Wirelessnorth.ca

Alek Krstajic, CEO of “BMV Holdings” announced the launch of their new brandname Public Mobile in Toronto this morning and placed the first public call on Canada’s new wireless spectrum. BMV/Public doesn’t quite have their official spectrum certificates just yet. But with the help of a provisional license (sadly this was not a pirate radio demo which would have been exciting) and a little help from Nortel to set up a single base station downtown, we had our demo.

Before you get too excited, let us recap what this all means. [see: BMV’s bets big on bargain spectrum ] Public owned a relatively narrow slice of slightly oddball “G band” spectrum, for a very cheap cost, just to the right of the main AWS band in this past year’s auction. They own this spectrum from Windsor to Quebec City.

They are rolling out CDMA. Everything about BMV is targeted maintaining very low costs and they are aiming straight for the very bottom end of the wireless market. Talk and text only. But a good deal on talk and text. $40 all-in all you can eat talk and text – as long as you are in the coverage area. (Don’t count on too much roaming or long distance).

And this is good. This is great! for what it is.

But talk and text is clearly not the future of mobile innovation. Talk and text doesn’t anybody for mobile content, mobile content distribution or anything really cool you can imagine doing with a truly connected population.

For very basic telephony, for cell phone service circa 1999, Public looks like they’ll do a fine job. We wish Alek and his investors all the best.

But the fact that they may well be quite successful with such a model, is much more a symptom of Canada’s failure in wireless leadership than any part of the solution.

In the Q&A, Alek rightly praised Industry Canada for their efforts to open up the market to new wireless competition.

However, if all the rest of the new entrants go this way, then it will time for Industry Canada to go back to the drawing board.