TORONTO – Leave it to Ted Rogers to take a shot at his competition while complaining about regulation – in the same sentence.
During Friday’s conference call with financial analysts, the Rogers Communications founder bemoaned the new rules announced in November by Industry Minister Jim Prentice surrounding the wireless spectrum auction coming in May, but especially took shots at the conditions placed on him when it comes to mandated network roaming for newcomers.
While spectrum has been set aside for new wireless companies, the ministry also said that the incumbents must allow customers of these newbies to roam on existing wireless networks. However, as Rogers is the sole GSM provider in Canada, the CEO believes all roaming will happen only on his network. (GSM is the technology of choice for most of the wireless world, while mainly North American companies like Telus, Bell and Sprint use CDMA technology and any new company would surely pick to build a GSM network.)
“When they talk about roaming, they’re talking about roaming on Rogers,” said Rogers. “Nobody’s going to roam on an old CDMA network that’s going to crash.”
Rogers noted some say it might be nice to earn some extra revenue off these potential newcomers as their customers use the Rogers Wireless network, but also explained he will have to build extra capacity into his network to accommodate them, and once they construct and then depart for their own networks, “I’m out a couple of hundred million bucks,” he explained.
RCI’s regulatory folks believe such a market modification means a change to its wireless license and isn’t legal in mid-license term. “Our position is that we can not tolerate to have our licenses amended and that’s the bottom line,” said Rogers.
“Our licenses say they can not be amended except in exceptional circumstances. You can amend them all you want in 2011, but between now and then, they can only be amended in exceptional circumstances,” added the company’s regulatory head Ken Englehart in a follow-up interview with Cartt.ca. “Is this auction an exceptional circumstance? I don’t really think so, given that they have them every few years.”
When it’s pointed out that those sound like fighting words, Englehart said: “What we’re going to do about it? What legal recourse we might take? No decision has been made. Right now we’re waiting for the decision that they make on (the license conditions, set to be released on February 29th).”
– Greg O’Brien
