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Word from the ever vigilant Alec Saunders this week that data pricing at Rogers has actually gotten worse. The news, if you really want to here it, is that Rogers $65 1GB plan is no more, replaced by only a rather expensive $100/1GB option. Roger’s ‘vision’ $7 plan with all it’s caveats is now also only applicable to 3 year contracts – regardless if Rogers subsidized your phone or if you paid full price for an unlocked GSM phone on your own.

At Wirelessnorth.ca we’re somewhat in shock that data rates could actually trend upwards. There was a quote, one of the favourites from the recent eComm conference in silicon valley “Violating Moore’s law… ought to be a criminal offence”.

And meanwhile it’s another season and Rogers still has no roaming plans for data either. That’s 5 cents a kilobyte should you accidentally step a foot across the US border. And with wonderful HSDPA “vision” devices capable of 250kBytes/sec or more that’s an amazing $750/min in case anyone is counting.

Data pricing, especially over GSM, continues to be a travesty in Canada.

This new spectrum auction can’t end soon enough.

Link: Rogers “Vision” sucks on Saunderslog.

Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo.

The often entertaining Bruce Sterling talking about the future of design and technology, everyware, spimes, mobiles and the long list of devices killed off or consumed by the mobile phone, and the victory condition for geolocative technology (a four year old should be able to find their way to new delhi). The best parts are roughly through the middle section. And some spot on advice for designers. Desigers should obssess over design so users don’t have to. “Don’t make me think” good design minimizes cognitive load and opportunity cost. Longish but packed with cheeky wisdom relevant to anyone contemplating the future of wireless. Hat tip to boing boing.

Breaking news in Canada’s spectrum auction – MTS Allstream and Yak Communications Corp have both come public with their participation. David George-Cosh has the story for the Post. What’s most interesting so far is that MTS has put down the full $340M – enough money to bid on the whole enchilada, 40MHz of set-aside spectrum from coast to coast. In reality though, they’re unlucky if they get the whole thing, but putting down this deposit maximizes their strategic options. There’s also Yak to consider, owned by Globalive Communications Corp. and we’ll find out more about them shortly.

Meanwhile we know Quebecor is deadly serious about their bid, they’re hiring and talking like they’ve won it already. In the province of Quebec they should be almost unbeatable, but watch for them to bid on territories outside as well. Data rates are just the beginning of what’s wrong with mobile in Canada they tell me, just wait til someone offers a truly “open” network in Canada.

What does that mean? And how much disruption can we really expect? The sentiment I’m hearing from those close to the bidding (on both sides of the street) are the same, it’s an exciting as hell time to be working in telcom but – anxious as well. Come June, it’s either a big bonus or time to look for a new job…

Why is the news coming out today? Because today is the deadline to submit applications to Industry Canada. IC won’t announce the list of applicants officially until Friday, and the list of approved bidders two weeks after that. But as far as the game theory is concerned, a extra week wont change anything so it makes sense to start pounding the PR drum.

This is shaping up to be the year for wireless in Canada. Stay tuned to this channel for more this week.

Previously: Everything you needed to know about the Canadian Spectrum Auction but were afraid to ask

Last month, the Canadian Government opened up to public questions on their proposed auction rules. Convenient for us Auction watchers, the questions were also made public, giving us a sneak peak into who is bidding and who is seriously interested. The questions ranged from highly technical and specific, to the pithy one sentence from Bear Sterns “Is there a 700 MHz auction coming in Canada similar to the U.S.?”, to the, are you sure you are in the right room, from Gamco ‘Investment Group’ “Why is their a limit to the amount of spectrum available? At a certain point do the airwaves just become more crowded? The US has 10X the population in a smaller land mass, therefore , shouldn’t we be able to have almost unlimited spectrum or at least 10X more per person than in the US?” (good luck with that one Industry Canada).

You can view the whole list of submissions here (it’s not as long as you might think).

