Last night Tony Lacavera (Chairman & CEO of Globalive) fulfilled his promise from a year ago and presented an updated perspective on the mobile industry in Canada and an update on his own mobile wireless project at Mobile Monday Toronto.

A lot has changed in a year – although his story and perspective really hasn’t. Tony’s favorite slide is a graph demonstrating the regional mobile duopolies in Canada that effectively show that in nearly every region 90% of the market share is controlled by 2 carriers.  Because of this, pricing from the major carriers have largely stabilized resulting in Canadians paying the third highest cell phone bills in the world.

This is the reason why he believes Canadians need a third true alternative in order to create competition and deliver a better overall value and experience from consumers. This is the reason why he believes his mobile brand WIND will do so well. After all, WIND will offer:

• Unlimited plans
• No contracts
• No hidden fees
• No catches

Additionally, Tony has stated his platform will be open and come with wifi partnerships already in place. He’ll allow person to person mobile top ups, offer the most current blackberries (although no iphone to start) and is focusing next on mobile payments, international money transfers, mobile advertising and near field communications (NFC).

There’s just one catch – the CRTC has ruled that they cannot launch in Canada due to foreign ownership issues around control and debt.

The CRTC recently exercised its subjective discretion to reverse the finding that was previously made by both industry Canada and the Department of Justice. This means that despite all the investment and ramping up, WIND mobile is effectively still-born. You can read more about the decision here.

Tony is confident they can still find a resolution to get the CRTC’s approval and in the mean time his staff has been sent out into the community for random acts of kindness to keep them busy – such as helping at the daily food bank.

Having said all that – do we really need a third major competitor in each market?

Although Tony’s chart was updated from a year ago (which showed 2006 numbers) to reflect the market reality of 2008 – it doesn’t really show the impact the iphone has made to Rogers in other regions in the last year.  The iphone as we know transcends carrier loyalty and has impacted the competitive landscape in regions where Rogers has been traditionally more passive.  As Tony outlined, carriers have traditionally been passive in other regions where they don’t dominate in order to keep reciprocal actions out of the markets they control. The iphone changed all that.

The other major news from a year ago is that Telus and Bell launched their new HSPA high speed 3.5 G network that now competes or bests Rogers across the country in terms of 3G access and overall speeds.  Because their new network is GSM based – they too can sell the iphone.

Recent public squabbles between Rogers, Telus and Bell about claims of who is better and who is faster certainly doesn’t make it sound like we are living in a Country with no competition or where the regional duopolies are complacent.

Although I hope all the best for WIND and look forward to them eventually entering the market, the conditions have changed from a year ago and regardless if we have 2 or 3 real choices in our local market, it looks like Canadians finally have real choice and options when it comes to plans, devices, and networks.

I’m wondering (and hoping) that Tony comes back again this time next year at MoMo Toronto with his favorite graph – updated to either prove he was right all along or that Canadian’s are actually doing just fine with two real major choices in each market.

Steve Levy, president of Canadian Market Research, Ipsos Reid, presented highlights from a survey of marketing executives at Marketing Week today in Toronto. As stated in the afternoon daily, Steve indicated that only about 12% of marketers are actually incorporating mobile into their marketing mix.

The reason… apparently infrastructure barriers. Huh?

The only barriers are marketers and brands who haven’t yet educated themselves on where / how mobile fits into the marketing mix NOW.

With over 75% of Canadians actively using mobile phones and with numbers approaching 40 billion for SMS messages sent in 2009, I don’t know how anybody could say infrastructure is barrier to leveraging mobile.

Earlier this year I blogged about Rogers breathing rarified air with the introduction of their 7.2 mbps network. Since then they have nearly trippled those speeds to 21 mbps which has also since been matched by Bell and Telus with their new 3.5G national network.  High speed (nearly broadband) wireless is now truly available to most Canadians.

