As my late afternoon update suggested yesterday, the race is on for wireless spectrum. It looks like most Canadians are going to have a substantial increase in choices when their mobile contracts come up for renewal. A year from now, most Canadians may be able to choose from 2 or 3 new facilities based wireless service providers.

The increased choice isn’t just for Canadians in major cities. In reviewing the applicant list, it appears that in some parts of the country, there could be a variety of specialized regional players.

There seems to be some mis-information and a lot of unknowns surrounding the first round of information released yesterday by Industry Canada in respect of applicants for the AWS auction in May.

I am happy to try to help clarify. First off, I should clarify that bid points are not the same as licenses. Bid points are a kind of proxy for the population covered in a geographic area multiplied by the number of megahertz – the size of the slice of spectrum being auctioned.

There are a total of 292 licenses coming up for auction. Each license covers a different geographic area and slice of spectrum, ranging from whole provinces down to sub-regions. Some of the licenses are for 20 MHz; some for 5 MHz. You can review the full list on Industry Canada’s website.

To bid for 10 MHz in all of the geographic regions of Canada takes 620 points. By the time Industry Canada considers your application complete, you need to have supplied a letter of credit as a deposit to cover the eligibility points you request. For the first 300 points, the deposit required is $40,000 per point. Everything over 300 points needs $140,000 per point.

So, to do some interpretation of the applications, we can see that Rogers wants the flexibility to be able to bid in all 65 MHz that isn’t set-aside for new entrants. That requires 6.5 times 620 bid points for a total of 4030. To determine the deposit required, the first 300 points are $40K ($12M) and the remaining 3730 points are $140K ($522.2M) for a total of $534.2M.

You can see that Telus wants the flexibility to bid on the equivalent of 30 MHz nationwide. Bell’s points equate to 20 MHz nationwide with enough points left over for another 10 MHz covering about half the population.

Looking at the other applicants, Niagara Networks appears to want to bid on everything – all 105 MHz – everywhere. MTS Allstream and Quebecor have enough points to be looking at national plays for all 40 MHz of new entrant spectrum – with a little left over in the case of MTS Allstream.

Although they aren’t the biggest bidder, Sasktel has applied for enough points to handle all the spectrum in Saskatchewan – with 3 points left over. Saskatchewan requires 20 points per 10 MHz slice. Watch for Saskatchewan to be a spoiler for companies looking to acquire a national license.

A colleague reminds me that Wireless Number Portability in Canada celebrates its first birthday today.

March 14, 2007 was the launch of consumers being able to take their number with them if they changed their wireless carrier. In Canada, the systems allow consumers to port numbers between wireless and wireline, increasing consumer choice and facilitating wireless substitution – cutting the cord completely.

As another step toward increased consumer choice, today is also the day that Industry Canada will release the list of applicants to participate in the AWS auction.

Happy birthday to Wireless Number Portability. Consumers can raise a toast to even more choice being on its way.

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Update [March 14, 5:30 pm]
The list of Applicants is now available on the Industry Canada website. There are 30 companies who have applied, ranging from Niagara Networks looking for a whopping 6510 bid points for almost $900M in deposits, down to a few firms looking for only 2 bid points at $80,000. At the end of the month, we’ll see which of these 30 contestants remain in the running. Industry Canada will be reviewing the paperwork and verifying the Letters of Credit to see who gets voted off the island.

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WNP, AWS

Yesterday, I wrote about the paradox of diverse viewpoints on the internet. In the interest of helping to present you with an alternate perspective, let me tell you about the release of book called “For Sale to the Highest Bidder: Telecom Policy in Canada” earlier this week from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. In the book, the “S” is written using a dollar sign.

There are a couple excerpts available on-line – the introduction and a piece about the privatization of BCE by the OTPP. From what I have read so far, this book clearly espouses a different view than what you can expect to usually read on this website.

