Telecom consultant Iain Grant and his colleagues at the SeaBoard Group still believe a partnership of interests -- a so-called "rebel alliance" -- could come together to create a stronger new spectrum owner than the licence winners from the recent AWS auction. SeaBoard's latest musing includes a name not mentioned yet: Montreal-based Cogeco Cable.
The country's fourth-largest cableco, with some 900,000 customers in Quebec and Ontario, Cogeco would give Globalive Wireless or DAVE the ability to compete with Bell, Rogers and Telus in offering Internet/cable/wireless/VoIP bundles. As Convergence Consulting noted last week, the ability to offer bundles will be a great strength in their home territories for three cablecos that won spectrum, Shaw, Videotron and EastLink.
And, SeaBoard notes, Cogeco recently bought Toronto Hydro Telecom (now Cogeco Data Services), which offers business telecom services such as its OneZone WiFi offering. So a business bundle could be assembled that includes voice/data plans and the use of hybrid handsets.
The Seaboard report came out late Monday so I couldn't get a comment from publicly-traded Cogeco. However, on Tuesday a company spokesman said there have been no talks with any of "those companies."
But it's still early days. The new entrants have only been able to talk to others about deals for three weeks.
By the way, the SeaBoard report also pours cold water on my musings that Quebec spectrum won by a numbered company with still-as-yet undetermined ownership could be valuable to Globalive, which didn't win any Quebec licences. There aren't any handsets for the "G" block spectrum, SeaBoard points out, although several auction particpants, including MTS Allstream and SaskTel went after these 10Mhz licences in the 1910-1915/1990-1995 bands. SeaBoard thinks its best use is for backhaul, unless the new owners of this stuff have secrets no one knows about.