Wirelessnorth.ca

Graphical representation of the chaos and carnage of the auction so far. Each line representing the sum total of standing winning bids at the end of each round. Ready to pick a winner?

Here’s where things stand after 9 rounds. The number of lincences changing hands is slowing down as the bidders are now focused on slugging it out for the mostly for the big cities. Look carefully at the table below and differences in strategy become apparent. The likes of Bell and Telus are using the auction to buy up licences over a wide coverage area, whereas entrants like Globalive, Tirabassi, Data (and Rogers) are just going after cities.

Quebecor seems to be solidifying their hold over at least 20Mhz-40Mhz over Quebec and Ontario, Bell and Telus are actually now picking up pieces from coast to coast. And Shaw keeps stealing thunder bay from the poor city of Thunderbay but Tbaytel has it this round. Globallive looks to be making a nearly-national play with some pricey chunks in BC, Alberta, Ontario and Southern Quebec. Jaguar is sitting on just 20MHz in Toronto (can they hang on to it?). Round 10 will be closing in a few minutes…

Sum of Standing High Bids:  
$1,139,485,749

We’re 4 rounds in to the auction now and bidding patterns are starting to take shape. The big trend is that each of the bidders encumbents and entrants are falling back to focus on their core markets. So much for a new national carrier. How this auction changes the market will depend on where you live. Shaw is spreading out in the west, MTS is mostly sticking to Manitoba (with a few pokes at Toronto) and Quebecor is focused on (surprise) Quebec and a few licences in Ontario. Interesting there’s a bunch of licences (esp out east and the north) no one has bid on yet. While some of the big ones (think Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver) are seeing some fierce back and forth bidding.

Before we jump into the detailed play by play, here’s a quick refresher on how the licences work:

There’s 6 blocks of mobile spectrum (A through F), but 3 of them (B,C,D) are set-asside for new entrants only. Just a little more confusinly the spectrums are also different widths (10 or 20 MHz – more being better) and some blocks are broken down into 14 geographic licences per block and others 59.

It’s a bit of work to parse all this out and the total numbers tend to hide what’s going on at a local level. But fear not, WirelessNorth.ca has dug into the numbers to give you a sports score summary of each block. Enjoy!

A a nice Block of 20MHz nationwaide in 59 geographic slivers (48 bid on)

From Nanaimo to Newfoundland Telus is all over this one coast to coast but only in the smaller cities. In the west Rogers is the high bid in Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City. Sakstel has Saskatoon and Regina, Bell has a few random bits like Lethbrige and Dawson Creek (plugging network holes?).

B Choicest Block of Set-aside spectrum 20Mhz in 14 pieces (11 bid on)

Quebecor has eastern and northern Quebec while Data & Audio Video has snagged Eastern Ontario & Outaouais, Shaw has Northern Ontario and the west. MTS has the middle –and- a huge bid of 92Million on southern Ontario including Toronto.

C Block 10MHz of Free-for-all spectrum in 14 geographies (12 bid on)

Quebecor has Southern Ontario and Toronto (now their furthest west outpost). Oh and they have most of the Quebec bits too except Tirabassi who has southern Quebec and BC. Globalive with Eastern Ontario & Outaouais. Shaw is big in Alberta and Sask, SSI Micro has the far north.

D Block smaller 10MHz block of set-aside in 59 pieces ( 43 bid on)

This one is all about Shaw everywhere west of Manitoba, MTS has Manitoba and Quebecor almost everything east of Toronto. But Data has, at the moment, high bid on Toronto itself and Tirabassi continues with the odd combo of Montreal and Vancouver. No one has the Maritimes in D block. And ruralcom hanging on to Yukon Northwest Territories with a princely bid of $20,000.

E Block is a less fashionable 10Mhz chunk of 57 tiny territories open to all (but only 33 bid on)

This one is mostly Telus and Bell duking it out for smaller areas across the country. Celluworld makes an appearance gunning for Kingston and Brockville. Quebecor holds montreal here (their only winning montreal spectrum at the moment). Shaw has Victoria/Vancouver and MTS has Winnepeg and Brandon.

F Is the most popular chuck of non-set aside, a fat 20MHz split into 59 slices (all 59 bid on)

From Ontario east to the Maritimes the list reads like this Bell, Bell, Bell, Bell, Bell… But here also comes Bragg with 48M bid on Toronto. And Telus is pretty much everything west of Bell land (la plus ca change…). Rogers has a single standing high bid for Quebec City.

G and I aren’t proper AWS spectrum just some extra tidbits of relatively narrow Industry Canada through in maybe useful for fixed wireless or other creative applications.

Here the only bidding action has been MTS and Sasktel with a few nibbles, and someone called Blue Canada Wireless willing to spend 14M for 10Mhz of this stuff just in Southern Quebec. (Your guess is as good as ours).

Link: Official Auction Site
Link: Everything you needed to know about the Canadian Spectrum Auction but were afraid to ask

We’re into round two of the auction and things are just starting to get interesting. Bidders who were on the sidelines in round one have jumped in to make use of their hefty deposits. The total sum of winning bids is up to 560M just an incremental bump from earlier this morning. But the big news is that GlobalLive and Rogers are moving up the ranks. GlobalLive (think Yak communications) now has the largest number of winning bids. For the moment.

