Comments on: Spectrum Auction: Round 182 and all but done

By: Swing Trading

Swing Trading — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:40:06 +0000

Interesting post. I have stumbled and twittered this for my friends. Hope others find it as interesting as I did.

By: Christian

Christian — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:30:40 +0000

This was always something that bothered me. They were planning on reviewing foreign ownership – this was part of their schedule back in March when they were revising from the list of bidders to the list of qualified bidders. They did get the beneficial ownership and letters of credit, but did not get to the level of validating foreign ownership levels – not sure why, they just essentially said “er, now we will do this after the auction…”. I'm guessing they just ran out of time. Seems like a potential problem if one of the bidders goes and does something really silly like breaks the auction rules and is sitting on a number of winning bids.

I can't find anything in the auction framework that gets into this, so it's hard to speculate on the consequences yet. And you really can't get much out of Globalive's statements of beneficial ownership (http://www.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/smt-gst.nsf/en/sf...), so we will have to see…

And yes, this is another Christian, not someone talking to themselves. ;)

By: Christian

Christian — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:15:01 +0000

Quick question for you – not sure that you have the answer though (I don't :-) ):

If Globalive's believed wireless financing mostly comes from Egyptian and Icelandic nationals http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2008/07/04/tech-s..., and Industry Canada – for whatever reason – decides that it doesn't comply with Canada's law on foreign ownership, would the auction be null and void and the process re-started? Remember here that Globalive was betting like a bovine with mad cow disease at the beginning on anything and everything that had “MHz” next to it and had a big part in driving the prices where they are at…

By: WirelessGuy

WirelessGuy — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 21:06:41 +0000

Look for a TELUS/Bell joint announcement in the future. :-)

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:57:03 +0000

There is simply no evidence that Rogers will deploy CDMA in conjunction with its GSM technology. If Canada decides to phase out CDMA, it's going to be a long and intensive process.

As for Bell and Telus going to build a GSM overlay, we'll see.

By: midtoad

midtoad — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:30:07 +0000

I hear that Rogers will use its new spectrum to launch a national CDMA network to better compete with Bell and Telus… not!

By: sid

sid — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:18:27 +0000

Any “extra” money the government gets, it has to all go to pay down the debt. The interest savings from paying down that debt can be used for whatever.

By: Christian

Christian — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:54:47 +0000

looking forward to your analysis / insights