Wind Mobile Vancouver Launch Day Interviews

Wind Mobile has come to Vancouver, and while I was down at the event to take some pictures and talk to customers, I also had the chance to talk to some people from Wind, to ask them about their future plans for services and phones.

I got to speak with Will Novosedlik, VP – Brand & Communications, and Scott Campbell, Chief Marketing Officer. I was mostly interested in the future expansion of the Wind “Home” zones, future network upgrades, and phone offerings.

Phones:

“We are not in the device business, we are in the service business, so there isn’t much we can do.”

That’s the gist of it folks. Wind would love to offer the iPhone, the newest HTC EVO/Incredible, and every BlackBerry phone in existence, but they have no control over the manufacturers building AWS-capable versions of their handsets. Wind (as well as Mobilicity and T-Mobile in the US) operate on the 3G-AWS band, which is slightly different from the standard 3G band that the other North American carriers use. This means that your iPhone 3GS will not work on the Wind network at 3G speeds, even if you unlock it and use a Wind SIM. You can presumably get voice and text, and data speeds will likely be limited to EDGE (think dial-up speeds).

RIM has apparently been great to Wind, and the two companies are working together quite well on ensuring that BlackBerry phones are 3G-AWS capable. Wind and RIM are going to be holding a series of promotions in the near future at sporting events and festivals, so watch out for those. Expect a solid offering of BlackBerrys in the future.

HTC has one phone on the Wind network – the HTC Maple. No word on any progress towards getting some of the new HTC superphones working, although it does seem that HTC is willing to make special versions of its phones for carriers. The EVO 4G is a WiMax-4G capable phone on Sprint’s network. Sprint is currently the only carrier in North America to use WiMax for 4G, and it looks like all the other carriers have plans to go with WiMax’s alternative technology, LTE. That HTC would make a WiMax version of their latest and greatest phone bodes well for the 3G-AWS carriers.

As for the iPhone – it’s anyone’s guess. Personally I don’t expect the next generation iPhone to come in an AWS version but that is pure speculation and could be completely wrong.

Of course the manufacturers need to be sure that they will sell enough of the AWS phones in order to justify making a different version. For many of them, there just isn’t enough demand right now. T-Mobile, Wind, and Mobilicity are the only AWS carriers in North America right now and all are relatively small players. Until they gain enough subscribers to get the manufacturers’ attention, the AWS handset market will remain fairly small.

That being said, Wind has a good relationship with T-Mobile, and are working together to build demand for AWS phones from the manufacturers. Apparently, they all have AWS handsets on their roadmap, so the phones are coming, it’s just a question now of when.

Android:

Pretty much the same as above. Android will become more available as manufacturers make AWS-capable Android phones.

LTE/4G:

Wind is able to upgrade to LTE along with the other carriers when they need to. There is no point in doing so now because there aren’t any LTE compatible phones out yet and it will be a while before they become widespread. If you’re looking to the future, Wind claims to be ready to upgrade with everyone else when the time is right.

Home Zone Expansion:

Wind is expanding its “Home” zones in all cities pretty much constantly. The Vancouver suburbs will largely be covered by the end of 2010, and the expansion will happen gradually and continually. Expect the same in Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, and Ottawa. I couldn’t get any more detail than that because even Wind doesn’t know exactly how fast the process will be.

When building out their network, Wind has to locate potential tower sites, contact the land owners, set up a lease agreement for the land to put up a tower, construct the tower, connect it to the existing network, test the system, and then go live. While they likely have the construction/connection/testing procedure down pat, the uncertainty and delays of locating and negotiating leasing agreements with individual landlords means they can’t give a solid timeline.

Summary:

There you have it. The phones will come when the manufacturers make them. The manufacturers will make them when there’s enough demand. Generating demand means growing the AWS carriers in numbers of subscribers. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, but that’s how it goes.

Network expansion is progressing quickly and continually so all anyone can say is: be patient.

Any other questions, feel free to contact me and I’ll do what I can to answer.