Wirelessnorth.ca

800 Million to zero in two weeks. Niagara Networks is gone from the Canadian AWS spectrum auction. This is great news for the other bidders, but is it good new for Canadians? Also is missing is T-Mobile, Sprint, ATT&T, Vodafone and any other foreign bidder. Perhaps undone by by a combination of a bad US financial market and/or CRTC rules that would have forced them to take a minority stake. Either way it looks like made-in-canada spectrum owners are coming for better or worse without the scale and experience adavantage of foreign partners. The drama isn’t over yet. Expect more dropouts and consolidation in the list as June approaches. More to come… stay tuned to wirelessnorth.ca

More from ICE 08 – yesterday afternoon – the “What’s Moving in Mobile Games?” session meandered through a variety of topics – Needless to say the iPhone was mentioned on numerous occasions (surprising the bulk of the panel slotted the device under the “hype” category rather than “opportunity” & it’s touch only interface poses a whole host of problems for designers as existing games can’t easily be ported) but there was one topic that stuck out for me above the rest of the discussion.

The moderator, Matt Gillis (SVP Publishing at Capcom Games), posed the question: “Is poor merchandising to blame for the slow growth in the mobile games market?”

The consensus was generally that merchandising wasn’t helping much but the reason that took the brunt of the blame was the “viral” aspects of the industry – or rather, the total lack thereof.

In a rich dose of irony, on a device that at its core is for communicating, a combination of incompatible handsets and multiple carriers makes getting a game to go “viral” is next to impossible.

When you step back and consider it – Not all games are available on all providers, or even within the same provider different handsets may or may not support the same games. The panel also readily admitted that discoverability was also a major issue – if your game isn’t on the first page or two in the store the chances of your game getting any meaningful sales is pretty slim.

So when you start to add it all up, even if you did refer a friend to a game, the chances of someone being able to locate, access, purchase & ultimately use the game can become a bit of a long shot, and needless to say that hurts sales.

The brutal truth is without the halo of a trusted friend’s recommendation the mobile game industry is locked in a reality where they have to sell virtually every customer individually. Generally through a tiny screen and typically with minimal information and mahybe a screenshot or two. The purchase decision essentially boils down to whether or not the consumer is willing to take a risk with a few dollars (+ whatever costs providers are tacking on) in purchasing the game.

The panel itself didn’t really have any solutions to offer but, as a nice dose of serendipity, one of the demos in the DemoCamp session that followed this panel was by a new mobile startup looking to help bridge the viral gap and get users playing collaborative games on cell phones, regardless of device or provider – Called Social Deck they’re looking to launch in the middle of 2008.

They had a working demo and the premise looks sounds. Initially they’re targeting iPhones, Blackberrys and (wisely I think) tying into Facebook so gameplay won’t be limited to mobile devices only. At this time they’re developing their own content but during the Q&A people were already poking around for opportunities to push existing IP into the app.

A system like this could be just what the industry needs to push a little of that viral mojo into the mobile device market.

Sitting in the “The Network Effect: Models for Canadian Collaboration” this morning at the ICE conference, panelist Sean Van Koughnett spoke about a new initiative he’s driving at the University of Waterloo – Called Velocity, and officially launching with the new term in September of 2008, the initiative combines a mobile and new media incubator with a student residence.

It’s a place where some of UW’s most talented, entrepreneurial, creative and technologically savvy students will be united under one roof to work on the future of mobile communications, web and new media.
It’s a place where students, faculty and corporate partners will be active collaborators and beneficiaries of the talent, ideas and innovations that evolve.

Source: Velocity Home Page

This is an idea I love – take a diverse group of students, give them space & support to conceive, nurture and grow their ideas and basically see what happens.

What’s great to hear is the university and supporters of the project have taken a laid back approach to deliverables with respect to this initiative, giving it the room to grow and evolve rather than artificially constraining it to demonstrate success in a narrow time frame.

Their inclusion of mobile as a key area of focus obviously interests those of us here at Wirelessnorth.ca – it will be interesting to see what emerges as it grows and develops over the coming years.

The big controversy in the Canadian tech blogosphere this week is Bell’s move to trottle “P2P” traffic on third party ISPs. [Globe and mail: Bell irks ISPs with new throttling policy ]This is distressing a lot of savvy customers who were relying on indie ISPs like teksavvy as the last redoubt of unfettered access to the internet as the likes of Rogers and Bell have been increasingly and unapoligetically clamping down on any users attempting to actually make effective use of their connections as sold to them.

This trend isn’t just worrying for a few power users. Though Bell paints it as a P2P “piracy” issue but the reality is that it’s the legit content that matters. Today at ICE08, leaders of Canadian broadcasting, content creation and interactive industries are meeting to talk about the future of media. In theory that future is somehow in digital distribution. The key question is how will Canadian content producers distribute in Canada if the ISPs have turned off all the taps?

