Wirelessnorth.ca

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