Tom (of WirelessNorth fame) ran a great workshop at LIFT08 on the future of wireless (sorry I missed it – so many choices!). The slides are on Slideshare:
In announcing the rules to the upcoming (May 2008) advanced spectrum auction, industry minister Jim Prentice has blasted open the doors to new wireless competition in Canada and has basically told the old heavyweights to back off.
The mobile and wireless services space is evolving rapidly. Just a few months ago, hundreds of bloggers and their commenters raged against the wireless data pricing situation in Canada. In July RIM joined the chorus publicly. Suddenly, there are signs of movement in the Canadian market, with Bell Mobility offering 1GB wireless data for $60/month or unlimited data for $75/month. Will Telus and Rogers/Fido follow suit?
In the United States, Apple’s iPhone has become the latest in a long string of must-have devices from the company that reinvented how we buy and listen to music. The total impact of the iPhone remains to be seen, but there is no question that it’s shaking up the wireless device industry with typically obsessive attention to user experience and hardware/software/services integration.
There is still no word on when Rogers/Fido will bring our iPhones to Canada. Gadget afficionados outside the U.S. are getting iPhones through grey market and not-so-grey-market channels and are now able to easily unlock the iPhone for use on the GSM network of their choice. Apple’s new iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone without the phone, features WiFi, the best mobile browser yet seen and a WiFi iTunes music store, may indicate the trojan horse strategy underneath the hood of iPhone.
Meanwhile, in the U.S. the FCC is setting the rules for the 700 MHz spectrum auction to take place in January, 2008. This spectrum is being retired from the UHF broadcast television spectrum to be retired by 2009 as broadcast makes the final transition to digital and is ideal for wireless broadband services.
The emerging rules point towards some kind of open access provisions on a portion of that spectrum to allow any device or software on any network. Google caused a wave with a $4.6 billion commitment based on getting open access provisions into the auction rules. Now there are reports that Apple might join Google’s effort to pry open the U.S. wireless market, and we can also expect eBay (which owns Skype) to get into the action. The iPod Touch WiFi provides some hints about why Apple would want to enter this market despite the massive capital investment and the low-margin nature of the business.
In Canada, 2008 marks the Advanced Wireless Services (“AWS”) spectrum auction, with similar discussion about creating a more open and more competitive field for wireless service in Canada. This is not the same kind of spectrum as the 700 MHz auction in the U.S., which is still a couple of years off as Canada’s planned transition to digital television is mandated for August, 2011.
The 2008 Canadian AWS auction is for spectrum in the 2 GHz range for 3G cellular mobile networks and “other advanced technologies”. The two sides of the debate are represented by the incumbent members of the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (“CWTA”) and the hopeful new market entrants of the Coalition for Wireless Competition (“3GCC”), led by Quebecor Media (Videotron) and MTS Allstream.
At the risk of oversimplifying, the 3GCC coalition is pushing for rules that give some kind of preference or encouragement to new market entrants including mechanisms for tower-sharing, while the CWTA is arguing that the “free market” should determine the outcome with an open auction and no such provisions. The rules haven’t yet been announced, but watch this space for updates.
I’m looking forward to covering the mobile/wireless space a lot more in 2008. As the network becomes increasingly ubiquitous and devices continue to shrink and improve in terms of user experience, amazing new possibilities for innovation will be presenting themselves. No doubt the battle for supremacy in the Telcos vs. New Entrants debates in the United States and Canada will be fascinating to watch. The implications are also huge for the development of a new and expanded ecosystem of technologies and content companies, which all makes for a very interesting historical moment for consumers, geeks and wonks everywhere.
From Tom Purves:
And all levels of government say that “ICT� competitiveness is key factor in Canada’s future economic prosperity. Ya. Right. I would like to say that Canada is a 3rd world country when it comes to Mobile ICT, except you can clearly see from this chart that even *Rwanda* has orders of magnitude better Mobile Data service than Canada.
The graphic is shocking.
The mobile content and platform innovation and competitiveness implications are massive. Blog about it. Digg this story.
I have resisted all smartphones and PDAs up to now. Blackberry was too corporate. Treo seemed too crappy and poorly integrated with the rest of my life. Motorola…well I never really took it seriously. And I really hate the whole structure of being locked into a mobile provider’s network, content and the exorbitant data pricing in Canada.
How I lust for this thing. Impossibly thin. iPod, phone and internet communicator. Fantastic form factor and absolutely breakthrough user interaction. Thin, widescreen, gorgeous. WiFi, GSM, Bluetooth, EDGE. Integrated with ITunes content. Partnered with Google and Yahoo. A real web browser experience. Running OS X. A real computer. $599 USD for 8GB model.
It won’t be introduced until June in the US in partnership with Cingular. How much longer before a Canadian can get one?
I am panting in breathless anticipation.
Ohmigod, that’s so gay. (via Wonkette)
Just when you thought that every Republican politician and staffer, evangelist church pastor and Catholic priest is gay, comes more of the same. Ken Mehlman, Chair of the Republican National Committee is a forty-something clean-cut single white male with good skin. YouTube captures Bill Maher outing him on Larry King. Blogactive did a parody ad (based on the anti-Ford negative ad in Tennessee) that riffed on the “Mehlman is gay” story rumour.
Is outing anybody, even a public figure, ever fair-game? I would argue that coming out is a deeply personal thing and nobody else’s business, but when a politician or somebody else with the power to influence the lives of others demonstrates their own hypocrisy on the subject, they put themselves in jeopardy. The dirty non-secret is that the public service and policy wonks, writers and commentators and the diplomatic corps are full of gay folk. Politics and policy is, after all, creative work – just like home decor.
Beyond the principal of individual privacy, all gay people (and “men who sleep with men”) in public life must realize that in a world of ubiquitous camera-phones with video and YouTube, there is no hiding who you are. I would also argue that we are all public people to some degree – we are involved in our communities, we participate in the marketplace. Human beings are social animals. In a post Cluetrain social-media enabled world, having an honest and authentic identity is a critical part of citizenship. As Jon Stewart puts it, “you can’t run from gay”.
So, before any video appears on YouTube showing me dancing with my arms up high, let me pre-empt by saying that yes your Remarkk author is a gay man. Deal.
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