But using, our own proprietary and highly scientific algorithm (we counted the total number of kilobytes of pdfs submitted by each participant), Wireless North has come up with the following table to determine who’s really serious about spectrum in Canada:

 
Annnnd, just for fun, we also give you what it would cost each of the incumbents to UPLOAD their submissions at the worst case scenario of each of their own publicly advertised data rates. Rogers $50/MB, Bell $12/MB, Telus $8MB

 
The real dark horses to watch however in the set-aside spectrum? Look Communications, and one Mystery Bidder represented by law firm Ogilvy Renault.

More voices emerging from the choir in Barcelona:

Ajit on Open Gardens: History does not remember the builders of the Silk Road – only it’s travellers and it’s traders ..
“In 2008, we see an industry in turmoil – and in the keynote sessions that dreaded word ‘Bit Pipe’ was mentioned at length…. But by common consensus, the company everyone wanted to meet was not an Operator – It was Apple. Like it or not – Google, Apple, Nokia and others drive the agenda today – and already with the launch of iPhone – the Operator is already a bit pipe. There may be no going back since iTunes is the billing mechanism for iPhone as I blogged before ”

Brian Dolan at Fierce: Dumb pipe nostalgia at Mobile World Congress “Just as the carriers’ fear of becoming a dumb pipe is one elephant the industry can’t seem to push out of the room”

After getting off to a slow start, the C block of the U.S. 700MHz spectrum auction has just crossed the magical 4.64B reserve price. This means whoever wins the spectrum (the bidders are as yet kept secret by the FCC), will be subject to two important “openness” regulations requiring open access to devices and to applications used on the network. Though the leading bidder may/may not be Google, this is automatically a win for the goog, as it opens the door to the Android platform and likely good news as well for American consumers and businesses.

Canada has yet to set the rules (or a specific timeline) for own 700MHz auction, though the precedent is for Canada to follow spectrum U.S. policy closely – in the interest of interoperability and copying generally whatever seems to be working down south.

4.7B is a lot of money.

^{photo: jenn_jenn}

The biggest wireless story of 2008 is going to be Canada’s upcoming spectrum auction. Technically, Canada is auctioning three chunks of spectrum, but only one of which, the “1700″, is particularly interesting for most uses. So much so, they’ve even given it a brand name: Advanced Wireless Spectrum (AWS).

The shocker of course, is that the government has done something dramatic by setting aside 3 of the 6 blocks (40% of actual spectrum) to new entrants. Furthermore, they’ve mandated the existing carriers to share towers and even share roaming spectrum to give these would-be entrants a fighting chance at achieving scale.

This government largess, does hide another issue however. Before we sling too much mud at certain tacit oligopolies in Canada, remember also this is the same government that is about 3 years behind the U.S. in unlocking wireless spectrum. What is on the block now is NOT even the same (or quite as juicy) as the 700MHz spectrum currently up for grabs in the U.S.. Canada won’t be clearing this auction until as late as 2012.

As for the spectrum itself, it is divided up into six blocks, 3 big and 3 small called (a,b,c,d,e,f). B, C and D are the set asides and the other three are open to incumbents. Coincidentally, there are exactly three big incumbents in Canada. Nonetheless, it doesn’t mean one block will go to each. Each block is further divided into territories (some blocks big geographic chunks of 14 blocks and others 50blocks of smaller regions) just to make it more confusing.

Oh and each block is broken into two pieces (2x5MHz or 2x10Mhz). The first block is for uplink transitions and the second for downlink. This is so base stations can efficiently listen and talk to a fleet of devices at the same time.

So it’s entirely possible that a telco like Telus might scoop up more or even all of the spectrum bands out west (where they need it most) and vice versa, Rogers might be bidding higher in eastern Canada. The not-so industry secret is that Canada’s “national’ carriers are rather, rather regional.

How “advanced” is the spectrum?

From an incumbent or new entrant, the spectrum itself is pretty good.

