By Howard Solomon
Assistant editor, Network World Canada
It's now four days after the AWS spectrum auction closed, time enough take a breath and ask who won and who lost.
"Everybody lost," says Mark Tauschek, a telecom analyst at Info-Tech Research. The new entrants vastly overpaid for spectrum as the values were bid up, he says, endangering their ability to pay for the networks needed to run the services they'll be offering.
Meanwhile Rogers, Bell and Telus scooped up [or could afford to make unaffordable to others] valuable 20Mhz city-wide licences, which he says will be for their future high-speed next-generation networks.
There is some validity to this view. Most of what the new entrants won is 10Mzh spectrum, except for the 20Mhz province-wide spectrum Industry Canada forbid the incumbents from getting.
That's one of the reasons why Iain Grant, managing director of the SeaBoard Group consultancy, isn't impressed with all of the 10MHz licences Globalive rounded up across much of the country. That's fine for voice services, he notes, but not good enough if customers start intensively using data services.
The solution to that and the cost of building infrastructure, he says, is for new entrants to share their licences to make the most of the 20Mhz spectrum they have and co-operate on erecting a network.
As we reported earlier this year, he believes new entrants could save a bundle by building a single network, perhaps by establishing an independent infrastructure company. After all, Bell and Telus share wireless networks, he notes. And the sharing of spectrum can be worked out with the help of lawyers and accountants -- we all know now what the licences are worth, he points out.
Even those who didn't get very much have a lot to offer, he says: MTS Allstream, for example, which won spectrum only in Manitoba, has a valuable fibre optic network that runs coast to coast. Then the new entrants can spend their efforts competing on price and service.
In this scenario, he says, "the losers aren't necessarily losers."
Grant admits he has an interest in this scenario - winning a consulting contract - but it does make you think.
The new entrants, forbidden until the first week of September from talking to each other until Industry Canada has certified the auction's outcome, can think, too.