stormbrew

I doubt it’s news to anyone that Canada is about to get a new entrant to its lackluster cell phone market. WIND Mobile, partially owned by foreign interests, was temporarily blocked from using the spectrum they bought on auction last year, but managed to overcome that hurdle and are now gunning towards having phones on the market before Christmas.

I’m shocked at how quickly they’ve developed these plans, personally, given the risk of setting up their network when their right to use it was risky at best. Perhaps their willingness to push on in spite of that adversity is a sign of good things to come from them.

The really interesting, and positive, thing about their voice plans is the tendency for things to come in “unlimited” bundles. The base plan includes unlimited in-network calling. The next plan up unlimited in-province calling. And last, but not least, unlimited national calling. This is how plans should work. And it makes them extremely competitive. And they’re competitively priced at $15, $35, and $45 respectively. I’m impressed here.

Their smartphone/modemstick data plans are also unlimited, but they go out of their way to make clear that you may be throttled down to lower speeds if you go above 5GB/mo. I’m assuming this means you get deprioritized if you cross that threshold, and clients who haven’t get priority on the network. If that’s the case, it seems a reasonable approach to throttling. At $35 to add ‘unlimited’ data to an existing voice plan (including a full featured BlackBerry plan if that’s what you’re using) or $50 for a modem stick data plan, these are pretty good deals. Very competitive with existing data plans from other providers, and even good compared to the promotional $30/6G plan Rogers lured people to the iPhone with.

The phone selection is a bit mediocre, with BlackBerrys (yuck) dominating and no flip phones at all, and I suspect this is because of their use of the 1700MHz spectrum, which a lot of phones (including the beloved iPhone) don’t support. Hopefully this improves, and hopefully they aren’t too stingy about using unlocked after/graymarket phones. I don’t imagine they would be, because there’s no indication any of these prices are contract-subsidized. You may pay a little more for these phones than you would from Rogers, but you’ll also probably save a lot on your bill. Hopefully the next iteration of the iPhone supports the AWS 1700MHz spectrum too.

And now here’s the big downside: Coverage. If you look at the map on that page, their coverage is the little red splotch around Toronto. Judging from their PR, Calgary will be added to that soon. If you’re in there, all the above plans work wonderfully, I’m sure. Outside of that, though, you get some nasty roaming fees. $0.25/minute of talk time, $0.10/25kB of data. Incoming texts are still free, though it doesn’t say anything about sent texts.

Because WIND has to build out their entire network from scratch, this is going to be their biggest problem. Like Fido before it was bought out by Rogers, WIND will be stuck for a long time with only urban zones appealing. And like Fido before it, if they do succeed at that, they will become ripe for the taking in a buyout by one of the Big Three because of the massive capital investment it’ll take to actually build this network. One need only ask a former Clearnet or Fido customer how terrible that situation can become to see this possibility in the future.

So I see huge potential in this new entrant to the market, but I’m not sure if it’s all roses and puppy dogs. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes, and I look forward to them coming up to Edmonton. I don’t see myself moving away from my iPhone, though, unless Nexus One really is the second coming.