Lacavera had this to say:

“Earlier today, the shareholders of Russian mobile telephone operator VimpelCom voted in support of a $6 billion deal to acquire WIND Telecom, whose assets include Orascom Telecom, a significant shareholder in WIND Mobile. The parties are now moving to close the deal, likely sometime in the first half of 2011.

This transaction would create the world’s fifth largest mobile operator by subscribers – more than 173 million subscribers!

This is great news for us. Our partner, Orascom, will be even larger and stronger as a financial partner. This gives us more leverage and increased scale with telecom network equipment manufacturers and more importantly, for devices including handsets and tablets. This will also give us more access to international cooperation for roaming and long distance services. All of that means the ability to deliver even more value to all of our customers.

I will keep you posted as new details emerge.”

Interesting development for sure. This could mean better international rates for Wind subscribers, as well as more capital for buying spectrum in the upcoming auctions, and sway with hardware providers for cheaper network equipment and access to handsets.

The structure of the deal should be interesting, considering that Wind has had trouble dealing with Canada’s foreign ownership rules regarding telecom companies in the past. Expect the CRTC and the current telecom companies to look into this.

The HTC-built and (soon to be) Google-sold device runs Android 2.1 atop a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, a 3.7-inch, 480 x 800 display, has 512MB of ROM, 512MB of RAM, and a 4GB microSD card (expandable to 32GB). The phone is a T-Mobile device (meaning no 3G if you want to take it to AT&T), and includes the standard modern additions of a light sensor, proximity sensor, and accelerometer.

T-Mobile runs their 3G network on the 3G-AWS part of the spectrum which is not the same part as the 3G networks of Verizon, AT&T, and Telus/Bell/Rogers here in Canada. However, Wind Mobile DOES run on 3G-AWS (as will DAVE and Public Mobile), so it looks as though there is a good chance for the Nexus One to come to Canada first through Wind Mobile. We will have to wait and see.

It should also be mentioned that Bell, Telus, and Rogers also have some 3G-AWS spectrum so they will also be able to support the Nexus One once they get those networks up and running.

Wind is listening so let them know what you want, and be sure to vote in the poll below.

What is available now?

As of now, Wind’s lineup consists of just 4 phones: the BlackBerry Bold 9700, HTC Maple, Samsung Gravity 2, and the Huawei 7519.

Why so limited?

The main reason is because Wind purchased spectrum in the new and not widely used 3G advanced wireless service (AWS) band which uses frequencies in the 1700 and 2100 MHz bands. This was the block of spectrum that was up for auction so Wind really had very little choice. In the US, T-Mobile purchased a similar block of spectrum to build their 3G network, and have thus driven some demand for 3G AWS phones, but even that lot is limited.

Think of it this way, Wind is setting up in FM while everyone is still making AM radios.

What is coming?

According to a fellow blogger, the Nokia N900, Sony Xperia X10, and some Android devices will be coming in a couple of months as the manufacturers include hardware support for 3G AWS.

What about the iPhone?

Simple answer: The iPhone is not 3G AWS capable.

There are nothing more than rumours floating around at this point, likely due to the fact that even if Apple had 3G AWS capable phones in the hands of telecom companies for testing purposes they would be under strict NDAs, however, here is what I can tell so far.

First, it looks like North America is moving to adopt 3G AWS. Spectrum is being auctioned off in the US, Canada, and Mexico, and is being bought up. The major telcos all have portions of this spectrum, and the new entrants have been getting bits and pieces here and there as well. Hardware manufacturers will only incur a minimal additional cost to add support for AWS to their devices so there is no reason for them to limit themselves and not adopt the new markets.

Second, there are several articles speculating that T-Mobile will be getting the iPhone in the US when AT&T’s exclusive contract with Apple ends next year. Because T-Mobile’s 3G network is based on 3G AWS, Apple will have to update the hardware in the 4th gen iPhone to include support for this band. It may even be the case that such devices exist, but of course we’ll never hear about them until Apple officially announces something. My guess: we’ll see a 3G AWS iPhone at the next refresh sometime around June 2010.

I decided to see just how Wind Mobile’s new offerings stacked up against the competition so I spent some time and did a rate comparison. I compared the 4 companies across two metrics: The power user who wants to really use their device, and to see what they offered for a $40 a month plan.

Power User: Talks a lot, uses a lot of data, and wants a high-end phone. The BlackBerry Bold 9700 was the phone of choice here, and all plans were as ‘unlimited’ as I could get them without purposely getting the most expensive options for the sake of it.

The $40 Plan: With so many options available out there, I spent several hours trying to piece together a fair comparison of plans. I found my job became much easier when I decided on a $40 a month budget and saw how far it could get me with an emphasis on talk and text.

