Ontera is a

telecommunications company A telecommunications company is a kind of electronic communications service provider, more precisely a telecommunications service provider (TSP), that provides telecommunications services such as telephony and data communications access. Many t ...

Ontario Ontario is the southernmost Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada. Located in Central Canada, Ontario is the Population of Canada by province and territory, country's most populous province. As of the 2021 Canadian census, it ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...

and a subsidiary of

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, Quebec, in Canada. It is an ILEC (incumbent local exchange carrier) in the province ...

. It provides local telephone service in the

Northern Ontario Northern Ontario is a primary geographic and quasi-administrative region of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario, the other primary region being Southern Ontario. Most of the core geographic region is located on p ...

towns of Bear Island, Iroquois Falls, Marten River,

Moosonee Moosonee () is a town in Northeastern 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 com ...

, Moose Factory and

Temagami Temagami, formerly spelled Timagami, is a municipality in northeastern Ontario, Canada, in the Nipissing District with Lake Temagami at its heart. The Temagami region is known as ''n'Daki Menan'', the homeland of the area's First Nations com ...

, and also offers long-distance services in most of

area code 705 Area codes 705, 249, and 683 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 1956 area code split from portions of the 613 and 519 numb ...

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 (Ontario), Crown agency of the Government of Ontario responsible for providing transportation services for passengers and goods in Northern ...

, 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, Timisk ...

markets until the

Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC; ) is a public organization in Canada tasked with the mandate as a regulatory agency tribunal for various electronic communications, covering broadcasting and telecommunic ...

(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 Bell Aliant. 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.

, 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

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,

VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also known as IP telephony, is a set of technologies used primarily for voice communication sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. VoIP enables voice calls to be transmitted as ...

and Internet security systems,

DSL Digital subscriber line (DSL; originally digital subscriber loop) is a family of technologies that are used to transmit digital data over telephone lines. In telecommunications marketing, the term DSL is widely understood to mean asymmetric di ...

, fibre optic and wireless

data Data ( , ) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted for ...

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, 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 Ontario Ontario Northland Transportation Commission Telecommunications companies of Canada Companies based in North Bay, Ontario BCE Inc. acquisitions Internet service providers of Canada Canadian companies established in 1902