Alec Saunders SquawkBox

It was hard not to get caught up in the excitement over the Nexus One announcement at the beginning of this week.  With pundits declaring that Google’s entry into the smartphone market would be a game changer, and reviewers claiming that Nexus One was like an open Apple iPhone, the hype meter was fairly off the charts! 

Disappointingly, Canadians making a trip to the Nexus One web page were confronted by a notice stating that the phone was not yet available in Canada.  No matter, many of us said, we’ll just buy it on eBay.

That might not be such a good idea. 

The patchwork of 3G bands emerging in North America makes the Nexus One a very poor phone for most Canadian mobile customers. Rogers, Telus and Bell operate on 850Mhz and 1900Mhz frequencies, while the Nexus One operates on 2100Mhz, 1700Mhz, and 900Mhz.  For Canadian customers of the big 3 carriers, high speed data on Nexus One will not be available.

There is a ray of hope for Canadians who want a Nexus One.  One carrier in Canada providing service on the 1700Mhz AWS band today is Wind Mobile.  The as yet unlaunched DAVE Wireless will also apparently provide 1700Mhz service. 

Frankly, the most deflating part of this launch story is that 3G hasn’t meant an intelligent rationalization of frequencies.  We remain mired in the tar-pit of frequency allocation strategies, driving up handset costs in order to support roaming and effectively locking specific devices to specific carrier networks.

Meh!

My venerable BlackBerry Curve has just come out of contract with Rogers, so I’m in the market for a new BlackBerry and my pals at RIM tell me that the BlackBerry 9700 “Onyx” is the one to have.  Not only that, but here in Canada Telus and Bell have both just launched new HSPA+ networks that compete directly with Rogers.  Unless you’ve been living under a rock, there’s no way you could have missed the full page ads that Bell has been running in the papers.

Identical networks, identical phones… it seems like an ideal opportunity to compare service providers, no?

On the surface, it looks as if Bell and Telus are getting really aggressive.  Bell’s price for the 9700 is $229, Telus’ $249, and Rogers $299. Winner, Bell!

And what about the plans?

My experience on iPhone has shown me that I’m not a super heavy mobile data user, and I’ve got a 3G stick so I don’t need to tether to my laptop. I’m looking for a modest number of minutes that can be used throughout North America, and a data plan that will give me between 500M and 1G of usage in any month.

• For $40/month Rogers offers 450 local minutes.  1G of data is an additional $30, and North American long distance is $25, bringing the total to $95, plus taxes, fees and so on.
• For $65/month Telus offers 450 local minutes plus 1G of data.  Add a North American LD plan for another $35, and the total is $100, plus taxes, fees and so on.
• For $60/month, Bell offers 600 local minutes, plus 1G of data.  The North American LD plan adds another $30, and that brings the total to $90 per month, plus taxes, fees and the like.

Heavens!  Bell offers more for less money than Telus or Rogers.  Bell wins again!

Even taking into account the $35 activation fee that Telus and Rogers would charge me to switch, over the lifetime of the contract Telus is the most expensive at $3,884, and Bell the cheapest at $3,504.

Note that this doesn’t take into account the fact that Bell has given me an extra 150 minutes of usage per month as well.  Since I rarely exceed 450 minutes per month on this device (my primary phone is the iPhone) it’s unlikely I would need that insurance policy, but it’s certainly nice to have.

When you net it out, I could save $215 over 3 years by switching from Rogers to Bell.  That’s $5.97 per month. 

Is it enough?  For most people, probably not. I might switch this one phone away from Rogers just to see how good the Bell network is, but ordinarily even I wouldn’t consider the switch for $6 per month in savings.

I’m still waiting to see what happens when the real competition starts between these behemoths.

There was big news here in Soviet Canuckistan today.  Next month, Bell and Telus will both start selling the Apple iPhone.  What?  “How is that possible”, you ask. “Aren’t Bell and Telus tied to ancient CDMA technology?”

Both are rolling out network upgrades to HSPA technology in time for the 2010 Olympics, putting them on an equal footing with Rogers.  Bell says that they will be lighting up their HSPA network by the end of November – less than two months away – while Telus hasn’t made a commitment on dates yet.

It’s not just about the iPhone, however.  Both networks should work with any foreign phones that support the appropriate HSPA networks.  Bell and Telus customers will have access to an extraordinary range of phones that were previously only usable on the Rogers network. Bell has even said that they will unlock handsets for customers (for a price).