To ensure parity across all plans, I opted for the no contract options on the Bell/Rogers/Telus plans. Also, for tax purposes, I ensured all plans were selected to be in Ontario (5% GST, 8% PST).

Power User – BlackBerry Bold 9700 – No Contract

Due Today: Wind looks to win out here with the lack of an activation fee and lower handset prices which lets them offer a lower start up cost. Of course you can do better with the competition if you are willing to enter a contract of 3 years; 2 year contracts don’t help very much.

Monthly: Again, Wind is priced significantly lower than the competition and manages to offer unlimited talk time as opposed to “so much it might as well be unlimited”, and unlimited data. Of course you have to stay close to home in order to do this well for now, but if this describes you, then Wind seems to be your choice.

The $40 Plan – No Contract

Monthly: For $40 you definitely get more with Wind. The competitors all offer pretty much identical service here, with Telus offering a slightly more attractive feature set. Wind gives the most extensive feature set and unlimited talk time. I did not include tax, 911 fees, nor a government regulatory recovery fee (Rogers), as it is not entirely clear on the websites as to what is included. Except Wind of course. No extra fees there, so your Wind bill is likely to be a little bit lower than the others.

• All phones sold at cost
• $5 unlimited text add-on
• No contracts/911 fees/start up fees/system access fees as expected
• Same pricing for pre-paid and post-paid plans
• Unlimited wind-to-wind calling
• All plans to have caller-id/missed call alerts/etc

Keep reading for a more in-depth look.

First off, the response to the Wind launch has been incredible. So much so that the Wind online store was knocked off-line for an hour. No matter, here is the basics:

All phones will be sold at cost up front.

Handsets / Devices:

Pretty great prices on those. Sure $450 might be a bit steep for an up-front cost for most people, but you can get a good phone in the Samsung Gravity 2 for just $150. I don’t know about you but my connection fee + taxes + service charge + whatever else ballooned my first bill on my current 3-year contract to well over $150, so really, you can almost consider the $150 phone as being “free”.

Now to the big question: The plans. First off, there’s no such thing as a “fee”. No start up fee, no 911 fee, no system access fee – it looks like this is a +tax operation. That is, the price you see is the price you pay plus tax.

Call Control

Another nicety Wind offers is all of their plans come with caller-id, call waiting, call forwarding, and missed call alerts. No more adding on $2 here, $3 there to get these features.

Voicemail

Voicemail however, is only included on the $45 plan. I’m not too concerned as I almost never check my voicemail anyways. Does anyone really use it much these days? I know whenever I make a call and the person isn’t there, I hang up on the voice mail service and just send a quick text. And of course, when Google Voice finally comes to Canada, that’ll be all the free voicemail you need. To add voicemail on to one of the cheaper plans is a $5 add-on. I think I’ll pass.

Unlimited Texting

What is also not mentioned on the charts below is the inclusion of a $5 unlimited texting add-on. That’s really not half bad. High-school students can text like mad on a $20/month plan – quite reasonable.

Long Distance

What is meant by “long distance” depends on your plan. With the $15 and $35 voice plans, your local area is your province. With the $45 plan, calling is unlimited Canada-wide.

Now, here is something that doesn’t quite make sense to me. If you go to the long-distance add-on page on Wind’s online site, you can add unlimited Canada-wide calling to the $35 Always Talk plan for $10 (the add-on is not available to the $15 Chat plan). That will bring you up to $45, but you won’t get the unlimited texting or voicemail features that you would have gotten if you just went for the $45 Always Shout plan. It seems that this option is pretty useless and I don’t quite understand why they have done this.

The $10 unlimited US long distance is a nice feature, although if you have a phone capable of skype, you can do better if you also have the data plan anyways.

$5 for preferred rates to a certain country is a great feature for students studying here in Canada. I personally know many students here from abroad and an affordable mobile phone plan was one of the things they all struggled with. The $15/mo plan with unlimited text and a preferred rate back home would be a very attractive option for them.

General Comments

Wind certainly did make a big splash today. The plans are flexible and include a lot. No fees, and phones at cost, all without a contract. The only things going against Wind right now are:

1. Limited phone selection (expected to get better).
2. Calgary and Toronto only (for now… Vancouver, Edmonton, and Ottawa in 2010)
3. Roaming of 25c/min (plans are great for city dwellers but not others)
4. Limited HOME zone coverage
5. Limited data plan options

Really though, it is expected that a new entrant into the market will have some shortcomings. It seems as though Wind has put up a valiant effort to mitigate these shortcomings and with time they should improve. The data plan option is a bit steep however. $35/mo for unlimited service is pretty great, but there’s no option for something smaller. $10 for 1GB of data would be a nice option to have.

