Wirelessnorth.ca

Koodo, the garish-colored discount flogger of Telus’ cheap hand-me-down “feature” phones, just got even cheaper. According to MobileSyrup Koodo cut prices on all their entire lineup from $25 to $50. We may not like the ads, but around here, we do give Koodo credit for the lowest entry-prices for cellular services and their reasonably innovative “tab”. The tab works a bit like Fido dollars in reverse, get the phone in your hand now, and rent to own it through your plan.

But sadly, great phones these are not. The price cut could be sign of competition heating up in the low end (thanks Wind) or it could be a sign of something better. Last decade’s crap talk-and-text-CDMA have got to go. Koodo has yet to launch any HSPA devices, let’s hope this cut is them taking out the trash in preparation for launching something better.

The mobile industry needs right now more creative financing options for making smart(er) phones financially accessible to a greater number of Canadians.

The news burning up the twittersphere today is that Bell and Telus are both revealed to be launching the Apple iPhone in Canada, as early as next month.

Neither Bell nor Telus would confirm that they would add the iPhone to their lineups. Apple also declined to comment. But people familiar with the matter said the two carriers will announce a working partnership with Apple as early as Tuesday or Wednesday and begin selling the device in time for the launch of their new network next month.

This is pretty epic news and a huge win for Canadians. Not for the sake of the iPhone, which is a perfectly excellent phone, but because it means the HSPA competitive war is now on. Far more than the coming new entrants (though they won’t hurt either) the fact that all three big telcos are now going toe-to-toe in the once Rogers-only universe of GSM can only be good news for the rest of us. In fact, Canada is the only market we can think of where 3 three carriers are offering the speedy fruit-themed widget. We just now need to see what the plans will be.

One also wonders if supplies of 3GS’s at Rogers outlets will also magically improve real quick?

link: Bell, Telus to launch iPhone next month

Coming soon on WirelessNorth.ca: Dear Bell and Telus, please just kiss and makeout and get it over with already.

UPDATE: It appears that triple-carrier iPhone is becoming the norm in various markets including the UK and France. At WirelessNorth.ca we for one welcome this new comoditization of high-end smart phones.

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

So RIMs iphone killer is landing at Telus. Or rather, safer to say for now, Telus’ Instinct-killer. Almost certainly, the storm will be more appealing than Bells touchscreen pony the Samsung Instinct.

It feels like there’s a whole cottage industry now amongst the handset makers in giving the desperate CDMA carriers to market against the iPhone. RIM’s core market is North America (the last bastion of CDMA) and it’s not the first time they’ve done something special for that standard. For a while the only 3G blackberries were on Bell/Telus’s EVDO network.

As for iPhone-killing, comparable specs are one thing, but RIM’s storm has a long way to go to match the feverish zeitgeist of the iPhone, not to mention iTunes integration, the app developer base etc. Of course we wish the Waterlooers the best of luck.

Along that line, more news/rumor from RIM is that they will also be launching an app store. The bad news is, that rather than be centrally hosted, the app store is unique to each carrier. We don’t know the full details yet, but that doesn’t sound good for developers. Rather than Apple’s slow and inscrutable app approval process, you can now look forward to something of the same with every carrier. What joy. Now little Johnny, don’t go building any app that might disrupt a Carrier business model, whether that model be present, future or imaginary…

As Alec puts it:

The appeal of the AppStore is that it goes around the carrier. As a developer, the last thing I want is to go on bended knee to 180 carriers to ask them to carry my software. Been there, done that, got the rugburn.

We shall see how Telus handles it. In the meantime, good for Telus and RIM for bringing us more fun toys to play with and a little more competition. Feel free to send one or two by the WirelessNorth.ca headquarters for closer inspection…

The storm should be out in time for Christmas (that doesn’t sound soon), we have no idea on the pricing contracts. Sometimes Christmas is a time Telus likes to throw the other carriers a curve ball when it comes to special plans and pricing. Ask Santa for that.

UPDATE: Looks like Bell is getting the storm too, so no competitive scoop for Telus. Maybe Telus and the newly privatized Bell should just merge and get it over with?…

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.

