Wirelessnorth.ca

The new entrant formerly known as 6934579 Canada Inc. (or on this blog as the Tirabassi mystery co.) has come clean on their plans for the Canadian Market. You may recall that 6934579 was an entrant than came out swinging early in the auction before settling on an somewhat oddball piece of spectrum (the G band) just off to the right of the main AWS band. A corner of spectrum poo-pooed by the big GSM players like Nokia/Ericson as orphan spectrum not really useful for anything. But apparently not so…

Alek Krstajic the new CEO of of BMV Holdings (real brand name TBD) gave us a call yesterday to spill the story on their big plans for Gband..

His take is that the other entrants “blew their brains out” spending far too much for too little spectrum. The encumbents “must feel like they dodged a bullet” Alek believes. The 10MHz G band is pretty tiny itself but by loading it up with cheap CDMA (yes you read that right) equipment, offer only talk and text (yes only talk and text) and he figures they can capture 1.8M subscribers across Ontario and Quebec

CDMA also has some advantages of a narrow channel width than GSM/HSPA making it easier for them to manage the network and future upgrades without having to switch off current subscribers (a problem other new entrants with only 10MHz could have).

BMV’s other big advantage is low cost. By going for G band they spent a tenth of what Quebecor or Globalive (“those guys will drowning in debt”) spent on spectrum. Combine that with vintage CDMA equipment from the Qualcom bargain bin and you have, maybe, a low cost winner.

Here’s the plan they will be offering: $40 flat rate unlimited local talk and text. Launching (Alek you’ve locked down that financing right?) mid 2009 in Quebec and Ontario. Not unlike Metro PCS which you may know of from the Sanfran/Bay Are (BMV’s backers where behind metro PCS too).

Is BMV designed as a koodo killer (Cheap service, basic phones, CDMA etc.)? Alek says they aren’t. “Koodo is splashing billboards all over Toronto with messages like ‘dump the systeme access fee’” Alek says the folk’s he’s targeting are new cell phone have no idea what a system access fee is because they haven’t had a phone before. Koodo is all about capturing churn whereas BMV will be growing the pie. Remember Canada is still a very under-penetrated wireless market.

So this isn’t a koodo killer so much as a landline killer. BCE be worried. Why pay likely more than $40/month for a local phone tethered to an ancient bit of copper when you could get a mobile equivalent for the same or lesser price?

Good for Alek and BMV to be shaking the industry up a little. The downside? This is not an innovation story. This is not growing the market for smartphones (“if you want a smart phone, no problem, go
visit my friend Pierre Karl Péladeau says Alek”) or mobile content or mobile experience innovation in Canada. Two steps forward, one step back.

For those keeping score:

++ for new competition
+ for getting mobile phones in the hands of more Canadians
+ for keeping the big guys honest at the low end
- for putting 90′s-era mobile technology in the hands of more Canadians
– for the reality check on the long road still ahead for new entrants

Videotron, Gloabalive (more or less) and now BMV have announced their plans, still waiting for Eastlink, Shaw (not soon?), DAVE and more…

Photo credit: flickr – woodleywonderworks

In case you haven’t heard, VC and converted-cannuck Rick Segal is sitting on a great pile of cash which he is earnestly trying to throw at startups. Rick works for JLA the VC firm administering the 150M blackberry partners fund (details). Rick has let us know of a great deal for seed stage mobile startups, ~100k on simple, standardized terms, convertible debt which you “don’t have to pay back” it is expected to be converted in to equity at your next round of funding within 18 months. The only major catch we’d imagine is that you’ll need to have a) a good enough idea b) a willingness to work your butt off once funded.

Here’s the advice.

1. Economy notwithstanding, it’s a great time to be at the seed stage of springboarding a new mobile startup in Canada. Remember that in the next year and half: Airwaves are opening up, wireless competition is coming, and newer and newer devices will be making amazing things possible. There’s a RIM/Apple/Android/Sybian/MSoft platform war brewing which is why these funding and partnership deals are on the table for developers.

2. Dust off the napkins and white boards, figure out a business model, whip together a prototype and drop Rick an email for one of his famous “no harm no foul” meetings.

3. There’s a saying in startup world “when they are passing around the cookie tray, take one.”

FYI: Thanks to his blogetc., Rick is probably the most public of the personalities at JLA, but we’ve long heard (from other CEOs) good things about John Albright and all the rest of the team at JLA.

see also: StartupEmpire: Somebody will get funded!

