Bell Canada, which in years past has been considered a weak player in Canada’s telecom industry, seems prepared to take a step forward.

While Bell has generally been slow in adapting to technological change, they now seem motivated to adapt to faster technologies.

The Canadian based telecom provider now has plans to bring fibre optics into their customer’s homes and expand their highly desired Internet TV.

Fibre optic cabling is a much faster data conduit than traditional telephone wiring, and should provide a much better service for their customers. The new fibre-to-home product rollout will initially happen in Quebec City, where most telephone wires are supported by telephone poles. This is ideal for Bell Canada because installing the new fibre wires on existing telephone poles is far more inexpensive than digging holes for the wires. Bell Canada also plans on introducing their new technologies to newer homes in the Ontario region.

Cusomters outside of Quebec City and Ontario won’t receive the fiber-to-home product, but instead will receive fiber-to-node connections. With these connections cables are brought near a home and then distributed with copper wiring. The fiber-to-node connection is also considered far superior over the existing network connection.

Two years ago, former Bell Canada CEO, Michael Sabia, announced that Bell Canada would not install the new fibre wiring, which drew heavy criticism from customers and shareholders.

The new CEO, George Cope, made upgrading the company’s networks his top priority and one of the first changes he has made was upgraded to the fibre networking.

Bell To Speed Things Up With More Fibre

The social networking site Seppukoo is promising to help Facebook users who no longer want to use the site, a chance to commit virtual suicide.

Seppukoo is allowing Facebook users to create memorial sites to their Facebook pages as a way to express discontent with Facebook.

The Seppukoo users just type in their username and password that they would if they were logging into their Facebook accounts and then the Facebook profile is deactivated.

Seppukoo claims to not save the information when the site is given the usernames and passwords to the Facebook accounts, but lawyers for Facebook simply aren’t sure about this.

Facebook does not want the Seppukoo application to solicit personal information from its users and potentially use a Facebook account which isn’t their account to begin with. Facebook has fairly strict procedures and guidelines.

The creators of the Seppukoo application continue to move forward and enhance the application even more. The truth is that both sides will have lawyers advocating on their behalf, but it is rare to see someone want to take on a social networking giant like Facebook.

Facebook Seppukoo To Offer Virutal Suicide

Murdoch (for years) has criticized aggregators such as Google for taking a free ride on its content arguing that it disminishes the value to advertisers.

Murdoch was asked why he didn’t simply pull his papers’ stories from Google News and replied:

“I think we will, but that’s when we start charging [for online content]. We have it [charging] already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story – but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form.”

Of course he could also just add a line to the sites robot.txt files which will block google from indexing his conent in their news search index.

Murdoch has recently been strongly critical of Google, calling them “keptomaniac” and “parasitical” for including News Corp content in Google News pages.

“The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them,” he said. “That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”

“I think we will [block Google indexing], but that’s when we start charging,” he continued. “We have it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story – but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form.”

Murdoch Needs To Get With The Times

The fact of the matter is, search indexes haven’t been “stealing” from traditional newspaper sites like the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times,: they’ve been giving them traffic and paying their bills.

Murdoch Wants His Sites Off Google News