Bruce talks about the business market and new technologies

Interview with Rob Bruce Part IIThe Canadian wireless industry is witnessing some pretty exciting developments, particularly when it comes to faster networks. While the CDMA camp has been offering higher-speed EvDO services for about two years, Rogers Wireless - the country's only GSM player - is rolling out its high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) network to major markets. In Part II of Report on Wireless' interview with Rob Bruce, president of Rogers Wireless, he talks about opportunities in the business market, new technologies and applications, and network expansion. RoW: HSDPA is now available in Ontario's Golden Horseshoe. Can you talk about the network rollout?RB: The challenge is to build a national network and with that in mind, we built test and trial sectors in each of the cities to give both our customers and our employees some experience with it. But we're working to roll out across during the course of this year and we will continue into next year to roll into even more rural parts of the country. It's a huge investment. How much we can spend from a capital perspective per year is capped at a certain amount practically speaking. So we've got to continue to build out our coverage, produce the most reliable network, which is something we've worked long and hard on, but at the same time up the ante on technology. My job is, and the team's job day to day is to balance how aggressively you go on getting to HSDPA at blinding speeds versus making sure that coverage around the periphery of developing areas of north Toronto and Edmonton, and frankly some of the places in New Brunswick and elsewhere we'd like to see better coverage. If we get it right, we win. We get more customers, we get more business, we get more ARPU. So, we spend a fair bit of time sitting around boardrooms beating up a lot of data to try to get the right answer. RoW: Messaging remains the killer app in mobile data despite building networks that can offer much more than that. RB: I see the world as being segmented. We talk to the segments in different ways, and we try to reach out to them through communities - whether the community is music or pictures. But across all communities, there's that layer of messaging and it comes in different flavours. I think the reason messaging is still the killer app is because it cuts across all segments to the extent that many of them have other things that they're more passionate about but they still need to send messages. RoW: Video calling is an interesting application but will it be compelling?RB: There are applications out there that are going to be huge and continue to grow by leaps and bounds. SMS and some of the messaging applications are amongst those. There are other things like mobile TV, video calling that in the short term are going to be interesting to some and talked volumes about regarding the promise of what will continue to be delivered by the wireless business. We don't confuse the two. We make sure both are there, but we work to offer the innovation for the early adopters while knowing the masses continue to want the evolution of usability of SMS and the wireless Internet experience. Frankly a lot of our investment will be paid out on HSDPA - removing the spectral efficiencies arguments that everybody has made over time about new networks - by people just using applications they've always used only a lot more because the applications will be friendlier and faster than they have been in the past. We will never get rich on video calling in the next 12 months, but I think what it does is it keeps the industry and the customers excited about the art of the possible and many fewer will actually use it. RoW: There was a lot of buzz about mobile TV in the past and now it's trailed off. How is the current mobile TV service doing?RB: I think it's one of those things that is really interesting. It's about the art of the possible, but it's not something that everybody wants. At times our competitors have put aggressive ads out, I scratch my head because this is an early adopter thing, this is something that a small chunk of the population is going to use and they're going to show their friends and the word of mouth will be fantastic. But when we actually advertise a service, it's because we think it's a mass product and there's big volumes to be had there. We have decent take rates with the service and we're continuing to evolve the content. The world of mobisodes and people producing things for mobiTV, bbTV and other like applications is taking place. Just like anything else, picture messaging took almost 4 years before it came of age. We needed to get a bunch of the sub components right, we needed to get to megapixel cameras and we needed to get to a simpler way of being able to store and transfer pictures. I think in many ways mobiTV and probably too video calling need to move down that continuum. RoW: Bill Linton, Rogers CFO, recently said during an investors conference that the company is well positioned in the business market because it has a small exposure. The company currently has an offer that if you buy one BlackBerry you get up to four BlackBerry 7290s for free. Can you talk about the prospects for the business space?RB: There have been a whole host of ads around reaching the business market and they've been quite successful. It would probably surprise you about the amount of in-roads we've made in the large accounts, most recently the win with the federal government. We bid selectively for pieces of the business that we wanted to win based on what we felt were a lot of our strengths, so we shared the win with Telus. We have huge representation in all the major banks and in fact are dominant in all the major banks in terms of BlackBerry and voice. People don't talk about it a lot and I think what people see is the consumer innovation side of the company. Telus in the East and Bell in the West are still much bigger players. They've got that big old fashioned legacy wireline business and data business through big business customers. We've really made some great strides on that front using some of the Sprint assets, but in a big way using wireless. RoW: When we think about the enterprise market, we think about it in terms of wireline services and not necessarily on the wireless side. But wireless does give Rogers a solid entry point for upselling. RB: It's fantastic. We've leveraged our lead on data and when you talk about it from a boardroom perspective with the data devices like BlackBerry we viewed that as the lead horse to continue to introduce them to a number of other services. We've got a whole host of services in a group that does nothing other than build vertical applications for these types of accounts that take them beyond the horizontal device and the horizontal application into a lot of vertical applications.

Bruce talks about the business market and new technologies

News | 05/02/2007 12:10 pm EDT

Interview with Rob Bruce Part II

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