TORONTO – John Maduri finds the claims being made by Canada’s wireless companies that they need access to 700 MHz wireless spectrum in order to deliver wireless broadband to rural Canadians to be nothing short of a “myth.”
Maduri runs a company, Xplornet, which has long made its living serving many thousands of customers who live and work nowhere near a high-rise. With a combination of fixed wireless and satellite service – and hundreds of millions of dollars invested – Xplornet is serving rural folks just fine, thanks, Maduri said in an interview with Cartt.ca. It’s the only provider delivering 4G beyond Canada’s big cities and, adds the CEO, he finds the contention rural broadband needs solving (such as what Bell Canada claimed last week and what others have said prior), insulting.
“The whole subject of rural broadband and how it’s related to 700 MHz has gotten so confused,” he said. “There are so many myths and mixed truths, it’s just shocking to me… We’re the guys that are rural. When we look around, we don’t see any of them and… it’s almost offensive for them to say, ‘Give (spectrum) to us, and we’ll solve the rural problem’. First of all, there’s not enough 700 (MHz spectrum). If we’re ‘solving’ rural mobile, traditional cellular service where customers use an average of 1 GB a month, maybe there is. But the business that we’re in is delivering 18, 19, 20 GB and growing every day – broadband. There’s not enough 700, unless you gave it all to one provider. So it’s a myth. It’s an absolute myth and mistruth,” explained Maduri (right).
The CEO is also worried that Industry Canada staff and their political bosses may be confusing access to 700 MHz spectrum and access to LTE. “I had MPs and other industry observers saying, ‘We’ve got to give these guys 700 because we need LTE everywhere,’ and the reality is, LTE will be available on all frequencies: On 2.5 GHz, on the AWS, on the 800…”
What Maduri wants to see is some creativity when it comes to the spectrum auction rules that may be released in the coming days or weeks (Speculating on the timing for the release of these rules has become a bit of a running joke now in the industry, since the original submissions to Industry Canada were handed in a year ago, Tuesday). Xplornet’s position is well-known. It believes the auction should more finely slice up licensed areas (47 of the 172 Tier 4 licenses) so that when companies win spectrum in a city, they get the dense urban cluster – leaving nearby suburban and rural regions up for grabs for others to purchase spectrum licenses and serve.
It’s an idea that other companies, such as Rogers Communications, supports, but says is impossible to execute. “Everyone, including Rogers, would like to do that, too, said Ken Engelhart, Rogers’ senior vice-president, regulatory. “You have to, at the border of license areas, co-ordinate. When you co-ordinate, you lose capacity. If you lose capacity at the edge of a city, there are a lot of people who live there so that’s why license areas are always drawn so that the borders are where there are very few people, so all the license areas contain a blob of urban, surrounded by a bunch of rural,” he explained.
“It would be better for (Xplornet), it would be better for Rogers, it would be better for everyone if they could divide the urban and rural into separate license areas but no one has ever been able to explain how that can be technically done.”
Maduri admits co-ordination isn’t a simple thing, however, “incumbents have a much greater co-ordination challenge within their own networks and it will become even more challenging as they integrate and co-ordinate amongst macro, micro, pico cells, and Wi-Fi to meet the growing depth of demand for portable/nomadic broadband use, in buildings as opposed to the historic mobile voice market, with coverage along highways/road systems. Yet, they will figure out and manage this coordination challenge.”
Besides, the U.S. 700 MHz auction (done in 2008!) showed licenses can be more finely sliced and “China and India will have hundreds of thousands of base stations… I am certain that they have and will continue to find ways to co-ordinate as networks grow,” Maduri added. “Co-ordination is the name of the game, and thankfully, new technologies are adapting to support it.”
Unlike other independent wireless providers, Maduri does not support a set aside of spectrum in the 700 MHz band. First, it’s near impossible, given the limited amount of spectrum available, he said. So, what about the 2500 MHz (or if you prefer, 2.5 GHz) spectrum, for which auction rules will be released at the same time as 700?
Right now, Inukshuk, a partnership of Rogers and Bell that was a WiMax play, owns a big chunk of spectrum in that band, but the partnership appears to have petered out. Neither company will comment for the record on the partnership, but the company’s web site is a dead end and Rogers is using its Inukshuk block of spectrum to deploy LTE, having officially shut off its “Rogers Portable Internet” service that runs on its 2500 MHz blocks, today (March 1st).
“WiMax is not going anywhere so we decided to put all of our eggs into the LTE basket,” said Engelhart. “We’re using that spectrum right now for LTE… There’s a pretty big 2.5 (GHz) ecosystem in Europe that we’re tapping into right now.”
And what about the future of the Inukshuk partnership? “We haven’t really said anything about that publicly,” is all he would say. (In fact, the 2.5 GHz spectrum being auctioned off is what Industry Canada reclaimed from Rogers and Bell for auction after the companies bought out the other Inukshuk investors in 2006)
Both Engelhart and Maduri see a solution, however in that spectrum (if in different ways). Maduri says he would be happy with 2.5 GHz or 700 MHz, if partitioned for rural – but that there must be some give and take on the part of the big incumbents, which own spectrum licenses in various bands.
“If Bell, or Telus, or Rogers were prepared to shed some of the spectrum that they have and make it available for rural, then I’d say let them fill their booths on 700. I don’t begrudge their need or desire for 700, not at all,” he said. “It’s great spectrum. We all know it’s propagation characteristics… Maybe the creative solution here is, as part of getting access to bid in the 700 MHz spectrum auction, that they be required to shed some of their (other) spectrum to rural providers on some reasonable basis,” Maduri continued.
“They’ve got (3.5GHz), they’ve got (2.5 GHz), they’ve got the AWS bands, they’ve got 800. I know for certain they’re not going to want to shed the 800, but they’ve got more than enough spectrum to deliver broadband and if they’re prepared to shed some of it to us and other providers through either some form of government process, some objective process, I think that’d be the most creative outcome that we could hope for.”
Adds Rogers’ Engelhart: “If (Industry Canada) really wants to do a set aside for new entrants, they should do it in 2500 because there’s a fabulous ecosystem developing for 2500 LTE and let’s face it, the new entrants are mostly building in urban areas where 2500 is a great LTE spectrum. Plus, it looks like 2500 will be a global band, used in North America, Europe and Asia, so it really is the kind of ecosystem you want to jump on board with… and in 2500, we’ve got quite a bit and Bell has quite a bit so they can do a set aside there without causing too much trouble.”
