Wirelessnorth.ca

Unless you’re a cab driver or a realestate agent, is unlimited voice still what it used to be? Thanks to the wonders of technology, we find the vast majority of usage on a mobile phone is shifting from “phoning anyone” to SMS, IM, Web, Twitter, Facebooking, skype, gtalk, foursquaring not to mention games, web and using that bright screen to find your way across your apartment in the dark.

I would never go anywhere without it, but I think I could count on one hand the number of actual calls I placed on my mobile last month.

Unlimited minutes. What are they good for?

You’ve probably seen the news already, but Tony Clement has stepped up to reverse the CRTC decision on Globalive and allow their mobile brand Wind to enter the market.

More on what this means for foreign investment and the CRTC in general to come.

Pic: one of many twitter responses this morning.

One of the last really severe pain-points for Canadian wireless sufferers subscribers have been roaming rates. It’s not uncommon for blackberry wielding business travelers we know in Canada to face roaming bills upwards of $1000 a month. It looks like there may be, finally, a Canadian-based roaming service alternative. Reader Anthony A writes to us about roammobility.com :

I came across this on twitter today and a Vancouver company, Roam Mobility has launched a global roaming service for Canadian and US travelers.

Besides low roaming rates they offer free incoming calls in over 60 countries like but got me excited was the free incoming in the USA. I did a bit reading on their site and you get a USA and UK number to use while traveling.

The price seems reasonable and they also offer new Motorola world phones if you don’t want to unlock yours or don’t have a GSM phone that works globally. I did notice that they didn’t offer data, so I contacted them and they said that the service will be available in 6 weeks. Their reason for not offering data now is because they are still trying to ensure their data roaming is at least 50% than any other major carrier.

If their service is good and I can get the service before I travel, then roaming rates won’t seem so stressful anymore. I like the idea that I can have a phone which anyone can call me on and it won’t cost me anything while I’m away. I’ve been to Miami and London this year, where were these guys before? My bill from Miami alone was $270!

If anyone else has experience/success using these guy’s roaming packages let us know.

Globalive CEO Tony Lacavera made a public appearance today at Mobile Monday Toronto, to talk about Wind, and where they go from here. You may recall that the CRTC has. for now, shut down Globalive’s wireless venture within what would have been weeks of their launch. The exact same wireless venture that another branch of government, Industry Canada, was more than happy enough to take 450M CAD of their money in exchange for a big chunk of spectrum.

• According to Tony, Canada is still effectively a series of provincial duopolies (2 carrier concentration of 80-90% in most markets), with the 3rd highest costs and least customer satisfaction in the world. What we need is competition.
• Globalive is not pleased to be missing Christmas but is pushing ahead, expanding the network, keeping staff on while they sort through with the CRTC and industry Canada
• Tony is not yet acknowledging the possibility of not launching
• CRTC’s reversal came after globalive were legally approved by both Industry Canada and Dept of Finance. The CRTC’s choice was not one of law but a subjective decision, says Tony, and we disagree with their interpretation.
• Tony played up the charity work globalive employees have been doing – “has made our culture so much stronger”
• Wind (The globalive wireless brand) plans to launch with “all unlimited plans, no contracts, no catches*”
• Other than the catch that data will have some limits, or at least large buckets (this is not so unreasonable)
• Tony is keen on cool ideas like open application platforms. Although we don’t know what that means from a carrier perspective exactly.
• Wind will launch with blackberries (the latest) and other smartphones but not the iphone yet
• Asked about whether Canada should scrap foreign ownership rules – no says they are still important from a broadcast and cultural perspective
• What Tony really means is that Globalive doesn’t need (to wait for) legislation to change for them to launch

A few great, and essentially unanswered yet questions from the audience:

1) Globalive (and the likes of Quebecor) are more clearly intent on building long-term sustainable businesses, but how well will they compete against kamakazie marketshare strategies of any of the pure new entrants who could, potentially, be intent on gaining-marketshare-at-any-cost strategies in order to flip their businesses at the end of five years? (e.g. when the spectrum exclusivity rules for new entrants come off)

2) How does the UK wireless industry (for example, pick any G8 country) perform so well and competitively without the benefit of Canadian-style foreign ownership? Why does Canada keep such good company as Burma, Iran, North Korea in sheltering our wireless industry from international competition?

This is the other face of new competition in Canadian Telecom. We’ve been hearing rumblings this would happen for a while now. Rogers is leaning-down and girding for the coming price war.

These winds of change (so to speak) come blowing not only from the impending entry of new entrants (Tony Clement’s particular Windy conundrum notwithstanding) but even more so from a MUCH more competitive landscape amongst the big boys now that Bell and Telus have gotten their HSPA on.

This next bit will come as some cold consolation to those laid off today. However, a newly competitive telecom sector will, in time, bring broad benefits to nearly every other sector of the Canadian economy. In the new and evermore digital economy, innovation is driven by connectivity. A faster pace of innovation as evidenced by falling prices and much greater availability of leading edge wireless devices and services (as has been a strong trend for the last 1-2 years) is at least one encouraging sign for driving economic growth in the years ahead.

LINK: Rogers laying off 900 as part of cost cuts

Previously on WirelessNorth.ca: Where oh where your wireless bill goes (as with soylent green it’s mostly people. And profits. At least circa 1998 it was)

^{ps. As always, WirelessNorth.ca is hiring aspiring telcom pundits and snarks (or any combination of the two). The pay, not so good though.}

I just moved to Vancouver from Europe where I spent many years working in the wireless industry. When it comes to wireless, Canada seems to be quite removed from Europe in a number of ways.

