Wi-Max’s Failure in Canada
With Sprint and Clearwire announcing plans to launch a national Wi-Max network in the U.S., does it disappoint anyone in Canada that our national Wi-Max carrier (formerly known as Inukshuk) is owned by Rogers and Bell Canada, which dominate the high-speed markets in Ontario and Quebec?
For this, I blame Manitoba Telecom Services and Allstream, which bailed out of Inukshuk rather than sticking it out and building a new and exciting Wi-Max service as promised. Then again, Manitoba Tel chickened out from getting into the national wireless phone business a few years ago when it had a chance to acquire Microcell (Rogers ended up buying it for $1.4-billion). Instead, it bought Allstream for $1.8-billion, which has to go down as one of the biggest strategic mistakes in Canadian telecom history.
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POSTED IN: Technology
5 opinions for Wi-Max’s Failure in Canada
Jevon
Jul 19, 2007 at 8:33 am
Downright depressing. That really could have been a great thing.
I still get confused. I always assumed in Canada that things like that were regulated. ie: “No, major carriers can’t just buy startups and kill them constantly”…
matt roberts
Jul 20, 2007 at 4:53 pm
I don’t disagree with your analysis.
Inukshuk - is 802.11 technology isn’t it? how is that WiMax (802.16.) In any event. Inukshuk hasn’t seen wide adoption from my understanding. MTS not being involved would be a good thing IMHO if I were a shareholder. Although, yes, I’m impressed with the clearwire deployment.
Buying Microcell. Why? because you want competition on price or just a quicker line to an iPhone. MTS should buy a business that almost never made money and where their only differentiator would be price and less service area?… while having no existing local geographic customer base. please. MTS was never a serious microcell bidder.
On the whole the Allstream purchase could be viewed as a mistake in hindsight. But at the time it was termed as a “surprising and strategically bold move” by you in the national post. As you may remember at the time no one was saying they should have bought Microcell but should have converted into an income trust.
matt roberts
Jul 20, 2007 at 4:56 pm
I’d meant to say:
I don’t disagree with your analysis on it looking like a strategic mistake, but -
sadly got dropped. in any event you get my idea ;)
ken laing
Jan 26, 2008 at 11:08 am
I live less than a mile from downtown Detroit, in Windsor, right on the river. I have a beautiful view of Detroit from my 3rd floor apartment window. Is it possible that I could receive, and make use of American WiFi that is provided to users in downtown Detroit??? I can already get their HDTV signals, and I have a T-Mobile phone that works on the Detoit towers. I also listen to their HD Radio stations in HD….the only place right now where you can make use of an HD radio in Canada.(DAB having been another great Canadian failure.)
James
Jan 31, 2008 at 12:16 am
I think MTS constantly makes bad decisions, for instance on a small scale recently deploying an “accelerator” for dialup users which only accelerates HTML, GIF, JPG, and SWF… IMO makes it a waste of money due to the fact that their dialup was already decent it just needed reorganizing (province wide toll free number is horrendously flawed - 90% of rural calls are forwarded to Steinbach routers, not the nearest router, and they have many such as Selkirk Brandon etc forcing connections to travel over land lines for unnecessary distances) and to top it off they paid all this money to licence this Propel accelerator when they could have just invested in some updates to their routers and provided microsoft’s MPPC software compression, they even have the proper cisco routers they just need firmware updates and some configuring, its just rediculous the constant stream of bad financial decisions coming out of them… and now with the increasing competition out there the way they treat their customers as if they still have some kind of monopoly is whats going to hang them. Rogers should swoop in and provide Wireless High Speed Internet to all the communities which MTS has written off as not profitable
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