This is a great day indeed, because finally, meaningful competition is coming to Canadian networks. 

Yesterday YouTube doubled the upload limit available to users in response the increasing number of high definition videos that are being sent to the site.  Now you can upload a 2G file, instead of a 1G file.   YouTube has made it easier to upload a high definition file as well. According to Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee.com, YouTube has done this because “HD videos are now becoming a significant part of the YouTube library”.

They look gorgeous, no doubt.  Check out this trailer from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.  Click the full screen button to see the full impact.  It’s really darned impressive.

Don’t expect to see a lot of Canadian high definition content, however.   Not that there aren’t people in this country shooting high definition video, who might have a strong desire to share that video.  It’s simply a matter of bandwidth and usage caps. All broadband providers in Canada, excepting a few small outfits in Vancouver, cap usage at between 50 and 150G of transfer per month, and restrict upload speeds to under 1 megabit per second, except Shaw who have raised their upload limit to a meagre 2 megabits.  We’d be in our graves before YouTube received our videos at these speeds.

Pathetic, no? Even worse, most of the small business offerings from these providers consist of repackaged residential service, with a better service agreement and a higher price.

Does it matter if a few people can’t upload video?  Perhaps not, unless you’re a Canadian culture supporter or Heritage Minister James Moore.  But what about the other impacts of capped usage and restricted upload bandwidth – the economic and environmental impacts?  Applications like VPN, remote desktop, and VoIP are the cornerstones of telecommuting strategies.  Those applications are dependent on high speed upload as well as download.  When telecommuting is impaired, it has an economic impact to business, and an environmental impact on society.  We should all care about that!

So how about it Rogers, Bell, Telus, Shaw and Videotron?  Download speeds have increased steadily over the last decade, but we’ve had upload speeds of under 1Mbs since the dawn of broadband.  Shouldn’t we have better?

Truphone’s announcement last week of Truphone Local Anywhere was the formal unveiling of their strategy to become a force in the mobile operator world.  Truphone Local Anywhere will not launch for some months yet, but the essence of it is that Truphone will deliver customers a GSM SIM that can operate locally in multiple countries.  As a customer, you might have a UK phone number, a US phone number, a Canadian phone number, and a Mexican phone number, for example, and pay local calling rates in all those countries.  Roaming becomes a thing of the past. 

This is a direct assault on one of the most profitable sources of operator income in the mobile world.  Roaming charges are the surest way for an operator to make huge profits.  Example: here in Canada Rogers charges users $0.90 per minute to roam in the United States.  Presumably there’s a revenue split with the American carrier hosting the call, but the charges are huge nevertheless.  This, in a world where it costs under a penny per minute to terminate a call anywhere in North America.

Truphone claims that with Truphone Anywhere Local, users will pay a rate competitive with local mobile rates.  Mobile travellers will no longer require a case full of local SIMs when travelling.  Truphone will provide local data, voice and text rates as if you were a resident of the country.

Truphone’s James Tagg told me that there are practically no limits on the SIM itself.  One could conceivably have over 100 countries on a single SIM.  Truphone, however, has not yet released the subscription model, which means that it’s still unclear what the cost will be (if any) to add additional countries and numbers. 

According to Truphone CEO Geraldine Wilson, the product will be targeted at frequent international travellers – pilots, business travellers, expat families, people who own multiple homes, and so on.  When asked how large the market was, Ms. Wilson pointed out that there are 300 million roamers today, and another 700 million travellers. 

The product won’t ship for many months yet.  The reason Truphone announced Truphone Local Anywhere at last week’s Mobile World Congress was to attract distribution partners in different countries.  In some cases, they expect to work directly with the incumbent mobile operator, in others to partner with an MVNO, and in others they will work with “non-traditional channels that operators don’t necessarily have access to”, according to Ms. Wilson.

Here in Canada, Bell and Telus are busy deploying new GSM networks in advance of the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010. Not wanting to be left out of the roaming “gusher” that the games will trigger, they’ve accelerated plans to replace their CDMA networks. Inevitably, though, roaming prices must fall here. Partnering with Truphone Local Anywhere would be a gutsy move that would differentiate them from market leader Rogers / Fido in a very identifiable way. Anybody in Toronto or Scarborough listening?