Cogeco Stock

Cogeco Inc., through its subsidiaries, operates in the communications and media sectors in Canada and the United States. The company is a subsidiary of Gestion Audem Inc.

The company’s Cogeco Communications Inc. subsidiary provides residential and business customers with Internet, video and telephony services through its two-way broadband fibre networks, operating in Quebec and Ontario, Canada, under the Cogeco Connexion name, and in the United States under the Atlantic Broadband brand in 12 states.

The company’s Cogeco Media Inc. and Cogeco Media Acquisitions Inc. subsidiaries (collectively ‘Cogeco Media’) own and operate 23 radio stations with complementary radio formats and extensive coverage serving a range of audiences mainly across the province of Quebec, as well as Cogeco News, a news agency.

Segments

The company operates through two segments, Communications and Other.

The Communications segment provides, through Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband, a range of Internet, video and telephony services in Canada and the United States, primarily to residential customers, as well as to small and medium sized businesses across its coverage area. The Communications segment consists of Canadian broadband services (Cogeco Connexion) and American broadband services (Atlantic Broadband). The activities of Cogeco Connexion are carried out in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, Canada. The Cogeco Connexion assets are managed from the head office in Montreal.

The activities of Atlantic Broadband are carried out in the United States in 12 states, such as Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. The Atlantic Broadband assets are managed from its main offices located in the city of Quincy (neighbouring Boston), Massachusetts.

The Other segment consists of radio stations held by Cogeco Media.

Services

Residential Services

Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband offer a wide range of video, Internet and telephony services to their residential customers. Services can be offered on a stand-alone basis or bundled into double-play and triple-play offerings to promote cross-selling within the customer base and to attract new customers.

Internet Service

Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband offer a wide range of Internet packages with top download speeds of up to 1 Gbps in Canada and the United States. They also offer best-in-class managed Wi-Fi, with new home Wi-Fi solutions launched in 2021 in both Canada and the United States. These solutions improve the overall customer experience by providing expanded Wi-Fi coverage with enhanced reliability and consistent speed in every area of the home. Both Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband's home Wi-Fi solutions include self-installation devices, which are provided to customers on a rental basis and work with any of the available gateways or modems.

Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband also offer a simple and complete security suite and email solutions to their Internet customers with automatic updates to protect their devices. As an added benefit, Internet customers can connect wirelessly to the Internet at no extra cost from designated Wi-Fi Internet hotspots in Cogeco Connexion's and Atlantic Broadband's Canadian and American footprints.

Video Services

Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband offer their customers a full array of video services on a subscription basis. Customers have access to a basic video service, various tier packages, pay-per-view channels, video on demand services and advanced video services.

Basic Service: Cogeco Connexion offers to its video customers a mandatory, small entry-level basic service consists of local, regional, over-the-air, community and educational channels. This package also includes, as mandated or permitted by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, certain discretionary services, such as the United States conventional services and an interactive program guide.

Atlantic Broadband’s basic digital service customers receive the basic level of service, which consists of local broadcast television and local community programming, including government and public access channels. They also receive an interactive electronic programming guide and multiple channels of CD-quality digital music.

Tier Packages: Cogeco Connexion’s Video service customers can obtain additional programming services by subscribing to one of the various tier packages, including pre-assembled packages, as well as flexible packages containing between 10 and 40 programming services.

Various digital tier packages, which focus on the interests of a particular customer demographic and emphasize sports, movies, family or ethnic programming are also offered by Atlantic Broadband.

Pay-per-view Channels: Digital video service customers have access in Canada and the United States to an expanded menu of pay-per-view channels, which allow customers to pay to view a single showing of a released movie or an one-time special sporting event or music concert on a commercial-free basis.

Video on demand Service: The video on demand service allows customers with digital services to choose from a library of hundreds of movies and other programming and to view them at a convenient time.

Advanced Video Service: In addition to traditional video set-top boxes, Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband offer advanced video services through TiVo Inc. (TiVo)’s service platform, which provides customers with a user-friendly interface and includes fully-integrated access to additional streaming apps, such as Netflix. TiVo allows customers to access content on multiple screens across TVs, smartphones, tablets and more, both in-home and on-the-go.

IPTV service: In 2021, Cogeco Connexion officially launched its first IPTV service, branded EPICO. This evolution toward IPTV further enhances its video platform offerings by improving its customers experience with highly customizable video content, wireless enabled equipment, voice activated controls and access to applications. An IPTV service will also be launched at the end of the calendar year in the United States with a progressive roll-out next year.