Having said all that, any marketer reading this post who has yet to incorporate mobile into their marketing mix should erase this post from their memory and go back to their usual ways.

Understanding how to use mobile in the marketing mix is one of our agency differentiators. The longer inaccurate messages are propagated about the mobile opportunity the better our competitive advantage will continue to be

Recently I was having a healthy debate with my friend Steve Sorge over at Mobile Fringe around “Wap vs App” – or should marketers focus their efforts on building out a mobile website vs. building out a mobile application.

Since my presentation at marketing magazine’s mobile 2.0 conference, my point of view had been shifting towards Wap – or the mobile web. My reasoning being that with the mobile safari browser webkit being commonly adapted by nearly all smartphones we can now build once and deploy many times with few changes to fit each platform while outputting a very rich experience.

This is not only cost effective but ensures reach – which is key if your audience isn’t on an iphone yet.

Steve pointed out that most people with iphones would rather search or browse on the App store than on Google – a huge shift in behaviour. With over 85,000 applications and 2 billion downloads, the App store is evolving to become your life tool for anything you need. After all, isn’t there an App for everything?

I was being trumped with my own traditional point of view – user experience trumps technology every time.

Yesterday it was announced in the media that the iphone is coming to Bell and Telus next month. Having recently completed upgrades to their networks to enable GSM (which is what the iphone works on), they can now offer the iphone and compete head on with Rogers. With iphone users already driving +60% of all mobile web traffic in Canada, what will happen when you suddenly make the most popular device available to everybody else?

2010 will be the year that the iphone changes the mobile landscape in Canada.

Although Canadians have other great options in the Palm Pre and the pending new Storm from Blackberry, making the iphone available to nearly all Canadians is a game changer – for both consumers and marketers.

So… Wap or App?

I’m back to the middle. You should probably do both, but start with a mobile website – unless your target audience is already on the iphone. By this time next year, that could be everybody.

“Yak” has many connotations – some more positive than others.

What yak mobile will mean to Canadians this time next year when they go to market nationally (minus Quebec) has equally as many possible implications for consumers and the mobile market.

CEO Tony Lacavera of Globalive Communications Corp. (who own yak) presented an overview of their vision and market strategy this week at Mobile Monday.  Here are some highlights and what they may mean to you and to the competitive market:

• They bought enough spectrum nationally to reach 25 million Canadians – but have set a short term goal of 1.5 million customers. They are going to initially focus on their own yak long distance customers (who are mostly middle-aged women), so don’t expect them to compete with the big 3 on their own turf
• They aren’t expecting Bell, Rogers, and Telus to make it easy on them to use their cell towers as mandated by the CRTC and they expect it will take a while to create network infrastructure that can compete with the big 3 for reliability.  Look for them to make deals with other spectrum winners (like Shaw and Videotron) and MVNOs as a way to fill some infrastructure and / or service gaps
• They are going to be GSM based in the AWS spectrum.  This means you should have more choice of devices to either bring over to them or to buy then if you were on Bell or Telus
• They expect that mobile penetration in Canada will be as high as 93% in three years and they hope to have about 8% market share – or enough to survive / hang on until 2012 when the next spectrum auction is expected to occur for the powerful 700 mhz range
• They will leverage big box and other major retailers primarily for distribution. This will make it easier for consumers buy and try yak mobile before fully committing to them. This is common practice in other countries like Italy and Greece where there is heavy penetration (100%+). With pay as you go programs, it’s not uncommon for consumers to carry multiple Sim cards
• Yak’s pending arrival has already impacted other flanker brands such as fido, solo, and koodoo as they are all repositioning themselves to be more competitive and in line with other international standards (like dropping system access fees, 12 month roll over minutes etc…)

yak mobile (or whatever they end up branding themselves) may not be the giant killer many consumers are hoping for, but they are the first of 4 new entrants that promises to restore the Canadian market to competitive levels not seen since 2000-2002 before the last wave of new entrants were bought out by Rogers and Telus

Over the past year I’ve blogged on more than one occasion about the frustrations many Canadian Marketers have had around the lack of data available on how Canadians use and interact with mobile.

