Wirelessnorth.ca

The rumour is that 10s of thousands of iPhones are circulating on Rogers network already. So many that it’s one of their more popular single handsets and effectively considered an unofficial SKU by their tech and customer support.

When will the iPhone come to Canada for real though? Apple’s COO, Timothy Cook has stated that expanding to more countries is in the works and best thing they can do, ironically enough, to combat rampant unlocking.

You have to remember that the iPhone, lovely as it is, just barely made it to market at launch. And in the last year Apple has been rapidly backfilling with features, tweaks (and SDKs) that you might have expected to be there originally. Though they seem to have quite the panache for it, Apple is still very, very new to the wireless game and trying to drive hard bargains with the world’s fractious and multitudinous collection of carriers is complicated business.

Meanwhile EDGE is rapidly loosing it’s luster and whereas 3G may once have been too battery hungry to effectively cram into that svelte iLozenge, technology marches on. I’ve always said that the best way to predict Apple’s product cycles is just to look at the chips. Though they may be shinier on the outside, Apple hardware, like everyone else’s, have identically humble innards. There are only a few foundries that supply everyone’s chips, and these folks tend to be (relatively at least) forthcoming about their roadmaps.

So why rollout the iPhone to a whole mess of new countries on the eve of iPhone Mark II? Better strategically to wait and spring the upgraded model on them and all the better to have all those cursed unlocked punters boil with jealousy so they buy in to a contract to get the new one anyway.

This theory is supported by a research note out of UBS today that “German chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG (IFX) likely will be supplying the new systems solution to Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) next-generation iPhone… and that 3G-enabled iPhones will be released by mid-year, and that the current EDGE iPhone platform is being ramped down earlier than expected to “clean” inventories.”

My prediction then, sometime around this summer, expect Jobs to finally start taking Ted Roger’s phone calls.

The bad news being, you may have to wait a little longer for your (official) iPhone. The good news being, an official iPhone could be a great thing. One, you won’t have to worry about bricking it with every update AND, second, is the service plan. While I don’t promise it will come cheap, Jobs has thus far demanded that every carrier offer something singularly and spectacularly unheard of in Canada – a flat rate data plan.

A 3G iPhone without flat rate data is like a snorkeling holiday in the Sahara.

The boys at Mobile Monday Toronto are hosting their second annual VC picth day for Mobile Monday on March 10th. By all accounts the last pitch event was a big success.


The (impressive list of) panelists this year will be:

• Ted Anderson, Managing General Partner, Ventures West
• Steven Bloom, CFO BrightSpark
• Marc Faucher, Principal, Summerhill Venture Partners (formerly BCE Capital)
• Martin Doane, Founding Partner, Ubequity Capital Partners
• Moderator – Peter Evans, Advisor, MaRS Venture Group

If you are an entrepreneur, there is still time to get your submission in, the deadline is Feb 29th. For everyone else planning to come out, WirelessNorth will see you there, at the Fort York Armoury on the 10th. Should be great.

Click here for all the info at the momotoronto site.

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Just a few days before the event was scheduled, I was asked by a couple friends if I could fill in a slot at DemoCamp17 in Toronto on the subject of “The state of Wireless in Canada Sucks”. You can thank Dave Crow for the title, who made it up and the theme by preannouncing it on his blog. I could probably have also prepared another 5 minutes about what’s awesome in wireless in Canada (On WirelessNorth.ca we try to cover both where we can find them). However, this is not that latter presentation. Somewhere some body has a video of this presentation, which I hope I can YouTube up at some point. In the meantime, above is the slide share version.

The crowd, who were probably over generous, had this to say about it (Do you think the subject may have touched a nerve?):

More than 400 people packed the Toronto Board of Trade conference hall Monday night for DemoCamp, a loosely organized gathering of Web entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and technology enthusiasts. … But the real crowd pleaser of the night had to go to WirelessNorth webmaster Tom Purves’ fast-paced Ignite presentation on why the Canadian wireless industry “sucks.” – David George-Cosh, National Post “DemoCamp warms up Toronto Tech Crowd“

