Wirelessnorth.ca

Drawing a card from the world of packaged goods, Canadian carriers are fighting toothpaste style wars for mind share and shelf space. You may have noticed toothpastes, energy drinks, shampoos and snack foods all come from mostly the same few producers, with at best only slight variation in actual ingredients. What you do in a maturing to saturated market is you compete on essentially-meaningless brand and product innovation, using sheer variety to elbow your competitors out of their shelfspace and mindspace.

Now combine that with the Canadian wireless industry. Canadians love to hate their carriers. There’s always an attractively large segment of subscribers ready to switch, churn or sign up for the first time. Meanwhile Canadians know new carriers are launching and have pent up demand for new choices. New choices the entrants thought they were going to have for themselves.

And so the news:

Rogers Communications is launching another wireless discount brand, named Chatr, to compete with new carriers Wind, Mobilicity and Public Mobile, sources say.

Chatr’s main purpose will be to match new entrants with lower prices and cheaper phones without diminishing the quality appearance of Rogers’ core brand, according to a source with Rogers who did not want to be named.

Now with Chatr, Rogers can surgically target the very specific geographies wherever the new entrants launching and undercut, or just out-market the upstarts with their own fake-new brand.

By opening up the industry to new entrants, Industry Canada’s goal was to drive competition. No doubt they were hoping to spur such competition by price, service quality and transparency more so than by marketing spend, general bamboozlement, and geographic discrimination.

Things could get interesting for consumers if Rogers adopts an aggressive enough scortched-earth strategy in key markets. At least for a few years, until the entrants are driven out or bought-up after their five year licenses are up. Building new national brands from scratch won’t be cheap or easy for Rogers^*. However, all incremental consumer acquisition, or just consumer confusion, is a win and drives up the brand-building costs to new entrants as well. Love it or not, Chatr could work. Let’s see what Chatr Rogers has to offer.

LINK BGR: Rogers to launch Chatr, a new low-end brand to compete with WIND
LINK CBC: Rogers launching another wireless brand

^* Though can’t be as expensive as spending a billion dollars on the biggest share of AWS spectrum and then not even turning it on.

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.

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.