Voice:

Data:

$15 for a starter plan? $45 for a full-featured, all-inclusive voice plan with unlimited everything? No extra fees? It almost brings a tear to your eye. I also like the fair usage stipulation. You can go nuts for your first 5 GB and after that they just throttle you down rather than cutting you off. I guess they don’t want people using it as their standard home internet connection to download movies, but want you to be able to use it for everything else.

So what is a HOME Zone?

In short, a HOME zone is an area where Wind has their own towers. Right now these areas consist of Toronto (see below), and Calgary. When you are in a HOME zone, you get the above plans and rates as advertised. When you’re AWAY, you pay more – 25c/min for all calls, 10c/25kB of data – but incoming texts are still free. Your phone will apparently make it very obvious as to whether you’re in a HOME or AWAY zone by displaying HOME or AWAY accordingly.

This definitely limits your mobility due to the roaming charges, but if you’re a city-goer who spends most of their time in the city, it’s not so bad. The HOME zone is small, but constantly increasing which is to be expected of a new company.

One nice feature that Wind has included is capping the length of an AWAY call to 120 minutes and trying to make it as obvious to the customer as to when they are incurring the roaming charges.

Toronto HOME Zone

Background

Wind Mobile is the brand under which Globalive Communications Corp, which is owned by the Egyptian wireless company Orascom, will operate in Canada. After successfully buying spectrum in all of Canada except Quebec (more on that later), and being approved to operate by Industry Canada, Globalive faced a potentially disastrous setback when the CRTC ruled that Wind did not meet the requirement that it be Canadian controlled.

Now, the question as to whether Wind is Canadian or not is a matter of contention. Certainly Globalive is not Canadian, and Globalive owns most of Wind’s shares as well as its debt, but the board of directors of Wind is made up of a majority of Canadians, and the majority of the voting shares of Wind are controlled by Canadians. While Wind’s shares are held offshore, and while its debt is owed to foreigners, control of the company apparently remains in Canada. So, is Wind Canadian?

The CRTC thought not.

Fortunately for Wind, Tony Clement, Industry Minister of Canada, disagreed and overturned the CRTC ruling, allowing Wind to operate in Canada. They will go live on Wednesday, December 16th in Calgary and Toronto, opening stores and additionally offering phones in kiosks in Blockbuster stores. Details on pricing will be officially announced Wednesday, but some details on plans have already leaked.

The Network and the Hardware

Wind will operate an HSPA network of 7.2 Mbps (no word yet on HSPA+ 21 Mbps), on what is known as the 3G AWS band (1700/2100). This band uses the 1700 MHz band for uplink and the 2100 MHz band for downlink. This is the same band that T-Mobile uses in the US, but no other carrier in North America uses it. What this means is that there will be a limited offering of phones available for use with Wind (certainly everything T-Mobile offers), at least initially.

Wind has managed, despite this unusual network, to offer a fairly wide range of phones right off the bat, including Blackberry and Samsung phones.

No iPhone

The iPhone does not operate on the 3G AWS band so it will not be offered by Wind initially. This is nothing that Wind can help – the spectrum that was auctioned off is just not compatible with the iPhone. There are some rumours that T-Mobile will get the iPhone in the future in the US, which means that Apple will make future versions of the iPhone compatible with the 3G AWS band that Wind uses.

No Android Either

Sorry. Not yet.

The Industry

As you are likely to know, the Canadian wireless industry is dominated by three major national carriers – Bell, Rogers, and Telus. Wind is launching in Calgary and Toronto in a few days and in several other cities in Q1 of 2010. It is worth mentioning that several other companies will be starting up in Q1 2010 as well – DAVE Wireless will launch in several Canadian cities at that time, Public Mobile will launch in Toronto, and Quebecor’s Videotron will launch in Quebec.

During the period of uncertainty over whether Wind would be allowed to operate in Canada, many believed that the front-runner for challenging the big three was likely to be DAVE. While still a strong contender, it now seems that Wind may have gained an edge with an early start and some media attention. Certainly Wind is doing very well with their handling of the media, getting much play in the newspapers, on tv and online.

Perhaps Wind’s strongest point of contention is that people are likely to see it as “the new guy” who will save us from the big three who have been content to lumber along with the status quo. This impression is furthered by Wind’s website windmobile.ca with its very distinct web 2.0 flavour. It almost resembles twitter.com, both in style and in how user-content-centric it is. You can write a short comment and post it to the Wind website as a suggestion for all to read. Try finding that anywhere else in the Canadian wireless world.

