Wirelessnorth.ca

Sorry we’re a few days late on the news, but here you are, some more good news on a new wireless entrant in Canada. Taking our catchprase “great wireless north” very seriously is RuralCom:

The proposed Alaska Highway Network will provide nearly contiguous coverage along 1,685 km. (1,047 mi.) of the Alaska Highway from Wonowon, BC to Beaver Creek, YT on the Alaska-Yukon Territory border. Communities to be served will include Fort Nelson, BC, Watson Lake, YT and Whitehorse, YT.

RuralCom’s proposed network along the BC North Coast will provide nearly contiguous coverage along the BC Inside Passage waterway from just north ofVancouver Island to the Alaska-BC border. BC communities served will include Bella Bella, Masset, Queen Charlotte City and Prince Rupert . The area served will also provide service to the 1.8 million cruise ship passengers traveling to and from Alaska during the May-October season.

From a policy perspective, you could count this one as a win for feds, as far as using the auction to encourage some mobile services in some hensewise underserved places. On the flip side though, the PR so far seems to suggest (now becoming a familiar refrain) an emphasis on talk and text service.

So your life-long dream and drop everything, buy a young malamute and hit the road streaming mobile broadband from the sidecar of your motor-bike the whole way up the yukon trail, may have to wait a little longer.

From a business perspective the model seems like a clever way for Ruralcom to also scoop some lucrative roaming revenues from tourists and Americans to and from Alaska as so forth. We do have a few questions though, drop us a note if you have more info: Does Ruralcom have any spectrum outside of AWS, or will only new AWS handsets get coverage? It must be a neat trick to provision basestation power and backhaul that far up the Yukon’s wazoo, there must be some interesting/clever stories there?

Protip: North of sixty, remote alternatives like solar power have some serious drawbacks some parts of the year…

Link: RuralCom Corporation to provide cell phone service to the Alaska Highway and the BC North Coast

Your WirelessNorth.ca editor just rolled out of an excellent session at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi). Maybe we were still half drunk on Texan tacos stand tacos (very specific to this location) but we managed to get down a few quick thoughts. We’re lately been skeptics around here still on the size and viability of mobile marketing as a way to monetize anything useful.

But we also know that there are a lot of mobile developers in Canada wondering how they’re going to monetize them. While a lot of ordinary Canadian businesses, brands, and entrepreneurs probably want to figure out how they might to start catching up to some other parts of the world as far as engaging with mobile.

Mobiles will be one of the primary ways that people will access the web, and so it’s important for any business that is, or could be, touched by the web to start thinking about mobile.

If you look where location based works (in Japan, in China) in marketing it’s a pull model. It’s not a direct mail/spam model, where you buy a bunch of numbers and send out sms marketing. Those models fail.

Imagine an interaction where you could send out a personal “RFP” for services and let local businesses compete.

Models will be auction based. A lot of work will be needed to figure out how to use mobile advertising. More inventory than advertisers for a while. (Translation: mobile content is still struggling to find enough advertisers).

Companies like mobile social tool Loopd are dependent on building their own adserving tools because otherwise the tools didn’t exist yet. (Google right now is apparently investing heavily in location based).

Advertising business models are still being figured out too. Pricing models could be price per pair of feet driven to a store instead of by impression or just cost per click. There is another idea/specter of the personal CPM. (someone jokes, what? am I worth only 47 cents?)

Augmented reality is where all this is going, these devices are going to get to know you really well and provide you with tons of personal/socially location specific information.

There will of course be tons of problems around privacy and location based services (a general theme at SXSW)
• Privacy there will need to be rules around times of day employers can track employees
• People what black holes, eg not tracked when at home
• Apps should be good at telling you when you are broadcasting location, and to whom and for what
• There are also passive models where, Navteq provides some free services if you share your anonymous location information, which helps them map traffic flow. In this case, they don’t have to care who you are, just how fast you are moving along a highway.
• No matter what, even *if* companies are careful with your privacy, government will always be able to track the hell out of you unless you take the battery right out of the phone

Rather than just hurling pizza coupons at mobile phone holders as the walk down the street, there’s other ways to market better/more friendly-ly. A lot of brands are releasing “helper” tools like for the iphone or blackberry (AirCanada mobile tools come to mind). The theme here is that mobile apps can add value to another product service

The lesson of sxsw is that brands have a huge learning curve to climb. (good news for you shameless mobile pundits out there, or would-be industry disruptors)

Just in time for SXSW, The wise and awesome Jay Goldman has just posted an excellent survival guide for anyone on Rogers who is traveling in the US and even thinking of turning their phone on.

The first thing you need to understand: if you don’t make some changes to your existing plan and you just go about using your phone like you do every day, you’re going to come home to a very nasty surprise in the form of a Rogers bill that will have you immediately applying for a government bailout package. I hear those are actually becoming hard to get, so you might want to keep reading.

Jay points out, Rogers charges standard voice rates of $1.70 a minute, texts at $0.60 each (actually we’ve seen Rogers charge $0.95 texts in the US) and data rates at the astounding $0.03/KB (that means $30/MB, or approximately $150 to transfer one single average MP3 or youtube video). And then there is Roger’s delightful practice of charging you roaming AND long distance on incoming calls while in the U.S.

But there is some hope! Jay recommends a bunch of good ways NOT to use your phone in chargeable ways as well as a few darkly secret Rogers plans that can help bring down the charges.

But the real win (you have an unlocked phone right?) is to leave your Rogers SIM card behind when traveling. Citizen Ziggy recommends:

If you are going to U.S. for SXSW or any other reason and want to use data on iphone at good price.

Once you get over border, get a T-Mobile PREPAID SIM.
Call support number and tell them you want to activate the “sidekick data plan” (1$/day unlimited data). DO NOT TELL THEM YOU HAVE iPhone. (tell them sidekick or HTC smartphone if they persist).

as for phone calls remember that the SIM also has free incoming calls. you can fwd your skype # or cellphone to the new number (charges may apply) or use http://jajah.com that turns outgoing calls into incoming calls for about 2cents/min.

If you are one of the lucky ones who have a http://grandcentral.com account you can use Grand dialer on your iphone to do the same thing that jajah does but for free.

LINK: Traveling to the US with Rogers