What strikes me is that Canadian wireless carriers are mainly looking at each other in search of best practices. The iPhone offerings, for example, are almost identical between the three carriers, with identical handset pricing and only slight variances in the plans and contract durations. Most of the plan differences are in the small print hardly picked up by the average consumer, and the minutes and SMS included in the different plans vary only slightly. In terms of contract duration, all carriers offer a 3-year contract term and only Telus also a 0-year option. Nobody offers a 1- or 2-year option while I’m sure there is a market for it: Many frequent iPhone users will want to replace their phone much earlier than after 3 years – and I think most of the early iPhone adoptors will agree with this.

Compare with Europe. Most European carriers have the policy of “higher value customer equals higher handset subsidy”, meaning that both the duration of the contract and the level of monthly commitment determine the subsidy and thus the price of the handset at sign-up. Canadian carriers only vary the subsidy with contract duration and do not reward customers for committing to a higher monthly fee: If you sign up for a 2-year contract it doesn’t matter if you take a $50 plan or a $100 plan, you pay the same for your handset even though your “customer lifetime value” might be twice as high. The difference in the total 2-year commitment in this case is $1200, a number that dwarfs the maximum subsidy levels of around $500 that I see in the market.

The first carrier to break this cycle will be a winner: they will be able to attract the high-value customers by offering them lower handset prices, while improving profitability at the same time. Research in Europe suggests that for most consumers consumers the price of the handset is more important than the price of the monthly plan when they sign up for service. This makes it likely that consumers will even agree to a higher commitment in return for a better handset price.

An added bonus for the carrier that picks up on this idea: they will be able to advertise even lower “from” handset prices and eye a more attractive offering for all customers, since this minimum price will be based on the highest subsidy level that is only provided to the most valuable customers.

An enhanced subsidy can take consumers more effort to decide what’s the best for their situation, but in return for that they will get a handset at the price they deserve, so I think that little extra effort is a fair price to pay.

Bart Venlet is a telecom professional who spent the last 14 years working for Vodafone in various roles in Europe and Japan, and is currently looking for a job.

Got other ideas how Canadian carriers and consumers could one day kick their collective heroin habit of handset subsidies and world record contract lengths? Short of, ahem, regulation? jump in the comments. – ed

You may hear from time to time this story of the scarcity of wireless spectrum. Wireless data usage is skyrocketing, wireless broadband connections are expected to cross over the number of fixed broadband connections as early as 2010. You might have also noticed that in Canada’s recent spectrum auction, the going rate for a mere 10Mhz of spectrum coast to coast in Canada (out of the several thousands of total arguably “useful” space in the EM spectrum) was being auctioned for upwards of 500 million dollars. Billions in fact taxed out to the industry on “scarce” spectrum before even the first dollar spent on actual useful infrastructure like say towers or terminals.

You might have noticed that short of owning precious spectrum licenses, neither you yourself nor any of your entrepreneurialy minded friends, are not allowed at all to set up any kind of radio tower of your own with a range any greater than a home wifi router. Why is that again?

Ladies and gentlemen, the other side of the story:

Michael Calabresse – The myth of spectrum scarcity:

“the only thing that’s scarce is government permission to use the airwaves”

Link: The Wireless Bandwidth Crunch: Where Will We Find More Spectrum?
Link: Ecom America 2009 Video: The Myth of Spectrum Scarcity (Michael Calabrese)

After Industry Canada spent over a million dollars trying and failing to launch a cell phone comparison tool for Canada, someone has gone and done it for free. That someone is J Ben Benjamin in partnership with web shop einfiniteweb.com. While not so much yet the world’s prettiest website, it’s gets the job done. You can compare voice minutes by time of day and incoming vs outgoing, data and text and a slew of other options (tip: look for data under “advanced search” took us a while to find that).

This is commendable work. Despite some progress the carriers have made recently towards simplifying plans, overall rate structures remain highly obfuscated in Canada. Therefore tools like this one that can bring any additional transparency are of great value.

A few caveats though, there are a few things the calculator does not take into consideration. On the cost side remember that all minutes are not created equal and nor are all “evenings”. On Rogers, for example, a minute can be one second long and an evening minute may start hours later than on a seemingly identical Fido plan.

The other factor not considered here is quality or value for service. A cheap plan isn’t much good if the network coverage doesn’t reach you or if all the handsets available are ancient crap (here’s looking at you flanker brands).

Some fun games you might be able to play with this tool: Check out the price discrimination by province! Find the best plans for the rather short list of specific phones actually worth buying: BBerry, Droids, Iphone, Pre etc. (once they all come out). Sounds like fodder for future articles.

LINK: www.cellphoneratecalculator.com

Yesterday the CRTC blocked Globalive from becoming Canada’s next national new wireless Carrier. This 14 months and 450 billion million dollars after this same government of ours (in this case Industry Canada) took Globalive’s money, approved their ownership structure and welcomed the new entrant to the industry.

Ironically, it was Telus who explains this decision the best: “CRTC makes the only Globalive decision it could“. The addendum to which would be “…after we ourselves, in a pique of legal jackassery, vigorously lodged the very official complaint thus forcing CRTC to abide to the letter of their antiquated and anti-competitive governing act despite it’s obvious contraction of the expressed policy of the Canadian government and people in this case.”

But don’t blame the incumbents. You know, other new entrants were equally pissed if/that Globalive would be seen to be receiving special treatment. The fact is that the Canadian capital markets are too small. All the other entrants (and even the incumbents in the past) have struggled mightily to build out their infrastructure while meeting the ownership requirements of last century’s Canada Telcom Act.

The real culprit here is our own bumbling goverment (Governments plural really) for a decade now, who have failed to reform or de-regulate foreign ownership, and who’ve failed modernize Canada’s regulatory governance in any coherent way to advance Canada in the digital economy.

Tony Clement, we’re looking at you.

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.