Marathon Canadian spectrum auction finally wraps up
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Jul 22nd 2008 11:26AM
posted Jul 22nd 2008 11:26AM
Holy cow, we're actually out of breath just thinking about how long it's been since Canada kicked this off. After running some two months and hauling in nearly three times as much cash as had been widely predicted -- $4.2 billion in Canadian currency, to be exact -- the Great White North's AWS auction has drawn to a close, and it looks like there's going to be some new competition in the mix whether Rogers, Bell, and Telus like it or not. The most prolific bidder has turned out to be Globalive, which runs the Yak brand and made off with licenses pretty much everywhere except Quebec at the cost of some $442 million CAD; several other new players came to bat for some licenses as well, and naturally, the big three incumbents took the opportunity to snap up some extra spectrum -- Rogers to the tune of nearly one billion dollars. It'll probably be a year or two before any of the rookies have service to offer, though they're helped out by new regulations that require existing networks to lease space on towers for new transceivers and offer roaming rates that aren't prohibitively high.[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
now that this is over telus can finally get to announcing their gsm network coming soon ;)
yes that is confirmed and u can quote me
Now, are they going to be a dual-network operator (like China Unicom is now) maintaining their CDMA at the same time as GSM, or will they dump CDMA for GSM (like China Unicom will be doing in the near future)? If they plan on dumping CDMA the transitioning period will be filled with a predominantly Chinese phone selection (with some Samsung and LG- those are the only non-Chinese manufacturers making CDMA phones with North America-compatible GSM).
they will be running both
Telus currently runs 2 networks already
CDMA & iDEN. If they add GSM then they will have 3 networks to run
it would make sense if both bell and telus would keep CDMA for 3 years after the last subscription to CDMA so people can switch after their contract is up, as it would cost both companies less money on giving the new phones away for a lower price (or free) to allow the customer to stay on the contract.
I'm surprised that Jim Prentice didn't call the bid unfair and just awarded to Rogers Wireless, BIG contributor to the Liberal Party of Canada. It should be interesting what comes out of this, then again Yak might just get bought out by Rogers and we're all at square one again. Unlike America monopolies are legal in Canada.
Let's hope if Yak becomes a takeover target by Rogers, that the Competition board and the CRTC stops it. I don't want to see another Rogers / Fido (Microcell) monopoly fiasco again