With full page ads in this weekend’s papers and a press conference earlier this week, Videotron (Quebecor) has announced their new Wireless network to be built on the Spectrum they purchased earlier this year. It’s not exactly a surprise that they will be putting the spectrum to use, but it is good to hear it announced officially (of the new entrants, only Videotron and Globalive have announced rollout plans so far). The network will be HSPA like everybody else (not waiting for LTE) and these HSPA signals should start wiggling their way across Quebecor’s airwaves by mid 2010. The bad news (or not good yet news) for Ontarians is that Videotron has said anything yet about expanding beyond Quebec (though they do hold a bunch of spectrum in southern and eastern Ontario.

Videotron already has about 55k cellphone subscribers in Quebec under an MNVO arrangement with Rogers which they will be migrating over to the new network.

Link: Quebecor launching new cellphone network

There is a new and very cool mobile organization brewing in Canada and you can help them out. The MEIC (Mobile Experience Innovation Centre) is a partnership between wireless industry players (big, small and new entrants), academic institutions and government (OMDC) trying to establish a new centre for mobile research, agile prototyping and business development, centered in Ontario. Great idea and we should hope to see more of these activities in Canada

MEIC is being led through OCAD by Michele Perras and Sara Diamond the president of OCAD. The centre is just starting out (no link cause the website isn’t up yet) with plans for a launch early next year.

How you can contribute is take the MEIC industry survey to help them shape the future of the centre. The survey is geared towards anyone in the content/services industry, design, engineering, academia, industry executives, managers or business owners with a significant focus on mobile. Focus is on Ontario but not exclusive to. From the MEIC:

As we are looking for a broad respondent audience, please complete the survey yourself and forward the survey to your industry colleagues and peers. We will be promoting the survey with the major wireless/mobile publications and groups as well.

The survey will be active only until October 31, 2008

As a bonus everyone who fully completes the survey will get access to the findings when the results are published. Go to it!

Full disclosure: WirelessNorth is a partner and supporter of MEIC.

you sure wouldn’t mistake it’s looks for something Apple would have come up with. Still it’s the most coveted handset to come out since, well the bold or the iPhone 3G.

You might even get excited about snagging an G1 on eBay. The good news is you can get them unlocked, and the T-mobile version uses the same AWS 3G spectrum band as Canada. The bad news is, you’ll be stuck on EDGE until AWS towers/equipment actually get rolled out (say mid to late next year?), by which point surely other g-phone models will be out. Who knows, maybe even a Canadian carrier will get their hands on one?

^{Photo credit: Romainguy}

The FCC moved a step closer today to opening up “white space” spectrum in the US. White space refers to the relatively common areas of blank or otherwise underused spectrum particularly in areas licensed for TV. In every country spectrum authorities license almost every single piece of the airwaves (often to the highest bidder) as a way for for governments to a) make money b) ensure that spectrum users use spectrum in an “orderly” manner without interfering with each other c) best manage the “scarcity” of spectrum in the public interest d) to enforce other public policy objectives like Canadian content or other regulations (CRTC etc.)

The trouble with this scheme is that from place to place there are inevitably chunks of spectrum here and there that are underutilized.

On the other hand, very little of the useful stretches of the electromagnetic spectrum is actually open for anyone to use. Only a few narrow bands (eg around 2.4 and 5.6 Mhz) are open for anyone anyone to use without a license, so long as devices conform to strict power limits. And so ever cordless phone, wifi router, baby monitor etc. cram all their activity into these bands. In fact some argue that in the last 20 years on a per MHz basis, there has been far more data transferred and far more innovation squeezed into the tiny unlicensed bands than all the rest of the licensed spectrum combined.

The other thing that has happened in the last 50 years is that radios and the microchips attached to them have gotten a lot smarter. Radios (think wifi for example) have gotten ever better at efficiently using spectrum and while also dealing with significant amounts of would-be interference from other nearby devices (diminishing arguments b and c above).

So some folks called the White Space Group, strongly supported by the PC industry, have been lobbying the FCC to open up white spaces for any unlicensed device to use, so long as those devices play nice with any nearby licensed broadcasters.

Many cable, TV and cellular companies have come out strongly against giving away “free” white space spectrum on the grounds that plentiful devices transmitting and receiving on these frequencies could cause interference with their existing, ahem, business models.

Fundamentally, so long as the technology works, unlicensing white space is the right public policy choice. But it is all irrelevant in Canada until the FCC decides first. It’s unlikely there would be any cool disruptive new wireless connectivity options in a computer or mobile device near you unless there was also a US market to sell them to…

link: FCC looks set to back “white spaces” as Chairman signs on

At long last, Telus and Bell have come clean on their plans to upgrade to HSPA [definition]. We broke this story back in July of this year.