I caught you at DemoCamp yesterday. I was quite proud to realize that it was a local Torontoian who had published that graph on wireless rates around the world I saw everywhere last summer. I find Canada’s postion a bit ironic given that we were a leader in wireless communication back in the 1950s when were built the cross country microwave network. -JP

fantastic presentation at democamp the other day! nice standing ovations! – Albert Lai

Wirelessnorth.ca preso rocked. Next steps? -Jeremy Wright, B5Media

DemoCampToronto17 was a great success. @tpurves rocked the house with “Why the State of Wireless in Canada Sucks”. All presenters awesome. -Jay Goldman

Ignite presentation “The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks” from Tom Purves could be the best ignite presentation in the history of Democamp Toronto so far. Well done, Tom! – Libin Panwir

Last month, the Canadian Government opened up to public questions on their proposed auction rules. Convenient for us Auction watchers, the questions were also made public, giving us a sneak peak into who is bidding and who is seriously interested. The questions ranged from highly technical and specific, to the pithy one sentence from Bear Sterns “Is there a 700 MHz auction coming in Canada similar to the U.S.?”, to the, are you sure you are in the right room, from Gamco ‘Investment Group’ “Why is their a limit to the amount of spectrum available? At a certain point do the airwaves just become more crowded? The US has 10X the population in a smaller land mass, therefore , shouldn’t we be able to have almost unlimited spectrum or at least 10X more per person than in the US?” (good luck with that one Industry Canada).

You can view the whole list of submissions here (it’s not as long as you might think).

But using, our own proprietary and highly scientific algorithm (we counted the total number of kilobytes of pdfs submitted by each participant), Wireless North has come up with the following table to determine who’s really serious about spectrum in Canada:

 
Annnnd, just for fun, we also give you what it would cost each of the incumbents to UPLOAD their submissions at the worst case scenario of each of their own publicly advertised data rates. Rogers $50/MB, Bell $12/MB, Telus $8MB

 
The real dark horses to watch however in the set-aside spectrum? Look Communications, and one Mystery Bidder represented by law firm Ogilvy Renault.

Karen Quinn Fung who was in town this week, pointed me towards Brian Fling’s of Blue Flavor awesome presentation on the mobile web presented at Web Directions North earlier this year. I posted a just a couple sample slides below, you can grab the rest, all 163(!) of them here. Thanks Karen!

More voices emerging from the choir in Barcelona:

Ajit on Open Gardens: History does not remember the builders of the Silk Road – only it’s travellers and it’s traders ..
“In 2008, we see an industry in turmoil – and in the keynote sessions that dreaded word ‘Bit Pipe’ was mentioned at length…. But by common consensus, the company everyone wanted to meet was not an Operator – It was Apple. Like it or not – Google, Apple, Nokia and others drive the agenda today – and already with the launch of iPhone – the Operator is already a bit pipe. There may be no going back since iTunes is the billing mechanism for iPhone as I blogged before ”

Brian Dolan at Fierce: Dumb pipe nostalgia at Mobile World Congress “Just as the carriers’ fear of becoming a dumb pipe is one elephant the industry can’t seem to push out of the room”

The Globe and Mail has an excellent wire story today on Carrier’s struggles to maintain and grow their roll in the value chain of mobile content. The value proposition of content and services delivered by mobile is spreading faster in some cases than the business models available to capture it.

Carriers fight not to become ‘dumb pipes’:

…Bit by bit, carriers are losing control….

Vodafone Chief Executive Arun Sarin said carriers should not sit back and allow themselves to be reduced to mere transporters of data, “dumb pipes” in the industry jargon.

“Customers want social networking, e-mail, SMS, instant messaging, voice — you name it,” Sarin said in a keynote address to the Mobile World Congress. “Communication is our core business. We have to be in all of these spaces.”

The strategy the Canadian carriers thus far have followed is to hold back the tide as long as possible, thereby capturing larger piece of a smaller pie (through lockins, long contracts and punitively high data rates on 3rd party applications for example). And it’s a successful strategy while it lasts, until one or more carriers start to break ranks, or regulators finally step in to open up the market (as we’re seeing with the current spectrum auction).

The alternate strategy for carriers of course is to bet on an open strategy and thereby make capture what is likely a smaller share of an ultimately larger pie. There is a ton of value that carriers can still offer in an open networked world to capitalize on their core assets, customer relationship, brand strength, customer data, location services etc. etc.