Don’t read too much into these stats just yet. Many of the largest licences are still tied with multiple bidders at or near the opening bid amount, with the current determination of “high bidder” being seriously arbitrary. So watch the results flip flop around for the next several rounds as the players increment their bids. This thing could go on for a while.

The only thing that is for certain is that the wireless industry will look a lot a lot different by the time the auction is done. Which combination of Quebecor, Shaw, or GlobalLive or Salvator Tirabassi will remain standing in the set aside spectrum? Will the big 3 fight it out or play nice in the remaining spectrum. Will the city of Thunder bay hang on to their tiny slice in their hometown? Will anyone bid on PEI?

Stay tuned to WirelessNorth.ca for the daily play by play. Looking forward to it. Happy hunting bidders.

UPDATE: these figures represent totals of “Value of Standing High and Current Bids” not just high bids which would look to include some double counting or would indicate the total bids placed across all licences so far winning or otherwise. We should have a clearer picture of who’s staking out how much and where as the auction progresses a few more rounds.

Canada’s AWS spectrum auction got off to a big start today raising 490M so far in bids across all of the spectrum blocks.

So far it’s the new entrants making the biggest moves with Quebecor and Shaw leading the bidding along with mystery company 6934579 who many thought were out of the auction but seem to have found new backing.

The greatest/biggest news about this round is that Quebecor is, in round one, bidding nationally.

This is just round 1 of the auction, check back later today for round two. We’re at a strategy stage here, not all of the points have been bid for yet and some of the players may be waiting to round 2 to make their move. If bidders wait too long however before placing a winning bid, they risk losing eligibility points in subsequent rounds of the auction.

Here is the site you can watch the auction yourself but stay tuned to wirelessnorth.ca for ongoing commentary and the ever helpful cheat-sheet of who these numbered companies are.

The auction itself will keep on going until the bidders stop bidding.

Results from round one:

Apropos of new competition coming to Canada’s wireless spectrum this week. A group of net neutral and digital access advocates have launched a new site called SaveOurInternets.ca. We’ve reported on how Canada has been precipitously slipping in world ICT rankings. Meanwhile there’s been a lot of lobbying and dubious research floating around from the big telco players in Canada on levels of competition and filtering/shaping etc. so it’s good to hear educated folks on the other side of the issue getting a voice. Follow SaveOurInternet.ca here.

In case you missed it (we did) Ars Technica posted a great (if a little geeky) article on RISC vs. CISC in the mobile era which is worth a read. CISC vs. RISC are two different chip architectures, and once, one of the great nerdy flame-war debates of the 80s-90s era internet. Basically CISC won.

CISC, for anyone without a computer engineering degree, is the architecture or essentially the language spoken by Intel and all PC chips. RISC was spoken by many server chips, mainframes and Apple computers (in the 604 and G4/G5 days) and by tiny embeded CPU designs like ARM.

Everyone pretty much admits that RISC was/is, in theory, more elegant than CISC, especially when considering the significantly fewer number of transistors you had to cram on to a chip to make a RISC CPU actually work. In the end though, thanks to Moore’s Law and market forces these differences became marginalized and Intel/CISC pretty much swept the market. Even Apple (wisely) switched to Intel. Except for the iPhone.

The last holdout for RISC has been mobile. In mobile and embedded applications (like the little CPU in your home router) every transistor and square millimeter of silicon counts because of cost and power requirements. You’d need a fan and 2pound battery to run your cell phone if there was an Intel pentium or centrino in there. CISC/Intel CPUs have never been able to compete in the mobile space. Until now.

Intel has just launched the Atom processor for mobile devices. The Atom is still a ways off (0.25W idle power to 4W active) in competing with ARM(Risc) cpus in power (0.01W-0.25W) but this is a lot closer than the typical maximum 9Watts to 35Watts (depending on model) required to power your laptop’s centrino chip.

RISC-speaking ARM or MIPS type chips will continue to rull the mobile market for a while, but clearly the barbarians are at the gate. In the next few years Intel has every intention of driving down the power requirements of Atom processors to compete for handsets.

But the ARM makers aren`t sitting still either. They have some pretty impressive looking designs on the not-too-distant road map. Quad-core processors in your handset anyone? Interesting times and interesting capabilities are ahead, my friends.

Significance for WirelessNorth.ca readers: What can you do with significantly more processing power in a mobile? Think better graphics and better/faster video encode/decode capabilities. Think useful voice recognition, image recognition, people/landmark recognition and other computer vision applications. Forget ordinary geolocation, with enough transistorized brains, your phone could do echolocation. heh.

We’re all for bringing on the mobile processor wars. :)

And then there were fewer. On the eve of Canada’s AWS spectrum auction, another major bidder has just lost the better part of their backing. Canada pension plan and blackstone group are now out though MTS is still qualified as a bidder, though according to the post and others, MTS may go it alone. They consortium haven’t said much other than a very short release. What MTS have said is

“Consistent with its previously stated goal of maintaining its current dividend policy, the company intends to pursue a focused and disciplined approach to the auction.”