Businesses should be paying attention. Michael Geist adds:

the business community is left to wonder whether it will soon target business VPN traffic or broadcasters like the CBC for their streamed traffic. This represents a fundamental reshaping of the Internet in Canada as we pay (literally) for the dire lack of competition and independent ISPs gear up for likely legal challenges. Regardless of those outcomes, it will become increasingly apparent that the regulators and politicians can no longer remain silent. Nor should Canadians.

There’s nothing necessarily illegal about the telco/cableco’s policies (though the third party ISPs will be attempting to bring a suit). From Bell’s perspective it would seem a shame to have invested so much in hardware for deep packet inspection and not make the best of it right?

In the long run, it can’t be smart. Shaping and throttling access to the net is flirting is flirting with a larger evil than mere network optimizations and fighting some war on “piracy”. Maybe it’s smart business, but is it smart politics?

As Geist points out, Bell and Rogers throttling effects shows like CBC’s Next Great Prime Minister which is distributed free and legitimately over bittorrent. You couldn’t imagine a better poster child for taking a case to the CRTC. Nothing like interfering with public broadcasting, democratic participation and Canadian cultural content to attract the love of policy wonks.

Talk about hot buttons for regulatory intervention. Stir enough backlash, and this short term business strategy could have long reaching strategic implications.

Looking forward to a better data plan on that prized grey-market iPhone of yours? Don’t count on the spectrum auction to come to your aid. At least not directly. One of the items not talked about too much with the AWS spectrum is that it requires new wireless chipsets to work. Any phone that you do get from one of the new carriers, depending on the model, will be likely to work and roam on other GSM bands (lets assume the new entrants go GSM/HSDPA). However, we have word that the compatibility won’t necessarily work the other way. If you do try to sign your existing GSM phone up with one of the new entrants, you’ll end up roaming on the Rogers network anyway.

Thank goodness for mandated “in-teritory roaming” rules in the spectrum auction? It depends how the commercial roaming agreements work out between incumbents and entrants. The regulators set up new rules for tower sharing and to help out new entrants during the rollout phase – but not so much so to discourage entrants from building their own inftrastructure at all. If you’re not ready to buy a new phone, you may actually end up better off sticking with your current carrier.

In any case, it all sounds like good news for Rogers on yet more roaming revenues from their new competitors.

Will the next, much rumoured, 3G iPhone, or next-gen blackberries for that matter work in the AWS bands? We shall see.

Much is up to distant firms like Infinion and just a few others who actually make the little silicon radios that toil away quietly under the covers of all your favourite handset brands.

Fortunately, the AWS spectrum has been haltingly on its way to rollout in the US for some time already, so everybody should be seeing growing availability and selection of AWS-friendly equipment soon.

Novatel has announced that it will be offering express card and tasty USB flavours. Combine this with some of Roger’s surprisingly reasonable pc-card data plans and you have a pretty good mobile broadband solution. And by finally we mean “sometime this summer”. In the meantime, I recently snagged an HSPA card (for research purposes you know). Look for soon on WirelessNorth.ca a review of the performance of Roger’s HSPA data network including such crazy scenarios that your Rogers/Bell portable internet or TorontoHydro OneZone had such trouble with like “in a house” or “in an office tower”.

Note Bell and telus also offer USB-based EVDO network adapters, not quite as fast but which you can pick up today. Of everyone, Telus has most generous pc-card data plans which it probably doesn’t get enough credit for. If Telus or Bell wants to send WirelessNorth.ca one of their devices, we’ll gladly test those out too.

At least when it comes laptop-only devices, Canadian carriers are getting closer be being globally competitive in wireless broadband. Before you think we’ve suddenly gone entirely soft on Canada’s telcogarchs: Take note that, while we’re getting in the ballpark of affordability pricing-wise (typically $65 for 1GB + system access fee + GST +PST), the Canadian carriers are still at least twice to three times as expensive as comparable services in other countries.

Once the price comes down one more factor and carriers start to give away the dongles, expect demand for these things to explode in Canada. (new entrants, are we giving you any ideas?)

Two big incumbents have emerged as the big winners in the FCC’s auction of the 700Mhz band in the U.S. Google was not a factor in the auction. Sam Churchill at DailyWireless has a good survey of thoughts on what these results might mean for American consumers, or for the future of WiMax. It does not mean great things in their opinion. Link: 700MHz: Politics Wins

I don’t blame Verizon or AT&T. They’re just trying to make a buck and need to protect their cash cow.

Congress and the FCC dropped the ball by not creating a more competitive environment. They could have created a USF funding model that encouraged competition. They could have avoided making the Integrated Wireless Network a $10 billion narrow-band boondoggle [that will probably never get built]. They could have encouraged “4G” technology, more competition, and lowered consumer costs with more effective use of the spectrum.

By contrast, Industry Canada’s approach of setting aside spectrum only for new entrants, seems to be looking smarter all the time?

For my part, I’m still a little confused by the whole process. How is it governments, by raking tens of billions off the balance sheets of the industry and then pocketing it, are exactly helping the cause of delivering affordable and accessible telcom services to their respective populations.

