TORONTO – Rob Bruce, the president of the cable and wireless arm of Rogers Communications, won’t be alone this week calling (as he did Tuesday opening the 2011 Canadian Telecom Summit) for a “fair and open auction” of the 700 MHz wireless spectrum.
We know enough of what the likes of Telus’ CFO Robert MacFarlane plans to say at lunch Wednesday and can hazard a guess that Bell CEO George Cope will follow up with a similar call on Thursday when he speaks to CTS delegates at the Toronto Congress Centre. The auction isn’t expected until 2012, but the rules governing that auction are expected sometime this fall and wireless newcomers like Globalive and Public Mobile want it set aside for them.
“Restrictions on the 700 auction would be a slap in the face to our nine million customers,” Bruce said this morning during his speech, which emphasized three main pillars the company is pitching to Canadians and their federal government. The other two are:
1. Adopting a regulatory regime that rewards and incents companies that build in both urban and rural markets.
2. Making more spectrum available, and fast (In the U.S., the 700 MHz auction happened years ago, wireless companies are using it authorities are moving on freeing up even more low frequency spectrum).
“Can you imagine the government insisting on leasing mining claims only to some of the many small cap (mining) companies… those with only a handful of employees and little capital – while shutting out… companies like Barrick Gold, Teck Resources and Kinross?” he asked.
Plus, with the federal government already having said it will release what it thinks about foreign investment at the same time it releases the rules to govern the 700 MHz auction, there is a danger of marginalizing the Canadian incumbents if it includes caps on what companies can buy – or set asides of spectrum for newer wireless operators.
“If you liberalize foreign ownership in Canada, I don’t think you can say to Orange, ‘you can buy all the spectrum you want in Canada’ but Rogers can’t,” added Rogers’ SVP regulatory Ken Engelhart in an interview with both he and Bruce after the keynote address.
“They wanted to incent new entry… I think you still would have gotten Shaw and Videotron buying spectrum and probably Globalive without a set aside,” he continued. “(But) the new entrants keep saying ‘we need (caps and set asides) to sustain competition’. I don’t understand what that means but I think at this point, you have a wide open auction and let the marketplace sort it out.”
“If you want to do the right things for Canadians, the right things from a public policy perspective, to close the digital divide and make sure people have rural and urban coverage on LTE and beyond, we don’t have a set aside, period,” added Bruce.
HE ALSO TOUCHED ON the power of social media (especially Twitter) for corporations such as his during his speech, so we asked him to expand on that in our interview.
“I think it’s incredibly powerful. We use (Twitter) to a great extent to listen to what our customers have to say,” Bruce said. “It’s very useful because it aggregates what a lot of our customers are feeling and thinking. We also use it to intervene when customers are having a challenge with one thing or another.”
However, the sheer crush of tweets on topics like usage based billing (hashtag: #UBB) can cause policy reactions that perhaps aren’t necessary, cautioned Bruce.
“A times it feels like people – government, industry and others – look at social media as a reflection of what everybody thinks and not what a small group of people think,” he explained. “We need to balance the power of it, in terms of getting the pulse on what some people think, with caution to be careful we don’t assume it’s what everybody thinks. It cuts both ways… It’s not necessarily market research that’s telling us exactly what Canadians think, feel and want.”
WE ALSO ASKED BRUCE about a couple of other items – both of which concern Shaw Communications. On Shaw’s new broadband pricing packages, where the Calgary-based network operator has dramatically boosted its bit caps to the 250 GB-to-750 GB-to-unlimited ranges?
“We don’t usually comment on other people’s pricing… We’ll look on as a bystander and see what kind of success Shaw has with it, recognizing that the market Shaw plays in is quite a different market than the one where we offer Internet,” he said.
“We think the retail market around Internet is highly competitive… Our customers tell us they’re very happy with the packages we have and we’ll continue to evolve them as required.”
What about that pesky rumour that Shaw and Rogers are going to build a national LTE network, working together the same way Bell and Telus did to create their HSPA+ network?
“The wonderful thing about being Rogers is people speculate on virtually everything. Whether it’s MLSE, whether it’s Shaw, I think you know we try not to comment on speculation because it just starts the wheel turning and it never stops.”