Tonight Bell and Samsung are launching the Instinct in Canada reportedly with the savvy PR-kungfu of an “unlimited” 3G data plan. You may remember Rogers getting a little flack for their not so unlimited. Expect Bell of course to offer unlimited service subject only to their usual laundry list of limits (except for tethering, subject to “acceptable” use, except for data services that don’t count etc.).

The Samsung is nice looking machine, it’s clearly designed to take on the iPhone, but does it stack up? We shall see.

Arguably more anticipated than the Instinct is the HTC Diamond. A friendly tipster to WirelessNorth.ca writes: “Just got a word from Telus that the touch diamond will be dropping in CDMA flavour on the Telus network on August 19th 2008.” Boy Genius had the scoop on the specs for the Telus Diamond here. The Diamond is a proper (Windows Mobile) smart phone, the specs are impressive, it has HTC’s fancy touch interface, nonetheless initial impressions of the device are mixed (in this case the UK GSM version). We’d love to hear what you think from the first ones that can get their hands on the Telus edition.

UPDATE: Telus writes:

“Good afternoon, Just saw your article about TELUS coming up with the Diamond. Just wanted to flag that we are actually launching next week, August 14th. See below the news release distributed yesterday. Rate plans info available at the bottom of the release.”

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.}

As was generally expected, Telus launces Koodo today. Koodo is another FauxVNO like Fido or Solo (owned by Rogers and Bell).

What distinguishes Koodo is that it’s branding is a different color than Telus, and it makes heavy use of Helvetica. Sort of an “American Apparel for Cougars”. Possibly those who also suffer from moderate colour blindness.

Presumably the garish branding helps to segment and mitigate any spillover from (or to) the mainstream brand, as Koodo targets “low end” consumers. It’s basically a me too move from Telus to capitalize on the “same high prices, crappier devices” model which seems to have been reasonably successful for Fido and Solo. Reminds me of this phenomenon.

Phones on offer come with features as exciting as 0.3 Megapixel cameras and SMS.

Data is priced at 5cents a “page”. [What does that even mean?]

You yourself can try and restrain your excitement here

tip: If you are looking for cheap very basic voice/text mobile service check out the 7-eleven prepaid devices. You’ll do better.

Spinvox is a neat little app that converts your voice messages to text and delivers them to your handset by email or SMS. This is handy for making your voicemails searchable and archivable or for those people get a lot of voicemail. You probably know who you are. We reported earlier on Rogers adding Spinvox so it seems only fair to mention that Telus users can now have Spinvox too. No word yet on comparable pricing of the Telus offer (Rogers was $15/month). Drop a line in the comments if you know.

Also no word yet on a service that works the other way. e.g. a system somewhere you could text every once in a while and it would call up by computerized voice your mum or whomever and tell her you are doing just fine these days thanks, and how are you?

Startup idea in the making?

Calling it the “Betamax” of wireless standards, there was a piece in the Toronto Star this weekend covering growing speculation that Telus (if not Bell as well) may switch their network to GSM.

“The CDMA format is still common in North America but is increasingly falling out of favour as the rest the world moves toward GSM. A switch would allow Telus subscribers to roam on more overseas networks and choose from a much larger (and cheaper) selection of cellphones built for global markets, where some 80 per cent of cellphone users now operate on a GSM format.”

Despite the enormous cost of the switchover there’s a few reasons to believe it’s ultimately inevitable that one or both of Telus and Bell will go GSM. GSM is by far the dominant world standard, giving GSM operators access earlier to a larger pool of hadsets and equipment (the iPhone, for example, is currently GSM-only) and, for a more immediate business case, is roaming.

Any new entrant in the current spectrum auction would go GSM, opening up a competitive market for GSM handsets (and SIM cards) in Canada for the first time since Rogers bought out Microcell several years ago.

At present almost any international vistor to Canada will be carrying a GSM device, and they run hundreds of millions in roaming minutes a year. Currently ALL of that revenue goes to Rogers.

You can bet the backroom deal offering with the equipment vendors is going on something fierce at Telus these days. We’d peg Ericsson as the likely big winner if Telus makes the switch.

Link, Toronto Star Telus considers dumping its `Betamax’ of wireless networks

Thanks to Mack D. Male for the tip.