For example, the chapter entitled Strange Bedfellows at BCE asserts the deal may betray a type of comradeship between the teachers’ union and the Bell unions:

As it now stands, we have a bizarre situation where teachers, who are unionized and tend to be progressive politically, find their pension funds used to increase foreign ownership which they likely oppose and which has uncertain consequences for their brothers and sisters in the acquired company. The transformation of the pension funds of workers into just another variety of profit-maximizing firms should be seen as one of the lost opportunities to transform capitalism, at least marginally, toward a human scale.

It is unclear that there is any pseudo-scientific research to back these claims. Are teachers more “progressive politically”? Would teachers choose to have OTPP invest with political motives or be primarily profit driven?

There is no presumption that the employees of such bought-up companies, or anyone other than the select list of the equity fund’s shareholders, benefit from this shuffling of the cards. The increasing prevalence of such activities, which benefit the few at the expense of the many, presumably helps to explain why the overall distribution of income and wealth has worsened in developed countries.

This paragraph ignores the fact that the “select list of the equity fund’s shareholders” is a very large list of current and future teachers. What is the factual basis to throw out a line like “the overall distribution of income and wealth has worsened in developed countries”? Would anyone really prefer to have the distribution of poverty in under-developed countries?

I have not yet spent the $15 plus shipping and handling to be able to read the whole book, although I’m not sure I need that much diversity in my reading diet. With their progressive agenda, I’m surprised that CCPA is chopping trees down to print their book, burning carbon to ship it and deliver it. Why not simply use the web to distribute the material under a creative commons license?

Maybe I’m just waiting to be able to download it for free.

Last Sunday, Rex Murphy’s Cross Country Checkup (on CBC Radio One) explored “Are There Legitimate Limits to Free Expression?”

You can download the program in MP3 format or listen to it using Real Audio.

The program explored the debate on various fronts: human rights commission complaints, campus discourse, government funding of films. I’m not going to contribute to the hyperbole being generated around Bill C-10. I’ll leave it to others to sort out the confusion between withdrawal of taxpayer support and the issue of censorship.

I’d like to look at diversity on the internet. The host’s introduction to the program asked:

Free speech is taken to be many to be the absolute central engine of a functioning democracy. Is it giving way before the pressures of political correctness, or the emergence of bureaucratic bodies under the guise of “protecting against potential future offenses?” Or are there justifiable limits to free speech? …and if there are …who should decide …and how?

A number of callers were concerned that magazines and journals were not giving sufficient space for opposing viewpoints. One caller suggested that a 100 word letter to the editor is hardly a fair response to a 6000 word essay.

One of the points that the host made was that in an internet era, an infinitely wide array of diverse views are possible. But I would suggest that conventional media has often been more effective at presenting opposing viewpoints – especially informed viewpoints.

Let me offer an observation of a possible paradox of internet media: While we have never had greater access to diverse viewpoints, we are also better empowered to restrict our news sources to those channels, blogs, RSS streams that are more likely to align with our current thinking.

A recent piece observes:

Web 2.0 is a mass movement that lends legitimacy to the majority opinion and uses peer pressure as an effective tool against those who disagree with the consensus.

In a Web 2.0 world, information is not usually imparted directly from authority. It either arrives through social networks or is sought out directly by individuals. The search methods in Web 2.0 favor the volume of supporters of a narrative and have little relationship to the degree of truth in the narrative.

Just as the internet empowers increased access to diverse viewpoints, we might wonder if its narrowcasting capability enables increased isolation from such diversity.

An article in last Monday’s New York Times talks about a joint initiative by the six largest cable companies in the US to develop a capability for advertisers to buy targeted and interactive ads.

Cable companies would presumably leverage information collected by set-top boxes in order to deliver ads that the Times suggests are better focussed than Google. It is all to increase the cable companies’ share of the $70 billion spent on television advertising in the United States.

The executives involved in Project Canoe think that, by working together, they can increase the cable industry’s take from $5 billion a year to $15 billion a year

When will these technology and agency capabilities migrate into Canada? Would Canadian cable companies create a similar consortium?

Do consumers have any idea of how much information is being gathered in their set-top boxes?

Technorati Tags:
cable TV, NY Times