Will Bell Canada buyout lead to a GSM conversion?
By Sean Cooper 
posted Jul 6th 2007 8:16AM
posted Jul 6th 2007 8:16AM
Now that BCE's $51.7 billion buyout looks solid with the potential victory going to the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, we can finally issue a collective sigh or relief. Bell is likely going to stay Bell, no merger with Telus looms on the Horizon, and all is well and good in Canadian CDMA-land. Or is it? The Financial Post is reporting on some Analyst's predictions that will see Bell shift from CDMA to GSM. We see these types of rumors surface now and again, and while Bell likely salivates at Rogers Wireless' annual $450 million GSM roaming revenue, the cost of said conversion would be out of the park. Of course, this is all fantasy 'til we here something official but we definitely aren't counting chickens around here. 
Ive been a cell phone rep for fido for five years and I can tell you that Ive heard alot of rumors troughout the years about different scenarios for bell. One thing Ive heard since Ive moved to whistler area (british-colombia where olympic will be held next year) is that bell is planning on lounching the 4G gsm network prior to the olympic coming to us. So we'll see if thats true or not.
Personnally I hope this is true, It sucks for bell user (and telus as well) who need to call or go online and wait 24 hours to get there ISN change just to get a new phone when you can just wake up in the morning and pick the phone that you wanna use for that specific day (remember dont take your expensive blackberry or iphone to go ski or snowboard!). ;-p
SO WHAT!!! This is stupid for a few reasons. If Bell leaves CDMA and goes GSM, they would shoot themselves in the foot, currently they have deals with Telus to share towers. To covert over would cost MILLIONS, unlikely when a teacher's pension association is riding on it. Lastly, it would not add competition in Canada...I suspect prices to stay exactly the same. Come play Monopoly in Canada.
-M.
no way in hell this is going to happen. Bell has a lot of people covered with their phones etc.
What will all those tradesmen do without their chunky old-school motorola and nokia handsets???
While I'm sure Rogers makes much more coin off roaming than Bell, there's still SOME roaming going on. Sprint roams on Bell... don't know if Verizon roams on Bell or Telus (it used to be Bell)
CDMA-to-GSM isn't unthinkable... it's been done in Australia and most of South America. And the sky didn't fall when North American TDMA nets switched to GSM (even though some folks still cling on to their TDMA sets today...)
Whether it's worth the investment here, wow... I have no idea. If they do end up doing it, let's have it be 3G -- a CDMA-to-WCDMA switch.
Well, Roger used to be CDMA in the past and switched to gsm just before acquiring fido.
I really doubt that Bell will move to GSM for a few reason, the first being we've already got alot of money invested into the CDMA network. Also, at this stage there isn't so much of a point, as the future of both GSM and CDMA currently looks like they'll be merging into one similar technology which carriers of both GSM and CDMA will carry. I think the biggest thing about the teachers pension plan deal, is bell can really focus on rolling out these increible new speeds.