This week Lemay-Yates Associates Inc. (LYA)has released a 100 page report after conducting extensive research into the Canadian broadband mobile market over the last few months covering handsets offered by 17 mobile carriers, flanker brands and MVNOs/resellers, as well as their features.

LYA also surveyed Canadian consumers to assess which mobile data services they currently use and to characterize the overall penetration and current usage of Canadian consumers.

Check out this 7 minute interview that highlights many of the findings (sorry for the secondary browser link – bnn does not offer video embed – shame!):

Their mobile report also addresses questions such as:

• What is the status of brand competition in each region of Canada: from BC, top Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, to Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime provinces
• What is the status of handsets with GPS capabilities for each service provider?
• Which carrier is the champion in supporting social networking applications?
• What is the current penetration of social networking applications such as facebook and MySpace among Canadian consumers?
• Who currently uses heavy data applications such as watching streaming TV or YouTube?
• How many iPhones could Rogers sell over the relatively short term and which carriers are more at risk of losing customers to the iPhone?
• How much do Canadians think mobile data is worth to them?
• Mobile carriers and service providers, broadcasters, third party applications developer, equipment and handset suppliers will gain new insight and a better understanding of this rapidly emerging market by purchasing this Report.

Want more details? Go to their website here.

This is an excellent question posed by the panel audience earlier this week.

The short answer is – nearly 100% of mobile devices in Canada have a mobile browser.

Every new device comes with one and consumers are updating & replacing their devices faster than ever. It used to be that every 2-3 years a consumer would update their device. Now it’s about every 6-9 months. Also, thanks to Stephanie at Yiibu for this link which shows device market share by Country.

Having said that, keep in mind that the mobile web experience varies greatly from device to device. You can design and develop sites that will work just fine on every device if you follow the standards laid out by the W3c and dotmobi.

Unlike the interweb where we are often designing for the lowest common denominator, you can design for the highest common denominator for the mobile web.  We can auto-detect your device before serving content so that you can serve up a very rich experience for smartphones (i.e. bb bold, iphone) and a more basic experience for your standard clamshell device for example.

Data plans in Canada have come way down in the last year. You can get unlimited data plans for as low as $7 / month from Bell and Telus for your flip phone, and as low as $30 / month for your smartphone from Rogers.

Summary: The mobile web is a viable channel to extend your message.  Be sure to design for mobile and user context instead of trying to cram an interweb site into a smaller screen.

Last summer when the iphone went on sale in the U.S. consumers were loving the visual voice mail feature that allowed people to see who called and what was said as an email or SMS message from their device.

This also means you can check your vmail as text in noisy places, or if you are out of country and don’t want to check your messages and incur hundreds or $$$ in fees.

What I didn’t realize is that Telus also offers this service and was the first one to do so in Canada. Check out their press release here.  The Telus service also allows you to get an audio recording of the message as an attachment to your email.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find any rate information on their website- but this is a feature worth investigating if you want the benefits of visual voice mail without having to switch to Rogers to get it on the iphone.

The Canadian spectrum auction ended this week and the good news for Canadians is that more choices are on their way.

For a full account of the outcome, check out the article in the Globe here.

Here’s the 15 second summary:

• The Canadian government raised 3 times more than anticipated during the auction
• Yak communications (owned by Globalive Communications Corp) who currently sells long distance plans in Canada is poised to be become a near national player. They now have spectrum rights in all provinces except for Quebec where they were outbid by Videotron
• Data & Audio-Visual Enterprises Wireless Inc (run by John Bitove and backed Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen) has also bought spectrum rights in 10 of the 13 largest cities in Canada. They will be targeting the 38% of Canadians who currently do not have a mobile device
• 3 new regional Carriers have emerged – Videotron in Quebec, Shaw in the West, and Bragg Communications in the East
• Consumers can expect new Carrier options to be available by this time next year

I would expect the current big three to roll out “new” plans that are more competitive than current in-market plans – but with hefty commitments… like 3 year contracts so that you’ll be stuck with a big penalty if you dare cross to the dark side next summer.

