Wirelessnorth.ca

As widely reported in the dead tree media this morning, spectrum auction underdog BMV has secured an additional 50M in backing to rollout

” Low-cost wireless carrier BMV Holdings (“BMV”) today announced that OMERS Private Equity, the private equity arm of the OMERS Worldwide group of companies, has signed an agreement to invest up to $50 million in the business. BMV will launch value-priced wireless services to Canadians in specific markets in Ontario and Quebec during the third quarter of 2009.”

Speculative wireless ventures clearly being seen as a good an investment as any these days.

For you, dear reader, this is a good news/bad news story. The good news is a scrappy new startup is now a lot closer to effectively complete rollout (in Quebec and Ontario). And competition has to be good right?

Well the bad news is, essentially, – no make that literally- this is your grandmama’s cell phone service. That’s who BMV is targeting. “The great unsubscribed”. Cheap phones, old-old-school CDMA technology, talk and text only, forget about data.

So what are you to do? Here’s the plan. Switch your high-end bell/telus/Rogers 3G plan to a data-only plan to keep your shiny smart phone applications humming (and sidestep the big-three’s increasingly egregious voice pricing). Step 2: buy up some dirt cheap minutes and a secondary handset from BMV or one of the other low-end entrant (you can bring the number with number portability) for those obscure occasions when you want a mobile device for… what’s that called again… oh yes “making phone calls”.

Call your Grandma. She misses you.

Earlier on WirelessNorth.ca: New Entrant: BMV’s bets big on bargain spectrum