One of the unexpectedly cooler demos at eComm08 was the launch of a Canadian company (based in Toronto) led by experienced entrepreneur Shai Berger fonolo. What fonolo does is help you, as a consumer, kick the butt of any dial-in customer service system. The fonolo service tracks and publishes the dialling tree and IVR scripts for popular customer service numbers. So you can skim over long scripts and at a glance see what option, however many layers deep it is that you are looking for.

From there, you then click on that option, and fonolo dials in for you, listens to using voice recognition and punches all the buttons then connects you only once it gets right to the spot you wanted. Super cool. No word yet on whether it also helps you skip the pain of keying in your 10-digit mobile phone number to the IVR then re-telling it again to a human agent 2 seconds later.

Better still though, you can use fonolo to log and track all your calls to customer service and record them too, and rate call center agents. You could even then play back a previous conversation while on the phone. If it works, this could be powerful stuff for consumers.

The other thing learned? Turns out there’s a lot of room left for innovation left in the telecom industry even for dusty old applications like “voice” as developers create new value by mashing-up voice with web interfaces and external data sets. (For another great example see Ribbit also demoed at eComm.)

Fonolo is in closed beta for now but look for the official launch soon. We’ll keep you posted on WirelessNorth.ca with a full review once it becomes available to the public.

As was generally expected, Telus launces Koodo today. Koodo is another FauxVNO like Fido or Solo (owned by Rogers and Bell).

What distinguishes Koodo is that it’s branding is a different color than Telus, and it makes heavy use of Helvetica. Sort of an “American Apparel for Cougars”. Possibly those who also suffer from moderate colour blindness.

Presumably the garish branding helps to segment and mitigate any spillover from (or to) the mainstream brand, as Koodo targets “low end” consumers. It’s basically a me too move from Telus to capitalize on the “same high prices, crappier devices” model which seems to have been reasonably successful for Fido and Solo. Reminds me of this phenomenon.

Phones on offer come with features as exciting as 0.3 Megapixel cameras and SMS.

Data is priced at 5cents a “page”. [What does that even mean?]

You yourself can try and restrain your excitement here

tip: If you are looking for cheap very basic voice/text mobile service check out the 7-eleven prepaid devices. You’ll do better.

881 Million is a lot of small change to be scrounging around for under the couch cushions. For Canada’s Spectrum auction, laying down the thick end of a billion at this stage is like bringing an elephant gun to a knife fight. Unsatisfied just to carve out just any portion of the spectrum set aside for new entrants, Niagara’s pachydermian offer tramples right across all of the spectrum available to Bell, Telus or Rogers as well.

Niagara Networks surprised pretty much everyone including the major media with this move. Consider 150M as roughly the minimum to have a shot at a viable national network. 300M (Quebecor, MTS) shows a little more guts by signaling a willingness to shut out any other new entrants as well.

But, 881 Million, well that’s just showing off.

Putting down a bid twice as big as reasonably expectable, Niagara is sending a fearsome signal to both the group of 30-odd entrants AND to the big three. Despite their rhetoric, the fact the entrants only requested points sufficient to cover the set-aside spectrum, offers some signal to the big guys that they might be of the nature to play nice once in market. Niagara is signaling no such offer of solace.

So who is Niagara Networks? from their submission to Industry Canada:

The founders of Niagara Networks have been involved in various spectrum licensing and policy issues. The President of Niagara Networks was President of Bit Pacific Technologies Incorporated. Bit Pacific Technologies participated as part of a consortium that applied for Local Multipoint Communications Services (LMCS) in a 1996 comparative licensing process…. The President of Niagara Networks was involved in the Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) licensing process and has been an advocate of new entrant set-asides with Industry Canada for many years. Niagara Networks respectfully submits, we have industry knowledge and experience with communications networks, services, spectrum, licensing and auction processes.

The internets have their theories that Sprint is in the mix. But I have my doubts.

The Post reports Niagara is backed by “North American” partners. Tom W has some words here .

By CRTC rules, no more than 35% 46.7% of an entrant can be US owned, but one can imagine than the financial engineering wizards are straining to concoct all manner of creative ways to count the definition “35%”.

Of course other big player unaccounted for yet is T-mobile. As they already own the equipment and all of the exact same spectrum band in the U.S., they’d be crazy not to have a horse in this race. And with T-Mobile’s potential economies of scale on the equipment side, they can put a higher value on spectrum and you’d expect them to be aligned with one of the leaders.

But last we checked, T-mobile is a German company.

We’ll find out March 31st when the beneficial ownership of each of the numbered companies is disclosed. The final auction doesn’t happen til June. Take a seat, stay tuned to WirelessNorth.ca, this one’s going to be a bruiser.

previously: The List Of Applicants for the 2008 Canadian 3G Spectrum Auction

^{Updated Mar17: Corrected roughly a hundred spelling mistakes. Mental note not to post from the red-eye.}

^{Updated Mar17: corrected/confirmed it’s 46.7% ownership that can be foreign. That thickens the plot.}