Although consumers will welcome better priced plans, the big question is – will the new entrants try to differentiate themselves beyond discounting?

If you were President for a day at the new Carrier, what would directive would you give to create a higher consumer value proposition?

Here are some initial thoughts…

• Focus more on the software and give the hardware away – or at least keep them unlocked. The more people can personalize their mobile device with widgets, apps, and tools, the more value they will see in your service.
  • How about a suggestions widget pre-loaded on every device? Publish them on the mobile web and desktop web and quarterly release a report on how many were actioned on or being considered for action
  • Make sure all communications are mobile web-enabled and supported with multiple SMS opt-in alert opportunities. I.e. SMS alert to indicate your new bill is in… then click to mobile web to view and pay etc…
• Keep the network open to allow the creation of innovative services from 3rd parties
• Create a unique perks or loyalty program that aligns with the lifestyle of their most valuable and most grow-able customers
• Offer opportunity for completely free mobile services with an Ad supported model for SMS, mobile web, and on device messaging

Let’s also hope that history does not repeat itself. The last time there was a spectrum auction in Canada (1995), Fido and Clearnet were created only to be bought out by Rogers and Telus a few years later.

The CWTA released their quarterly report last week and highlights are consistent with year long trends.

More Canadians are texting more often.

It will be interesting to see if proposed new charges for incoming texting as announced last week by Bell and Telus will impact overall numbers. It will also be neat to see the impact of the iphone…  will Canadians text even more or will they simply migrate to mobile instant messaging (MIM), Twitter, and other mobile web based communication options?

I know – it’s not just about the iphone – super awesome third generation mobile devices from Blackberry (Bold), Palm (Centro) and Samsung (Instinct) promise to make the next quarter an exciting one for our market.

Here are some highlights to the report:

• 4.1 billion messages were sent peer to peer in Q1 (note messages related to mobile marketing campaigns are not counted). Note that 10.1 billion were sent in all of 2007
• 1.4 billion messages were sent in March 2008 alone
• 42% of Canadian mobile subscribers sent at least one peer-to-peer message in March 2008. Imagine what that number would if your friends who return your text with a phone call because they don’t know how to text… figured it out?
• MMS-capable common short codes were made available for the first time
• As of May 14th, North America’s first user-generated mobile picture messaging service on broadcast television was launched in Canada
• There are 25 active mobile micro-payments (m-commerce) applications approved in Canada

With yesterday’s report from the Globe and Mail that both Bell and Telus would start charging 15 cents for incoming SMS messages for customers who are not locked into an SMS plan and Roger’s announcement of a data plan for the new iphone that was widely seen as uncompetitive and unfair to consumers, I figured the future of mobile as a mass marketing medium would be still-born until new carriers enter the market next year.

All may not be lost

In reaction to all the negative press received over their original iphone plan, Rogers / Fido this morning announced a new data plan for the new 3G iphone to be released Friday of this week.  Here are some details:

Effective July 11, and as a limited time promotional offer for customers who activate until August 31, 2008 on a three year contract, a data-only offering of 6GB of data for $30 per month is being made available that can be added to any in-market voice plan. For example, with 6GB of data, iPhone 3G
users can visit 35,952 web pages, or send and receive 157,286 emails, or watch 6,292 minutes of YouTube videos each and every month.

You can read the full news release here.  Rogers has also indicated that they will not charge for incoming SMS messages either – making them appear far more pro-consumer than they did just a week ago.

Per my earlier post this week, I still wouldn’t rush to buy that new iphone. Rates and plans are bound to only get better from here.