Yesterday, I reported on Ted Rogers speech to the Canadian Club in Ottawa and I mentioned that there would be a response from Pierre Karl Péladeau of Quebecor today.

I have just returned from the lunch and here are some highlights from his speech.

To be fair, I will not add commentary – my views on the AWS spectrum auction can be found by reading postings on this site over the past year.

Here are some of the statements:

like you I have not had a chance to actually use an iPhone. It’s not available in Canada. 1 million have already been sold south of the border.

Americans can pay about $60 a month to use this iPhone. In Canada, this same phone will likely cost between $260 to $879 a month. In fact the National Post recently ran a story featuring a reknown expert in the field, who estimated it would cost $900 a month to use all the functions of the iPhone in Canada.

Some of the advocacy advertising was present, as the accompanying graphic shows, with a strangled Blackberry under the weight of chains.

Pierre Karl cited the statements from RIM’s Don Morrison from earlier in the year:

The COO of RIM believes that Canadian carriers could increase the number of BlackBerries they sell each week by eight or nine times if they simply lowered their prices to the levels seen in such countries as Germany, France and Spain. Eight or nine times the current sales volume!

The very symbol of the Canadian wireless success is being denied to Canadians. That’s a real shame but it does tell us something very concerning about the wireless industry in Canada, and that is the focus of my address today.

He spoke about free markets:

The Canadian market would be considered free if it were open to foreign ownership, but I am led to believe a truly open market is simply not in the cards politically right now. Too many issues come to play. So we find ourselves among Canadian providers, asking the federal government to set rules that best guarantee a higher level of wireless competition.

I may write something about these points later. In the meantime, I’ll let you judge for yourselves. The complete text is available on-line.

Technorati Tags:
Quebecor, AWS

University of Waterloo has created a Media and Mobility Network Project (MMNP), which is intended to explore and develop advanced communications solutions for students on campus.

The project’s genesis came from a recognition that a lot of the traditional phone and TV lines in the dorms were not being used as students migrated to mobile services and video downloading.

As the project definition describes, the concept has grown to become more multi-disciplinary:

The Project will dovetail with a Faculty of Arts initiative to apply research from the Humanities and Social Sciences into various means of content creation and information delivery to UW students, and to collaborate with business partners to create a business model for the digital delivery of information (news, commentary, advertising interactive content, and the like) in a post-newspaper age.

Waterloo has begun to play with some of the advanced technology and the university is seriously moving forward to change the nature of communications services being provided in the 2008-2009 school year.

Service providers should sit up and take notice.

I met with the MMNP team in early September and this group is serious about demonstrating progress. The project is especially exciting because of the diversity of the university organizations involved in shaping the project, including the types of representatives from the Faculty of Arts that can explore deeper communications issues I raised on Monday.

With the University of Waterloo’s profile among the people who are creating the next generation of technology and services, you can expect that there will be a number of folks who should be watching what is going on with Waterloo’s MMNP.

Bell Canada has announced an unlimited mobile data plan for $75 per month. Details are available on the Bell website.

The plan is designed for wireless connection cards operating on Bell’s EVDO Rev A high speed mobile network, offering peak upload speeds of up to 1.8 Mbps and peak download speeds of up to 3.1 Mbps and covering about 70% of the Canadian population. The small print says that Bell’s acceptable use policies apply, meaning you agree not to use you device in a manner that “consumes excessive network capacity in Bell’s reasonable opinion, or causes our network, or our ability to provide services to others, to be adversely affected.”

A clause that will raise eyebrows is that you also agree not to use the service “for multi-media streaming, voice over Internet protocol or any other application which uses excessive network capacity that is not made available to you by Bell.” Well, so much for unlimited service!

These restrictions seem to conflict with some of the freedom that is promoted in the press release and may be artifacts of an older acceptable use policy. I’ll post an update if Bell lets me know that these restrictions no longer apply.

System access fees apply, so the monthly cost is actually $84, but this a dramatic improvement in data services affordability.

How will other carriers respond?

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Update [October 24, 10:50 am]
Today’s NY Times includes a story about Verizon settling a case with the NY attorney general’s office. According to the story, New York found that Verizon Wireless had marketed certain mobile internet plans as “unlimited,” without disclosing that actions like downloading movies and playing games online were prohibited.

Technorati Tags:
Bell, EVDO

The certification of a class action suit on system access fees has driven a lot of extra eyeballs to this site today.

When I first looked at my web-stats today, I thought the extra hits would have been due to my coverage of Ted Rogers’ speech at the Canadian Club but in addition, a lot of people visited my older blog posts about:

1. I hate system access fees, from September 2006
2. Clarifying system access fees, from December 2006
3. CRTC ducks issue of system access fees, from July 2007
4. System access fees, one of my earliest posts from March 2006

My earlier posts continue to express my views on the subject.

You can usually count on Ted Rogers to come up with an entertaining speech, especially when parts of the business are being put at risk by government intervention.

In today’s speech at The Canadian Club in Ottawa, Ted said that the handouts being sought by large, well financed companies seeking to become new entrants would make them “The all-time corporate welfare bums in Canadian History!”

Here is a sample:

Remember that Canada had a fourth national carrier called Microcell with the FIDO brand that became insolvent in 2002 and was refinanced at huge losses to its debt holders only to be headed in the same direction again until Rogers rescued it in 2004.

So there were four carriers in Canada and the fourth one couldn’t make a go of it. One of our most vocal critics in the current debate is Vidéotron. As I have said Vidéotron was a minority shareholder in Microcell. When the Canadian wireless industry was not profitable and Microcell was in trouble, what did Vidéotron do? Did they spend more money as Rogers did and double down on what many considered to be a risky bet? No, they sold out of the business and left Microcell to sink or swim.

Now that the wireless business is profitable, Vidéotron wants back in with a few handouts from their competitors and subsidies and patronage from the government.

Ted also took a shot at MTS Allstream:

Another company that is pointing the finger of blame is MTS, the phone company in Manitoba. But they have been providing wireless for 20 years in Manitoba. They were one of the original licensees. They say that Canadian prices are too high and they say that Canadian wireless networks are not advanced enough. But it is their own pricing they are complaining about and their own dated CDMA technology at which they are pointing their fingers.

They would have you believe that if they offered service across Canada that suddenly their prices will drop and their technology will improve. What a specious argument. Talk about sucking and blowing at the same time.

He concluded by saying that he doesn’t oppose new entry.

We just think that new entrants should buy the spectrum in an open auction like everyone else. They are large, well-financed companies and they should put their money up like every other wireless provider.

Pierre-Karl Peladeau is speaking at Toronto’s Empire Club tomorrow and his speech, entitled “Why pay more and get less? Taking on Canada’s Protected Wireless Market” will have lots of rebuttal.

I plan to provide a review of the Empire Club speech tomorrow.

Technorati Tags:
Rogers, AWS