Wirelessnorth.ca

Telus has announced it’s iPhone launch for November 5th of this year, at the same time they are announcing their half of the new 21MB HSPA+ (same speed as Rogers) network they’ve been rolling out with Bell. Telus is calling it “Canada’s largest 3G+ network“. We have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

What we do know, is that things are looking up in Canada Wireless-wise. Compared, for instance, with our poor American neighbours to the south we now have not one but three (and soon to be more) offering the latest 3G standards all of whom offer, generally, far better reliability than the US’s largest GSM carrier AT&T.

On top of which we now have three carriers offering the iPhone 3GS as well as, we trust, some very nice next-generation androids and blackberries (9700′s) any day now.

It’s going to be a very good Christmas to look for smartphones and broadband sticks in your stockings.

AwesomeEricc writes:

Listen, Telus is launching their GSM 4G (Yes, that’s right, 4G not 3G) network in late September 2009. Most new Telus phone are already GSM compatable, but not active. In September 2009 all phone, will be accepting a Telus Sim Card. Meaning you can buy any unlocked phone from eBay (etc.) and use it with Telus. Also, to Stewart Marshall, Telus, as per most cell phone companies, does not buy out contracts from other companies. Also, Telus will not be waiting the usual 6months time to offer a phone that Rogers or Fido offered earlier, but quite the opposite.

see also:

TELUS to soft-launch HSDPA network in Fall 2009? -boy genius

TELUS SIM card terms of service take effect Sept 15 – mobile syrup

Bell and Telus to go GSM – WirelessNorth.ca

Canadian mobile shop Xtreme Labs Inc. kindly let WirelessNorth.ca know about some 3G speed testing results from their iPhone bandwidth app. It would have been good to know how consistent these speeds were, but on the average, Roger’s network scores high:

We found in the US that average download speeds of 841 Kbit/s compared poorly to Japan with download speeds of 1,213 Kbit/s but compared favorably to the UK where download speeds averaged 663 Kbit/s. Canada stands out at a respectable 1,314 Kbit/s.

Here’s the global averages:

Why we think this is interesting: 3G or 3.5G or whatever you want to call it, is starting to show some impressive bandwidth numbers. Impressive for a lot of media streaming applications. Plenty of data/media bandwidth to fill a small screen. Where 3G is still clearly hurting however is latency. Nearly half a second is not too snappy and maybe why real-time 2-way voice/video/gaming over IP applications are just not quite there yet for mobile.

What we need is LTE (2010 – 2012ish) which should even more bandwidth, but even more importantly, sub 100ms latency (depending on how far you are pinging etc.).

Link: What is the REAL speed of your 3G connection?

An announcement was expected as early as this week [National Post
BCE and Telus in 3G network pact], but apparently the spell checking and t crossing on the PR release is taking a little longer. The cat is pretty much out of the bag however, they may as well tell us the full news.

What might an HSPA announcement mean? For one thing they will be among the first to roll out a “naked” HSPA network. Most other carriers globally moving to HSPA are upgrading or overlaying on top of existing 2G GSM/EDGE etc. services. Bell and Telus (and probably other new entrants as well) will be rolling out without the benefit of an established/reliable (if slower) network to fall back on when out of HSPA range.

It also means that Rogers will still retain all the roaming revenue from foreign (2G) GSM phones roaming in Canada. When it comes to 3G services, Rogers may have the advantage in reliability and coverage for a while until Bell/Telus new networks can can catch up in density and maturity. Even the new entrants may do better as they’ll have the advantage now of falling back to the Rogers network as well as the Bell network for roaming and reliability. (A little extra competition on the wholesale side for HSPA roaming probably can’t hurt their cause either).

What else will be the consequences of managing a frankenstein CDMA+HSPA network? What will happen to all those 3 year EVDO contracts? We shall see, and we await word from Bell and Telus. Meanwhile if you have theories, drop us a comment.

WirelessNorth.ca originally broke the story on Bell /Telus going GSM-HSPA back in July.

Just a few months ago, we were raving about the speed of Rogers HSDPA network. Recently, and anecdotaly, it appears that average download speeds declining. Blame the iPhone or more usb broadband sticks on the network perhaps. In any case, please write in if you’ve noticed a similar experience, or peak speeds if can measure it. If we get any more data points we’ll report them back. Wireless connections are fickle things. We’d also be curious to know fastest effective speeds that can be wrung out of a Telus/Bell EVDO or EVDOrevA connection, if anyone’s got one.

This is huge news for the wireless industry in Canada. We are hearing strong rumours than both Bell and Telus will be switching (or at least launching) an HSPA (GSM) network in Canada by 2010. You heard it here first. Rumours and speculation about the switch have been swirling for a while, but this time it looks like it’s for real.

Ever since they purchased FIDO and became Canada’s only GSM carrier, Rogers has been holding it over and winning customer and revenue share from Bell and Telus. GSM phones are increasingly becoming the world standard with only Bell, Telus, some of the larger US carriers and a few others internationally are the last significant holdouts. Increasingly high end phones are coming out only on GSM (like the nokia n-series or the iPhone) or the CDMA equivalents may come out only 6 months later.

