Canadians are so desperate for a wireless telecom shakeup that it’s not unthinkable a new independent carrier could be greeted with Uber-like enthusiasm when TNW Wireless launches across Canada in March, according to Sandeep Panesar.
“We’re going to be something in this country where people sit up and go, ‘Wow. This is refreshing. This is different,’” said TNW Networks Corp.’s CEO.
TNW’s Wi-Node technology allows users to insert a SIM card into an unlocked phone and roam anywhere Wi-Fi is available. When users leave a Wi-Node area, they roam on the networks of incumbent carriers.
TNW will offer 500 megabytes (MB) of data for $10 a month, with additional 100 MB data blocks available at $2.90 a pop.
But securing the necessary infrastructure and roaming agreements with incumbent carriers required major stickhandling on TNW’s part.
One potential deal fell through more than a year ago. But earlier this month TNW’s parent company, Investel Capital Corp., acquired Vancouver-based RuralCom and its wireless spectrum licences for an undisclosed amount.
The provider, which is being rebranded as TNW Wireless, owns both spectrum and local towers offering mobile phone service to residents along the Alaska Highway in B.C. and the Yukon.
While RuralCom’s infrastructure provides service to only one region, Panesar plans to use it as a springboard for a new kind of wireless service available across North America.
It’s a business model similar to Sugar Mobile, which offers wireless services through a combination of Wi-Fi and roaming agreements its sister company has with incumbents.
Sugar’s sister company, Ice Wireless, provides wireless services to communities in the northern territories. When users venture beyond those areas, roaming agreements with other carriers kick in.
But Sugar drew the ire of Rogers Communications Inc. (TSX: RCI.B), which accused it of circumventing regulations because most of its members do not live in the northern territories and therefore aren’t considered to be roaming if they live in Toronto but rely on the Ice Wireless infrastructure.
Rogers and Sugar are still disputing the issue before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
“I think they [TNW] will have problems with roaming agreements,” Canadian telecom analyst Mark Goldberg said in an email to Business in Vancouver.
He said the company’s success depends on whether roaming partners consider TNW’s application to conform to the agreements.
But Panesar said TNW’s Wi-Node technology avoids the roaming problems Sugar ran into.
“Unlike Sugar Mobile, where they’re constantly registered to the other carriers, we actually turn off the cell radios,” he said, adding that TNW’s technology means users won’t constantly be roaming.
“It’s a secure backhaul from the Wi-Fi directly to our home public mobile network [RuralCom’s infrastructure], and it allows for an extension of the home public network. So effectively, the user is still on the home public network and not roaming.”
Panesar said he’s confident this arrangement will keep TNW in compliance with RuralCom’s roaming agreements in Canada and the U.S.
“[It] highlights the major, major problem that we don’t have open-access rules in Canada the way that they do in other countries,” said David Christopher, spokesman for the digital-advocacy group OpenMedia.
In the U.K., for example, large telecom companies are required to give smaller providers access to their networks at a rate set by regulators.
“Here, the way the rules are set up at the moment basically just allows the big telecom companies to block these smaller competitors outright. That’s something we really need the CRTC to take another look at,” Christopher said.
“The problem with our market isn’t the lack of hunger or the lack of innovation. There are people out there who really want to compete, who really want to go in and take on the big guys. They just need a level playing field in which to do so.”
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