Far away from the industry PR festival in Barcelona, another conference is coming in Mountain View on what comes next in telecoms in the potential post-walled-garden world of open wireless and open telecom. What will wireless and telecom look like if the agitators and disruptors of openness (Google, Voip, Open spectrum rules etc.) have their way? Thanks to Lee Dryburgh for the pointer. The program looks really cool. Example topics (from the conference site):

• Future of telephony and SMS in the era of social media
• Consumer VoIP has only had minor impact so what happens next?
• How will Android™ and the Open Handset Alliance™ change the mobile ecosystem? What about an iPhone™ SDK?
• How is the networked information environment displacing telephony and main stream media?
• How can our personal service IDs, contact IDs, devices and content be managed, synced and shared?
• Is the mastery of different distribution systems a key to winning both technically and financially? Will the Internet subsume the other systems?
• Do WiMAX, LTE, WiFi mesh, 4G, UWB, SDR and wireless grid technologies represent opportunities? What about VoIPo3G?
• How can communications be enhanced with attention metadata, positioning, presence and digital reputation?
• Will open spectrum unleash a torrent of wireless innovation?

Registration link is here.

In the news today, Torontoist calls foul on Roger’s new “unlimited” data plan. Go read. excellent rant. Why is it important?

Among the plan’s many “unlimited” caveats, is this gem:

3rd party applications are applications like Yahoo! Go or Google Maps. These are non-Rogers applications which can be downloaded to the device and incur data charges at a rate of 5¢/KB – Rogers “Unlimited” browsing plan

In Roger’s case, this isn’t an offer, this is declaring preemptive war on off-deck content. 5cents a kilobyte is $50 a megabyte 3 years, or a prohibitive cost and fear denial-of-audience attack against any non-rogers owned or licensed off-deck applications.

Now all mobile application developers, whether you are Google, an art student or designer experimenting with new modes of interaction, or a kid in the garage with the Next Great Software Idea, you all now have to do a corporate deal with Rogers to have any hope of distribution and mobile usage on the Rogers network.

Where are Bell and Telus in all this? If I were them , there’s tremendous opportunity here to call out the emperors nakedness on data and play the white knight of the industry. There’s a whole internet and mobile ecosystem out there exploding with new (3rd party) mobile services and applications – which your competitor is shutting out. Sounds like a competitive advantage to me.

“if someone doesn’t have a mobile phone they will lack basic functions of waht it is to be human. in the end, everyone will have at least one cell phone, in china and in everywhere” -at davos

Big variation in pricing and penetration of mobile around the world. US arpu is around 40USD, in India $4 USD, China mobile $11USD. But chinese first and third largest opperators. 300 and 100 milion subs respectively (thats a lot). China is signing up 5-6 MILLION new subs a month (think about what this means for the future of the internet in general.
1 million postpaid
5 million prepaid
estimates 80-100 mil accessing internet on mobile
33 billion sms a month

chinese were intested in developing on 3g. tired of paying royalties to gsma. govn wants to impose standards, telcos and manufacturers don’t want chinese-only standards because they want to sell overseas too
so govn has refused to sell 3G spectrum because of techno nationalism. may not have 3g before olympics
in china and korea the state is never far from technology
innovative phones in china: feng shui sensing phone, cigarette holder phone combo, and iphone clones
innovative usage: crowd shopping, when strangers congregate around a vendor and product to negotiate a discount.
govn has urged mobile citizens to send rousing red messages to familly outside china (propaganda)
800 milion txt voting messages sent during the 3rd season of super girl (think reality TV show)
which panicked and embarased the government.. because voting is not so common in china.
digital divide Issues:
rather than build branch banking infrastructure, mobile banking is much more economical. Mobile will bring banking, lending and other services to rural areas for the first time.
social networking (facebook) have failed to develop followings mobile instant message rules, dislike email because you don’t know when the reply will come
Bangledesh: Grameen phone largest cellular network 98% coverage and 15m subscribers in sept
One woman per village takes out loan from grameen phone as an entrepreneur and offers phone to village. owner opperated pay phone. And good business for farmers by making market information accessible to all, substantially empowering women from rural housholds

The future of mobile is in the countryside in china/bangledesh.