Here’s what this means. MTS is not raising outside capital, and they are not indenting to straining what capital or free cash flows they have already. This means they aren’t building a network even if they win, at least not a very big one. Your hopes of MTS being Canada’s next big coast-to-coast mobile player are done.

More likely, MTS will be bidding and bidding conservatively on licences at least up to the deposit capital they have set aside already. Then they’ll sit on it. Should they actually win any block at a good price, the wheeling and dealing may begin again. Perhaps they think they can get better terms out of their financing partners once the dust settles. Or failing that, flip it to Rogers in five years for a healthy profit.

The other factor that is substantially in play here is of course the credit crunch in the capital markets in general. Unfortunately for Canadians and for Industry Canada, they picked a real tough time for anyone to be sticking out their hat on the street looking for a few extra billion for some brand new high risk venture.

Rogers, Canada’s only GSM provider has recently provided some new clarity around their famous $7 unlimited “on device” browsing plan. The plan gives you unlimited use of the Rogers-branded browser on certain devices (not blackberries, not pdas, not data cards) for 7 bucks a month.

Without a data plan, Rogers charges 5cents kilobyte, $50 bucks a megabyte, $50,000 or an entry level BMW per gigabyte of usage.

The funny thing about Rogers new HDSPA network is that it’s pretty awesome. We know you can get speeds up to 250kb per second using a 3.6MBs device (or a GB in about 70 minutes). With a newer
7.2MBs phone would be notionaly up to double that, or least better than a Gig per hour at top speed. You wonder if the engineers forgot to mention to the pricing folks how many wildly more kilobytes you can push through the air than

One way to look at this plan is that $7 a month is one heck of a discount on $50,000 dollars an hour. The other way to look at this is the other way around.

Being so cheap, the deal makes some sense as deal as basic mobile websurfing as it’s an application (like $15 a month unlimited email) that doesn’t tend to have high bandwidth requirements to begin with. There’s also the advantage of forcing all mobile surfers to start of at the rogers portal/deck welcome page – and all the co-marketing monetization opportunities that come along with that.

It’s really any mobile app other than browsing or email that would have high bandwidth.

Here’s what Rogers has to say about that:

How could I incur additional data charges outside of the Unlimited On-Device Mobile Browsing Plan?

You may be incurring additional data transfer charges if:

1. If you have downloaded an application to your handset that is not Rogers Certified, see rogers.com/mobileinternet for a list of eligible applications and websites.
   OR
2. On the Nokia N95 8GB, when you launch the Nokia mobile Internet browser and do not see the Rogers homepage, you are accessing the mobile Internet outside of the Unlimited On-Device Mobile Browsing Plan.
   OR
3. Tethering: When you use your phone as a wireless modem to connect to the Internet. The phone can be connected via USB cable or infrared Bluetooth.

Pay-per-use data rates for in-eligible usage with the Unlimited On-Device Mobile Browsing Plan:

Up to 5MB 	$15/MB
5MB to 10 MB 	$10/MB
10MB to 20MB 	$5/MB
20MB or more 	$0.50/MB

Here’s what that translates to on your bill at speeds of (only) 250kb/s:

First 5MB 	$75	20 seconds
10 MB		$125	40 seconds
20 MB		$175	80 seconds
 1 GB		 $687	 70 minutes

What’s your thoughts, Can we still call this punitive pricing on data use? It’s pretty close. It’s clear that Rogers is gung ho about pricing by application and no so keen on this whole idea of “off deck” applications.

Next up on WirelessNorth.ca! Top 10 mobile applications least likely to be certified by your carrier for unlimited usage. Care to take any guesses?

p.s. Fortunately(?) there is another option, the not widely publisized but generaly avalable option to apply a $65 for one GB of any-type usage to your phone, and, sometimes (pick the right CSR) you can get the data card version with incremental GBs costing only $10 each (another heck of a discount from 50 thousand a gig) added on as well.

So there we are, can we put this topic to bed now? _{Just please don’t ask about roaming rates, blackberry rates, rates in different provinces…}

• It will be a 3G device on Rogers HSDPA network
• It will continue to have mediocre battery life (Though Jobs will make some claims to the contrary)
• The entry price will be $50 or $100 higher than whatever ATT&T or the Apple US store charges for the same model. Currency parity? The Apple store has never heard of it.
• It will come with a 3 year contract. Standard for Canada, but one year longer than any other jurisdiciton on the planet.
• It will come in June
• It will have a 1GB data cap
• Pricing packages including voice minutes, data, messaging & system access fee will start at a minimum of $80CAD a month before taxes (Rogers ARPU sits at nearly $75, no way they’ll let a flagship device bring down the mean)
• This means each iPhone will earn Rogers (cost you) about $3300 over the life of the contract. Yowza.
• With the speed of HSPA, web applications on the iPhone will get (more) awesome
• With no physical keyboard, addoption by enterprise and business users will still not really happen
• In the consumer segment, the device will give the Bold a run for it’s money (a device you shouldn’t expect to be cheap either)