Wirelessnorth.ca

As reported here and elsewhere, Rogers released strong Q1 earnings on Tuesday, which were largely overshadowed by the announcement of the upcoming launch of the iPhone in Canada. A few impressions after listening through the conference call (audio | transcript) and reading the news release:

Bullish on mobile broadband, but voice may stagnate.

Data revenues are up a blistering 47% from last year, but Rogers concedes that the current growth rate in voice ARPU – currently hovering between 3 and 4 percent – will be difficult to maintain in coming years.

Retention spending down.

After successfully migrating its customers away from older TDMA handsets and having weathered the introduction of local number portability without too much churn, it looks like Rogers is scaling back on the inducements and focusing on the bottom line.

W(h)ither Inukshuk?

The pre-WiMax network, jointly developed by Bell and Rogers, announced the expansion of its coverage area, now to 152 cities. But Rogers’ investment in the network fell 80%, from $5M in Q1-2007 to $1M this year. Meanwhile, LTE (aka 3.5G) HSPA now covers around 60% of the Canadian population, with 7.2 Mbps mobile broadband speeds available in the 25 largest cities in Canada, executives said during the conference call. While the company’s “overarching bet” is on the HSPA flavour of mobile broadband (followed by LTE deployment), executives said they saw a strategic advantage to having a presence in the pre-WiMax market segment, even if that segment has a “smaller future”.

No worries about Bell and/or Telus rolling out a competing GSM network.

Call it the rumour that refuses to go away, but the arrival of the iPhone could tip the balance for Bell and Telus, who have long been rumoured to be mulling the addition of an HSDPA overlay onto their CDMA/EVDO networks, if not an outright conversion to GSM/HSPA, as recently happened in Australia. The conversion would make all the more sense for Bell since, as telecommunications provider to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, it would find itself in the embarrassing position of seeing the lion’s share of the roaming revenue from the event flow to its rival.

Next up: Telus reports earnings on May 8.

(Disclosure: the author does not own any Rogers securities or funds that hold them)