Wirelessnorth.ca

No earnings call on Wednesday for BCE. In the leadup to the upcoming leveraged buy-out by a consortium headed by the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, execs at Canada’s incumbent integrated telco decided after Q2 2007 to forego the traditional quarterly analyst call, sticking instead to a media release/shareholder report combo.

On the wireless side, a few salient points:

• Net activations for the quarter (gross activations minus churn) at 34,000 were roughly triple the number reported last year at the end of the same quarter, with 82% of net adds opting for post-paid rate plans.
• Blended ARPU (ie. pre- and post-paid, which includes a 50% share of Virgin Mobile’s ARPU) advanced by a modest $0.74 to $52.32 on the strength of feature-rich smartphones and high gross activations, but post-paid ARPU remained unchanged year-over-year from the $64 reported in Q1 2007.
• Overall, operating revenues from the wireless division were up nearly 9% from last year (voice and data ARPU are not broken out separately).

Notable by its absence was any significant mention of the Inukshuk network or any planned strategic initiatives for the WiMax network. Not surprisingly perhaps, a powerpoint posted on March 3, 2008 (at the end but dating from the kickoff of BCE’s FY 07) lists a number of Bell’s strategic priorities for 2007: expanding the company’s fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) footprint and “invest[ing] in wireless”, with wireless performance for the year primarily driven by an expanded handset lineup and distribution channel, as well as growth in data consumption.

It seems likely, then – especially in an atmosphere of cost reduction – that the bulk of future capital expenditures will likely be devoted to expanding the company’s EVDO and FTTN capacities, rather than to expanding the WiMax footprint.