Somehow, Canada has lost a major city of 700,000 people and two provinces. Manitoba and Saskatchewan, including the city of Winnipeg, have gone AWOL as far as some of the submissions in the AWS consultation are concerned.
Case in point: There is a report on current spectrum holdings attached to the submission by Mobilexchange, which seems to have forgotten about the Canadian mid-west.
The report states:
- Canadian cellular licensing in 1983 and PCS licensing in 1995 both resulted in national license footprints for the carriers. In 2001 Industry Canada auctioned “additional” PCS spectrum divided into 14 license regions (“Tier 2” areas).
- All of the spectrum from Canadian awards is now held by Rogers, Bell and Telus
“All” is a pretty powerful word. It means everything. The entire shooting match. Nothing but. So if “all of the spectrum from Canadian awards is now held by Rogers, Bell and Telus,” that would mean no one else has any spectrum.
Up until I read that report, I thought that the ILECs in Manitoba and Saskatchewan were facilities-based wireless carriers. I thought they got their spectrum in the original cellular license awards and have been paying license fees for 20 years. But the report says only Bell, Rogers and TELUS hold spectrum from those awards, so what happened to Sasktel and MTS Allstream. Maybe the report writers didn’t really mean “all.”
They meant all but the holders of licenses covering the 12% of the country’s land area smack in the middle of the map, including one of the 10 largest cities in the country. Any other errors and omissions? Don’t forget to check on some of the other license holders, like independent telcos.
Why is this important? One might ask if Winnipeg is an example of what can happen when 4 licensed facilities-based carriers compete to serve a major metropolitan area. There are interesting questions to examine. The competitive behaviour of a regional operator with 3 national carriers. The impact on penetration rates, end user pricing, deployment of new technologies and services, etc.
It would be a study worth looking at. But first we need to make sure that Manitoba and Saskatchewan are still considered part of Canada by respondents to the consultation process. Then we need a survey that provides the real details on spectrum holdings by all the carriers in Canada – even in those markets that have inconvenient truths.
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Manitoba, Saskatchewan, AWS, spectrum