TORONTO – Add Wind Mobile to the list of new wireless providers rankled by Rogers’ new low cost-brand Chatr.
After Mobilicty filed a lawsuit against Rogers over Chatr earlier this month, Wind chairman Anthony Lacavera said Thursday that his company has also filed a complaint with the Competition Bureau. Wind’s grievance is about Rogers’ advertising campaign for its Chatr’s network which it claims is "more reliable” and has “fewer dropped calls than all the new entrants”.
“There is absolutely no solid or objective technical basis for Chatr’s claim to have more network reliability and fewer dropped calls than Wind”, Lacavera said in a statement. “The truth is that Rogers does not have access to our network stats and we don’t have access to theirs, which makes it impossible to accurately compare networks.”
In a speech to Toronto’s Board of Trade on Thursday, Lacavera pressed his point about the dropped call claim, explaining that in many countries, when a customer moves from one carrier’s network to another, there is a seamless transition for the caller, known as “a soft hand-off”. In Canada, however, when a caller moves from Wind’s home zone to roam on an incumbent network, their call is immediately dropped by the incumbent, a process referred to as “a hard hand-off”.
“It means that a Wind customer would experience a dropped call made as a result of the incumbent hand-off policy, having nothing to do with our network”, he continued. “The incumbents have taken advantage of a loop-hole in the government policy to use hard hand-offs and then have the audacity to exploit that advantage and market against Wind and the other new entrants for dropped calls that the incumbents actually create.”
Lacavera also called on the government to implement regulations that support the consumer, not “entrenched anti-competitive behavior”.
“Specifically, I am talking about the acquisition and control of spectrum, tower sharing, and roaming agreements”, he added, after claiming that incumbents hoard unused spectrum in order to limit competition. “Government should give new entrants access to spectrum in upcoming auctions to ensure incumbents do not acquire it at any price to stave off further competition. Tower-sharing should be encouraged with incentives, or, at a minimum, disincentives for not sharing. There are environmental considerations to this, first and foremost.”