• It supports the latest 3/4G standards of HSPA and LTE. Carriers could start rolling out 7MBs or even 14mbs HSPA equipment right away (in theory, this is faster than my home wired broadband
• These are the same auction blocks as auctioned off a few years ago in the U.S. so there is GSM/HSPA equipment and handsets/devices on the shelf supporting these frequency bands. Vendors are standing by to take your call.
• There’s no one using it right now. So, unlike problems in the US, rollout can begin quickly without the messy business of dealing with interfering legacy users of the spectrum
• You would be a nut to rollout CDMA on this network in this day and age. Or you would be Bell.

What does it cost? Opening bid price for 10MHz blocks is about 54M nationally, and 140Million for a 20MHz chunk. Practically speaking, 20MHz is at least what you need to be serious operator, but you could also get by on 10MHz with a little clever juggling, roaming and/or future spectrum purchases to greater handle subscriber growth down the road.

when is this all going down?

Auction Timelines:
Deadline for Applications: March 10, 2008
Government Publication of the list of Applicants: March 14, 2008
Government Publication of the list of Qualified Bidders: March 31, 2008
Auction begins: May 27, 2008

My Predictions
Among the incumbents, my money is on Telus vs Rogers. Telus could use the spectrum as a deft way of switching to GSM while keeping their existing network operational. Rogers could just plain use the extra spectrum.

Among the entrants, Quebecor has been most vocal, but they have been in a world of financial trouble lately. Manitoba Tel should be a player, and I bet Shaw will put a toe in to the auction. Watch though, for a spate of entrants you’ve never heard of, at least in the early stages. A market opportunity like this does *not* come along often, and the Canadian market is ripe for disruption.

The biggest challenge? undoubtedly financing. Even with the government concessions, it’s frightfully expensive to start a wireless operator, especially nation wide. So you could see entrants focusing on local/regional licenses and/or creative strategies for achieving scale nationwide.

For the official line, the Industry Canada Spectrum Auction page is here

Myself/WirelessNorth.ca be running a workshop at LIFT this year on “Open and the Future of Wireless”. And you are invited! With spectrum auctions upcoming in Canada (and elsewhere) opportunities are emerging to reboot the way we think about mobile connectivity and computing. So we’ll be gathering a brace of smart people at LIFT to envision/design/prognosticate the future of wireless.

As more applications move to the web, software and media are moving to a model of cloud computing. At the same time, better devices and faster, more affordable wireless networks, are making it possible to stay connected almost anywhere.

Together these trends should ultimately, and fundamentally change the tools we use to live, work, play, govern and more. However, how will this future play out?

In particular, what role might “open” models play into our expected -or- ideal vision of the future?

If you registered for Lift head on over to this page to register for the workshop. Looks like we’ll have a good crowd there already. Should be fun!

^{Photo: leaping over a “Lift+” installation in the networking/art area outside Lift07}

UPDATE: Michael Arrington has some good coverage of business and FCC leaders at Davos on much the same topic. Looking forward to continuing this conversation in Switzerland in just several days.

Breathless romours are afoot on the mobile forums that Rogers may be substantially reducing surfing rates on certain devices. Feb 5th is the magic date that Big Red is expected to be dropping rates to as low as $5 to $7 for unlimited surfing on for on-device browsers.

What’s the catch? the plan may not be available on windows media, smart phones or blackberries (a.k.a any any device you might actually want to use unlimited browsing on).

This too after recently introducing a $15 unlimited email plan for the pearl.

All of which seeming to further this Canadian industry trend of per-device network pricing. A nice gesture, but but not quite the open device landscape of our wireless dreams? Check back Feb 5th to know for sure.

American analysts are suggesting that the price of not just the spectrum, but the cost of rollout will sweep asside all but the encumbents from the race. It’s not the same block of spectrum, but the deadline for Canada’s own 3G spectrum is fast approaching (applications in March, auction closing in June). In the Canadian version, the ministry of industry has set asside areas of spectrum as well as mandated tower sharing and roaming provisions which should increase the chances new competition in Canada. It’s still an expensive propostion however, and made challenging too by CRTC limitations on foreign ownership, meaning the bulk of the capital (a billion and a half or so for a national play) will need to be raised at home.

Link: Incumbents to Sweep Us Spectrum Auction, Analysts Say