Major new wireless operator blows into Manitoba market

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Wind Mobile's Anthony Lacavera: 'doing site acquisitions' (JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS) Photo Store

THERE is an element of the Winnipeg market that will applaud the arrival of any competitor on a scene dominated by a few players, in the hope it will shake things up.

Anthony Lacavera, the 37-year-old CEO and founder of Wind Mobile, met a few of those folks at his presentation to a communications industry event in Winnipeg Thursday.

Wind Mobile is to be the first of the new wireless cohort formed after the 2009 spectrum auction to enter the Manitoba market.

Lacavera would not be pinned down to a launch date in this province, other than to say it will be some time in 2012.

"We are doing site acquisitions -- that is our focus in Winnipeg right now," Lacavera said in an interview. "We will not launch until all the sites have been acquired."

He's talking about 70 to 80 tower sites in Winnipeg and Brandon, which will give the three-year-old upstart its own infrastructure to offer wireless services to businesses and consumers independent of the existing MTS and Rogers networks.

In addition to the audacity of trying to crack what is otherwise a wireless oligopoly in Canada, Lacavera chose to do it with foreign investment levels exceeding what had been the permitted norm.

Wind's foreign ownership has withstood one court challenge and the Supreme Court of Canada has yet to decide if it will hear an appeal on the matter.

Meanwhile, the irrepressible Lacavera marches across the country.

He hopes to launch in Regina, Halifax, Victoria and east along the 401 highway in Ontario into Kingston, Peterborough and some other towns in 2012.

Wind Mobile is already operating in all the largest cities outside Quebec.

It is the largest of the new wireless entrants, with close to 430,000 subscribers -- as many as Public and Mobilicity combined.

It has twice as many subscribers as Videotron's Quebec-only subscriber base.

Though Lacavera is confident of the stalwart backing of his investors -- Amsterdam-based VimpelCom, which merged with Egypt's Orascom Telecom last year -- there is chatter now about what the Canadian landscape might look like if Wind, Mobilicity, Public and Videotron were to join forces.

"My dream now, because the new guys have all launched in a lot of markets, is for us all to get together," Lacavera said Thursday. "Collectively, those new entrants have almost one million subscribers. Now we are of size, now we have some critical mass."

But even with a growth rate across the country of about 1,000 new subscribers a day, success is far from guaranteed.

Still, there are plenty who continue to root for Wind and other new competitors.

Christian Dandeneau, CEO of IDfusion Software in Winnipeg, said, "There are many young people who are disappointed with the current service offerings and want an unlocked phone and more options and choices for the plans they use."

Wind offers plans such as unlimited voice and data for $35 a month -- with no contract to tie customers down.

But as Kelvin Shepherd, president of MTS's Manitoba operation, points out, that means you have to buy your own phone and it also means you really can't be making calls outside Wind's limited zone.

Indeed, if you're outside the zone, it will mean 25 cents a minute for calls, 10 cents per text message and 25 cents per kilobyte of data.

Iain Grant, of the Seaboard Group, scoffs at the notion there is not a survival scenario for the new wireless players.

"Ted Rogers never made a dime for 15 years while he built his network out," Grant said. "They told him it would not be sustainable."

They said the same thing about Wind after its second year in business.

But a recent report from the Seaboard Group noted that after two years, Wind had attracted far more subscribers than the likes of Rogers and Bell in their second year of wireless offerings.

The Seaboard paper shows how competition really does create more demand and lowers prices.

Even MTS's Shepherd said, "You have to wake up every day and work hard to be successful. But it's an exciting opportunity for people in the industry with the opportunity every day to do something new and hopefully win some new customers."

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 17, 2012 B4