Reactions

Certainly the big three will not let Wind come into their territory without a fight. While I don’t expect any reaction in terms of price cuts immediately, there has already been a reaction from the incumbents. One of the first lessons you learn in any business strategy class is that the incumbents in an oligopoly will do everything they can to raise the barriers of entry for new players.

Quebecor did this with its subsidiary Videotron in Quebec. Videotron paid more for the rights to the 3G AWS spectrum in Quebec than Wind paid for in the rest of Canada. Quebecor essentially made it too expensive for Wind to operate there.

The big three have gone about this largely through lobbying and regulations.

According to spokesman Shawn Hall, Telus, “would not be surprised to see several challenges to the precedent-setting decision,” and is “assessing the decision and our response to it.”

Even the unions are chiming in. The Communications Energy and Paperworkers Union is considering launching a lawsuit to re-ban Wind from operating.

“This decision is illegal,” Dave Coles, president of the Communications Energy and Paperworkers’ union, said today in a phone interview. “There’s no sense in appealing to cabinet.”

“We’re going to challenge it in court,” he said.

Adoption

Wind’s success will be entirely dependent on if they can attract customers. They are off to a good start, gaining media attention and publicity with a positive image and a lot of consumer interaction. Being the first new entrant into the market, edging out DAVE and Public, will certainly help, but it might not be as big of an advantage as one might think.

Due to the fact that many Canadians are tied in to 3-year contracts with their current providers, and are likely unwilling to either pay the ~$400 ETF required to break the contract or to buy the rest of it out, Wind won’t realistically have access to the entirety of the Canadian market for three more years as people slowly come off their contracts. This means that Wind is essentially on the same ground as DAVE – both newcomers to the market trying to pick off people as their contracts end.

Teens

Of course there is one other group Wind can target – teens. Wind can try to be a teen’s first mobility provider – there’s no waiting for a contract to end if the user has never had a mobile phone. This should be a market heavily targeted by the new entrants due to the level playing field and certain demographic advantages.

First, teens are extremely heavy users of text-messaging and less so on voice. Text messaging is a cash cow for wireless providers right now. It is essentially free to implement, yet carries huge premiums (15c a text message anyone?). A plan offering very little voice time, free evenings and weekends, and unlimited text messaging for a low rate would be a great teen plan. Throw in some data and I’d upgrade it to perfect. It becomes hyper-perfect when you consider free Wind-to-Wind calling as well.

Being the new guy would also help with the teen segment. Everyone’s uncool parents talk on their Bell/Rogers/Telus phones. All the cool kids at school use Wind.

Summary

Wind has jumped some hurdles on its way to entering the Canadian mobile telecommunications market, and it seems the worst is yet to come. The decision to allow Wind to operate stands as of now, but will face scrutiny and challenges in the months to come. Wind will also have to face up against three well-entrenched incumbents, and a few new competitors in what really amounts to a commodity market with little differentiation.

Wind Mobile Pros/Cons

Pros:

• “New guy” image
• HSPA network
• Consumer-centric attitude
• Looks to have great pricing plans

Cons:

• Shares “new guy” image with DAVE and Public
• Not operating in Quebec
• No iPhone/Android phones at launch

Comments? I’d love to know what you are thinking about this.

VOICE PLANS

Chat:

• $15
• 100 Province-wide minutes
• Unlimited WIND to WIND calling (Canada-wide)
• Unlimited incoming SMS / 50 sent

Always Talk:

• $35
• Unlimited province-wide calling
• Unlimited WIND to WIND calling
• Unlimited incoming SMS / 50 sent

Always Shout:

• $45
• Unlimited Canada-wide calling
• Unlimited SMS
• Voicemail

DATA PLANS

Infinite Mobile:

• $35
• Unlimited data for phones (includes tethering)

Social BlackBerry:

• $10
• Unlimited instant messaging, Facebook and MySpace

Infinite BlackBerry:

• $35
• Unlimited data for BlackBerry

Infinite Laptop:

• $45
• Unlimited data for USB data sticks

ADD-ONS

• Voice:
• 10c Per Minute with the $15 plan

• SMS:
• $0.10

• MMS:
• $0.20

• Voicemail:
• $5

• Long Distance:
• $20
• Unlimited calls to North America

Updated with a globeandmail.comarticle.

According to Globalive chairman Anthony Lacavera, the company could begin operations in Toronto and Calgary next week, with other cities soon to follow. A very telling quote from the article:

“If Canadians had realized how much they had been missing out on when Globalive was rejected, they would have been very upset,” said Canaccord Adams analyst David Lambert.

“These guys have national coverage from Day 1, three data centres, they’ve managed to get 475 cell sites in the last nine months and have kiosks inside of Blockbuster stores. I think there are many ways they’ll undercut prices, especially from Rogers.”