Date: September 2 , 2005
Source: The KW Record
Contact: Chuck Howitt
PETER LEE, RECORD STAFF (photo) Steven McCartney heads Atria Networks, the result of the merger of the area’s utility-owned telecommunications companies
(Sep 2, 2005)
The merger of two area companies has created one of the largest utility-owned telecommunications corporations in Ontario.
Atria Networks Inc. is the new company formed by the merger of Kitchener-based FibreTech Telecommunications and Guelph FibreWired. FibreTech was owned by the three hydro utilities in Waterloo Region: Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro, Waterloo North Hydro and Cambridge and North Dumfries. Guelph FibreWired was owned by Guelph Hydro.
Atria will be owned by the utilities, which are owned by the municipalities.
The president is Steven McCartney, who previously held the top job at FibreTech.
The merger will result in no job losses, he said, and the company will likely do “a small amount of hiring in the new year.”
Atria has 23 employees, 18 in the Kitchener office and five in Guelph.
Fibretech and Guelph FibreWired specialized in offering fibre-optic cable to carry Internet and other data communications services. The merger gives Atria five per cent of the local business telecommunications market, McCartney said.
Growing demand and the desire to offer new products and services prompted the merger, he said.
“Atria is a geographic consolidation and a natural move to ensure we can continue to add the products and services these dynamic markets demand,” he said in a press release.
Atria also hopes to extend its Wi-Fi coverage, which offers wireless Internet service, to libraries and private users, and to offer telephone service for the first time. Trials for the phone service, which is carried over the same cable, will start in early 2006, he said.
With the merger, Atria will operate more than 1,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cable, spanning an area from Orangeville in the northeast to the townships southwest of Kitchener.
In October, FibreTech announced a merger with FibreWired in Hamilton, but that deal has been put on the back burner, McCartney said. “It got dragged so much into politics and governance that we agreed to set it aside and come back at it later. The negotiations just dragged on too long.”
McCartney said demand is still strong for fibre-optic cable. The broadband explosion of 1999 to 2001 has levelled off but there has been steady growth in the past few years, he said.
Atria does design and operational work, then contracts out the laying of the fibre-optic cable.
The name Atria was chosen to emphasize the company’s belief in the “power of community connection,” the company said. Atria is the plural of atrium, Latin for an open central court or a public meeting space full of space and light in a home or building.
“This positive association aligns perfectly with the company’s vision to bring communities together to nurture improved business and community relationships using broadband technology,” McCartney said in the news release.