TELUS INSISTS THAT THE joint Long Term Evolution (LTE) infrastructure build the company has signed with Bell Canada is simply that: an agreement to share the costs of building out a national LTE network. Nothing more.
There will not be any spectrum sharing, says Michael Hennessy, senior vice-president of regulatory and government affairs at Telus in an interview with Cartt.ca. He explains that the premise of deploying the LTE network in conjunction with Bell is to reduce their respective capital costs of building a national network. “We each control our own spectrum and we’re using our own spectrum to support our radio access network,” Hennessy says. “Where the biggest benefits are coming from is really the shared capital costs savings around infrastructure.”
While Hennessy couldn’t go into too much detail because of non-disclosure agreements, he says Telus will place its antennas on Bell towers in licence areas where it doesn’t build and vice versa. As well, Telus will use its own facilities to backhaul traffic to switching equipment to better control quality and speed of the traffic. “The fundamental premise [of this agreement] is shared costs,” Hennessy says. “It’s not an incremental cost thing, we have to have a fair balance in where we build out, so that the amount of money we’re each putting in to cover a population zone is more or less equivalent.”
At a high level, Telus and Bell will collaborate on building a national LTE network, each choosing the licence areas or regions where they will deploy network. The idea is that there will be little overlap in the two companies’ networks. Both Bell and Telus are making LTE services available in the following 14 municipalities: Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area, Kitchener, Waterloo, Hamilton, Guelph, Belleville, Ottawa, Montreal, Québec City, Halifax and Yellowknife.
Telus and Bell have had a number of infrastructure sharing agreements in the past going back to 2001 in the wake of the PCS auction. They extended that deal after the 2008 Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) auction so they could build a national HSPA network in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
The joint LTE network build has sparked some controversy with some parties suggesting that because the two companies are going to work together on deploying LTE, they are sharing spectrum and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to bid separately in the upcoming 700 MHz auction.
Hennessy says previous infrastructure sharing agreements between Telus and Bell have been put under the microscope by Industry Canada before and for the very reason of determining whether the companies are considered affiliated entities. “Industry Canada has looked at these reciprocal arrangements in the past…the last time probably was the 2008 auction,” says Hennessy noting the department didn’t see the two companies as “an affiliated undertaking and that the primary reason I think is because there is no joint ownership of spectrum.”
Telecom consultant Michael Rozender, head of telecom and wireless consultancy Rozender Consultants International, says Bell and Telus are essentially sharing their towers with one another. “Their physical infrastructure for backbone for wireless is heavily shared because of Telus didn’t have much infrastructure out East and Bell didn’t have much out West,” explains Rozender, referring to the regional carrier legacy from which the two operators sprang. “They basically used the same towers to put up antennas and radios for their own networks on each others towers.”
With respect to the possibility that they are sharing spectrum, Rozender says that’s not true. “What’s important to clarify is that they do not share actual spectrum channels. So when you roam onto a Telus HSPA antenna that’s stuck on a Bell tower, you’re not actually using any Bell radios or electronics. It’s just the antenna that’s mounted on their friendly competitor’s tower,” he explains.
The consultant adds though that the two companies could be sharing spectrum in the 850 MHz band because back in the day when Bell and Telus were still confined to their respective telephone operating territories, neither had spectrum in this band across the country. “You could say in the sense that some channels in the 850 MHz range are Bell channels and some channels in the 850 range are Telus channels,” Rozender says, noting that this goes back to their regional carrier legacy and that “old CDMA stuff.”