The upgrade won’t be cheap, but is very much great news for the industry (well less so for Rogers but they knew it was coming) as well as for consumers. The overall trend of consolidating network standards on the way eventually to LTE will and should lead to lower cost and faster time to market for wireless hardware. Device and equipment makers now have less work to duplicate across competing wireless standards. Not that device makers don’t have to deal with with the proliferation auctioned spectrum bands internationally and the engineering challenges of multiple gps/wifi/bluetooth radios in devices… etc.

It would seem that Canada’s two big CDMA/EVDO carriers finally got sick of Rogers getting all the cool devices first, and of stealing all the juicy international roaming revenue to themselves. 80% of the world is on GSM/HSPA which explains why device makers often release GSM phones first and why visitors to Canada are often roaming on Rogers rather than Bell/Telus.

The new network is proposed to ready (just in time) for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

For Canadians, it’s great that devices (assuming you can unlock them) will finally be portable across every major carrier. This factor alone will do a lot reduce switching costs and, hopefully, go some way to keeping the new and current carries honest. At least, that’s the theory.

Link: BCE and Telus announce joint network upgrade

Thanks to GaryB for the tip

# Friends of WirelessNorth.ca James Eberhardt and Gabe Sawhney, collectively echo mobile have let us know they will be running an iPhone Developers class December 7th – December 8th at the Rich Media Institute. The course is targeted at flash and action script developers looking to get started in iPhone development. James and Gabe have also donated a 2 for 1 voucher for the course as a raffle at tonight’s WirelessNorth.ca mobile meetup. thanks guys!

# Apple has just announced they will be touring the world with their own developer workshops for the iPhone (sounds like a fun job). They are stopping in Toronto December 4th, which at the moment, is the only venue in North America not yet sold out. While there’s still spots, I’d recommend signing up for both!

# Free tickets for WirelessNorth.ca’s mobile/iPhone developers meetup tonight are now sold out. A few sponsor tickets remain (all funds raised go directly to the nacho, wifi and free beer budget).

So RIMs iphone killer is landing at Telus. Or rather, safer to say for now, Telus’ Instinct-killer. Almost certainly, the storm will be more appealing than Bells touchscreen pony the Samsung Instinct.

It feels like there’s a whole cottage industry now amongst the handset makers in giving the desperate CDMA carriers to market against the iPhone. RIM’s core market is North America (the last bastion of CDMA) and it’s not the first time they’ve done something special for that standard. For a while the only 3G blackberries were on Bell/Telus’s EVDO network.

As for iPhone-killing, comparable specs are one thing, but RIM’s storm has a long way to go to match the feverish zeitgeist of the iPhone, not to mention iTunes integration, the app developer base etc. Of course we wish the Waterlooers the best of luck.

Along that line, more news/rumor from RIM is that they will also be launching an app store. The bad news is, that rather than be centrally hosted, the app store is unique to each carrier. We don’t know the full details yet, but that doesn’t sound good for developers. Rather than Apple’s slow and inscrutable app approval process, you can now look forward to something of the same with every carrier. What joy. Now little Johnny, don’t go building any app that might disrupt a Carrier business model, whether that model be present, future or imaginary…

As Alec puts it:

The appeal of the AppStore is that it goes around the carrier. As a developer, the last thing I want is to go on bended knee to 180 carriers to ask them to carry my software. Been there, done that, got the rugburn.

We shall see how Telus handles it. In the meantime, good for Telus and RIM for bringing us more fun toys to play with and a little more competition. Feel free to send one or two by the WirelessNorth.ca headquarters for closer inspection…

The storm should be out in time for Christmas (that doesn’t sound soon), we have no idea on the pricing contracts. Sometimes Christmas is a time Telus likes to throw the other carriers a curve ball when it comes to special plans and pricing. Ask Santa for that.

UPDATE: Looks like Bell is getting the storm too, so no competitive scoop for Telus. Maybe Telus and the newly privatized Bell should just merge and get it over with?…

We’re confirmed! This Thursday WirelessNorth.ca will be hosting a mobile developers meetup in Toronto. The theme of this meetup is the iPhone and celebrating the lifting of the NDA (so that developers can actually talk about and share ideas on iPhone development), but feel free to bring your blackberries too and what ever else you’d like to talk about. This is not a formal or a demo type event, just come on out and have a few beers and I’ll show you mine if you show me yours etc.

Should be fun, but it’s not a huge pub, so reserve your spot if you want to able to join us.

Time: 6:30 – 9:30 pm
Location: The Bedford Academy, 36 Prince Arthur Avenue, Toronto, ON
To bring: Your self, your mobile app or your idea for one

Register: Free! but spots limited, click here to register