GSM also has the handy feature of the SIM card, making it much easier to buy and sell unlocked phones or move devices between carriers.

We had thought that Bell/Telus would try to coast it out for 4G aka LTE sometime in 2012. LTE is the global industry’s plan to finally converge on a “single” 4G wireless standard. It seems though that Telus/Bell couldn’t wait and they will be migrating to LTE by way of HSPA.

Suddenly, that 30MHz or so of combined national spectrum that the two are bidding on seems like it could become an awfully handy way of switching horses.

In addition to the new entrants, having two more incumbents move to GSM inevitably will create more competition through better access to high-end devices, as well an easier ability for subscribers to switch carriers (if not for those 3year contracts).

We at WirelessNorth.ca welcome all our new GSM overlords. We love the smell of competition in the morning.

^{All links to wikipedia, invariably useful if ever you need help decoding the acronym soup of wireless standards.}

• It will be a 3G device on Rogers HSDPA network
• It will continue to have mediocre battery life (Though Jobs will make some claims to the contrary)
• The entry price will be $50 or $100 higher than whatever ATT&T or the Apple US store charges for the same model. Currency parity? The Apple store has never heard of it.
• It will come with a 3 year contract. Standard for Canada, but one year longer than any other jurisdiciton on the planet.
• It will come in June
• It will have a 1GB data cap
• Pricing packages including voice minutes, data, messaging & system access fee will start at a minimum of $80CAD a month before taxes (Rogers ARPU sits at nearly $75, no way they’ll let a flagship device bring down the mean)
• This means each iPhone will earn Rogers (cost you) about $3300 over the life of the contract. Yowza.
• With the speed of HSPA, web applications on the iPhone will get (more) awesome
• With no physical keyboard, addoption by enterprise and business users will still not really happen
• In the consumer segment, the device will give the Bold a run for it’s money (a device you shouldn’t expect to be cheap either)

Get this for delicious ironies of our day. Download speeds on Rogers wireless cellular/HSDPA network are hitting 250 kBytes/sec. Observed torrent rates on the throttled-within-an-inch-of-its-life home “broad”-band are closer to 30 kBytes/sec. What does this mean?

Rogers wireless network is wide open. No deep packet inspection. Due to the physics of airwaves, it’s the one network that should be most constrained and yet they’ll let you run all the bandwidth saturating P2P apps you want. Crazy that you can do this over the air but not over wireline.

Mobile broadband is fast. The highspeed airwaves are empty, like a fresh built freeway just before it’s consumed by suburbia. enjoy while the going is good.

Pissed off by slow access over cable? Run a few torrents over the air. Better effective bandwidth and you can take it anywhere.

Somewhere, someplace, a Rogers network engineer wants to kill me for telling you this.

*This is with a 3.6Mbs cellular PC card (about $99 unlocked on eBay) . 7.2Mbs cards are also on the market, and the network may be capable of it in your area.

Rogers is recently selling PC cards connecting to their (theoretical) 3.6MB HSPA. Aside from the fact that there is no usb dongle option, this is good news. And the prices are shockingly reasonable* considering the source. $65 per 1GB of monthly usage. Now this is is before taxes, 911** and system access fees etc., and, already twice the price 1 GB USB dongle that say 3 would sell you in the UK (15pound a month including VAT)… BUT for Canada a 2x is better than the 40x data price disparity we`re used too. The best feature of this plan though is what happen if you go over 1Gb. The plan gracefully, and automatically upgrades you to the next (2GB) plan for only $10 more. This is awesomely customer friendly. The catch -unfortunatley- is that you cannot apply this plan to any other Rogers device or move your SIM card to your blackberry and expect to get away with it.

$10 for an extra GB is also kindof funny considering that Rogers charges $50/MB of overage after the first 10MB of usage on their standard Vision plan. One Gigabyte equals 1024 Megabytes.

1GB of outside internet traffic on a PC card = $65
1GB of outside internet traffic on a standard rogers vision phone plan = 1024 – 10 = 1014MB x $50 = $50,700

Of the two plans, I’d recommend the former. *cough*

According to Alec Saunders, there is an option for not quite the same plan but something close to it if you ask a customer service rep the right questions:

Tom – I saw the same 1, 2, 3 GB plans you did, and phoned Rogers customer service. I explained that I had a sophisticated phone with a 5 megapixel camera, and wanted a suitable dataplan to go on it. The rep suggested a 1 GB plan for $65. I asked if this was the same as the HSPA card plan, and she said no. She wouldn’t sell me the 2 or 3GB plan. Still, it beats the tar out of the old $100 for 200M plan I had on my Blackberry.

An HSPA phone like the N95 with a good plan the ability to “tether” or share it’s internet connection is one way to get the best of both worlds. How to buy a Nokia n95 in Canada.

*Goodluck trying to surf the Rogers site on a firefox browser. It’s a strange animal to them, their web designers and layout engineers have never heard of the beast.

**It`s an excersise for the reader to determine how exactly how to dial 911 on a PC card in the event of an appropriate emergency.