Telephony Service

Cogeco Connexion’s home phone service uses Internet protocol (IP) to transport digitized voice signals over the same private network that brings video and Internet services to customers.

Canadian Residential customers can subscribe to various telephony services, including Basic (unlimited local calling), Select (unlimited calling, two features and 100 minutes long distance within Canada and the United States) and Freedom (unlimited calls within Canada and the United States and five of the most popular telephony features). Customers can also add many calling features to their home phone package. All Cogeco Connexion residential telephony service customers have access to international long distance plans.

Atlantic Broadband's residential telephony service features include unlimited long-distance calling throughout the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, the ability to keep the customers’ existing telephone number where local number portability is supported, the ability to access enhanced Emergency 911 dialing and the ability to use existing telephones and in-house wiring. The service also includes voicemail and fifteen other popular custom calling features, such as calling line ID.

Service Bundles

As of August 31, 2021, 67% and 47% of Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband customers, respectively, subscribed to double play and triple play bundle services.

Business Services

Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband offer video, Internet and telephony services to businesses across their service areas.

Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband offers a wide range of general and dedicated broadband Internet packages with speeds up to 10 Gbps on the downstream and up to 1 Gbps on the upstream. These Internet services are often sold in solution packages with business phone lines, long distance, toll free, security and video services.

Cogeco Connexion also provides IP based telephony services and other network connectivity services delivered over fibre optic connection to larger businesses in its footprint. Network connectivity services are offered in point-to-point or point-to-multipoint configurations resulting in highly scalable and secure services.

Atlantic Broadband's commercial telephony service offers commercial customers multiple line capability, and is often bundled with the Internet service. Atlantic Broadband offers a voice over IP-based PRI and a hosted PBX service for its commercial customers, as well as 4G LTE HSD Backup Service as a failover solution for its small business Internet customers. Atlantic Broadband has enhanced its Metro-Ethernet service offering with standardized solutions and speeds that scale up to 10 Gbps, including multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), based on customer needs. Atlantic Broadband also opportunistically pursues large business, carrier and corporate customers located within its network footprint requiring wide area networks, point-to-point or point-to-multipoint data services and virtual private networks.

Networks and Infrastructure

Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband provide residential Internet, video and telephony services and business services through advanced fibre optic and two-way broadband distribution networks. Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband deliver services through their own long distance fibre optic systems, advanced hybrid fibre-coaxial broadband distribution networks, point-to-point fibre networks and fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network technologies.

Cogeco Connexion's distribution network covers a large territory from Western Ontario to Eastern Quebec. Atlantic Broadband's distribution network covers the East Coast of the United States, from the southern part of Maine to southern Virginia, as well as portions of South Carolina and a large footprint in Southern Florida, in addition to the Ohio market, which became part of Atlantic Broadband's footprint as of the closing of the acquisition of the Ohio broadband systems, which occurred in September 2021.

Each of Cogeco Connexion's and Atlantic Broadband's core transport networks have a broad reach and are designed to easily interconnect, at very high speed, their many local distribution systems to video content providers, other public telephony networks, software application providers and the worldwide Internet.

For residential services, Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband are constantly densifying optical fibres to nodes serving small clusters of homes passed, with multiple fibres per node in most cases, to rapidly increase the speed and capacity of the system when necessary.

Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband’s telephony service uses voice over IP technology, which makes possible to have a telephone conversation over a dedicated Internet IP network instead of dedicated voice transmission lines. Cogeco Connexion offers Internet speeds of up to 1 Gbps in approximately 72% of its footprint and 120 Mbps in all of its footprint.

As of August 31, 2021, Atlantic Broadband offered up to 1 Gbps Internet speeds to approximately 94% of its footprint of serviceable homes and businesses, and with the acquisition of the Ohio broadband systems, to approximately 97%.

Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband are deploying FTTH technology in all new residential developments, which meet specific criteria of size, proximity to the existing plant and service penetration rate. Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband's FTTH deployment utilizes Passive Optical Networking (PON) technology, as it is a robust solution offering customers symmetrical speeds.

Third Party Suppliers

Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband have agreements in place with Telus and Net2Phone Cable Telephony, LLC (a division of IDT), respectively whereby they assist with provisioning capabilities and provide them with switching and termination of traffic to the public switched telephone network, delivery of enhanced Emergency 911 service, local number portability and operator and directory services. Cogeco Connexion and Atlantic Broadband have agreements in place, respectively with Netcracker and CSG Systems, Inc. for the provision of products and services related to customer management and billing.

History

Cogeco Inc. was founded in 1957. The company was incorporated under Part I of the Companies Act (Québec) in 1957.