecommunications operator, is a kind of communications service provider (CSP), more precisely a telecommunications service provider (TSP), that provides telecommunicat ...

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by to ...

and a subsidiary of

Bell Aliant Bell Aliant is a brand name used by Bell Canada for telecommunications services in Atlantic Canada. Prior to 2015, Bell Aliant Inc. (formerly Aliant Inc.) was a separate company providing telecom services in the Atlantic provinces and a few othe ...

. It provides local telephone service in the

Northern Ontario Northern Ontario is a primary geographic and quasi-administrative region of the Canadian province of Ontario, the other primary region being Southern Ontario. Most of the core geographic region is located on part of the Superior Geological Pro ...

towns of Bear Island,

Iroquois Falls Iroquois Falls is a town in Northern Ontario, Canada, with a population of 4,537 at the 2016 census. The town centre lies 11 km east of Hwy 11 on the banks of the Abitibi River, west of Lake Abitibi. Timmins, one of the largest cities in ...

Marten River The Marten River is a short river in central Alberta. The Marten is one of the major inflows of Lesser Slave Lake, which drains through the Lesser Slave River, a major tributary of the Athabasca River. Significant debate exists regarding the or ...

Moosonee Moosonee () is a town in northern Ontario, Canada, on the Moose River approximately south of James Bay. It is considered to be "the Gateway to the Arctic" and has Ontario's only saltwater port. Nearby on Moose Factory Island is the community of ...

Moose Factory Moose Factory is a community in the Cochrane District, Ontario, Canada. It is located on Moose Factory Island, near the mouth of the Moose River, which is at the southern end of James Bay. It was the first English-speaking settlement in lands no ...

and Temagami, and also offers long-distance services in most of

area code 705 Area codes 705 and 249 are telephone area codes in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) for most of northeastern and central Ontario in Canada. Area code 705 was created in a 1957 split from portions of the 613 and 519 numbering plan areas. ...

History

Ontera was founded as the Ontario Northland Telecommunications division of the

Ontario Northland Transportation Commission The Ontario Northland Transportation Commission (ONTC), or simply Ontario Northland, is a Crown agency of the Government of Ontario responsible for providing transportation services for passengers and goods in northern Ontario. It reports to ...

, a Crown agency of the Government of Ontario, in 1902. It was the exclusive provider of long-distance calling services in many rural

Northeastern Ontario Northeastern Ontario is a secondary region of Northern Ontario in the Canadian province of Ontario, which lies north of Lake Huron and east of Lake Superior. Northeastern Ontario consists of the districts of Algoma, Sudbury, Cochrane, Timiskami ...

markets until the

Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC; french: Conseil de la radiodiffusion et des télécommunications canadiennes, links=) is a public organization in Canada with mandate as a regulatory agency for broadcast ...

(CRTC) approved long-distance competition in 2000. The name was changed to O.N.Tel Inc. in the 1990s, then changed its trading name to O.N.Telcom in 2000, and then renamed to Ontera in 2004.

Divestment

In April 2014, the Ontario government announced it would sell Ontera to

. According to the Public Accounts of Ontario prepared by the provincial treasury board, the 6.3 million sale was made at a loss of $61 million. The acquisition was completed in October 2014.

Bell Canada Bell Canada (commonly referred to as Bell) is a Canadian telecommunications company headquartered at 1 Carrefour Alexander-Graham-Bell in the borough of Verdun in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is an ILEC (incumbent local exchange carrier) in ...

, which had been the largest shareholder in Bell Aliant and most of its predecessors throughout their respective histories, took full ownership of Bell Aliant in late 2014. Following its divestment, Ontera did not maintain investments in network infrastructure and stopped accepting new customers. The municipal council of Temagami approved a resolution in September 2020 to lobby the

to require Ontera upgrade its infrastructure and allow third-party resellers.

Network Infrastructure

Ontera provides customer-premises

LAN Lan or LAN may also refer to: Science and technology * Local asymptotic normality, a fundamental property of regular models in statistics * Longitude of the ascending node, one of the orbital elements used to specify the orbit of an object in spa ...

VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet t ...

and Internet security systems, DSL,

fibre optic An optical fiber, or optical fibre in Commonwealth English, is a flexible, transparent fiber made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. Optical fibers are used most often as a means t ...

and wireless

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpret ...

services. The company owns and operates an extensive fibre optic telecommunications network throughout most of Northeastern Ontario. In September 2008, Ontera announced plans to install a

ring network A ring network is a network topology in which each node connects to exactly two other nodes, forming a single continuous pathway for signals through each node – a ring. Data travels from node to node, with each node along the way handling eve ...

, to strengthen network reliability, which was completed by spring 2009.

References

External links

* {{Canadian ISP 1902 establishments in Ontario Bell Aliant Former Crown corporations of Canada Ontario Northland Transportation Commission Telecommunications companies of Canada Companies based in North Bay, Ontario Companies acquired by Bell Canada Enterprises Internet service providers of Canada