Ted Rogers fights back over mandated roaming, tower sharing

Financial analysts got an earful February 22 when Ted Rogers, president and CEO of Rogers Communications Inc., took aim at Industry Canada for adopting provisions that would allow new entrants to roam on his wireless network and share towers, saying it would cause his company "real economic hardships". After first saying he wouldn't comment on matters regarding the ongoing spectrum auction consultation process, Rogers had a change of heart near the end of the hour-long fourth-quarter and year-end financial and subscriber results conference call. He took square aim at the department's policies regarding mandated tower sharing and roaming, the details of which still have to be finalized, as well as the broader issue of changing the terms and conditions of its spectrum licences. In one of the last questions, an analyst pointed out that a new entrant would presumably want to share towers with Rogers Wireless and roam on its network, to which the CEO had some interesting remarks. Rogers started out rather soft in his objections, noting that the company can't share tower space unless the party wishing to access the tower is willing to pay for upgrades to make the tower capable of carrying the extra equipment. But he took on a less conciliatory tone when talking about roaming and licence condition changes. When talk of roaming surfaces, it's not in reference to roaming on Bell Mobility's and Telus Mobility's network, it's about roaming on Rogers Wireless' network, Rogers stated. "Nobody is going to roaming on an old CDMA network that's about to crash," he said. "So all going to come on ours. And isn't that wonderful? We're going to get some revenue for a while. But we will build out capacity, say for the next five years, and then these guys put in their own and I've got empty wires all over the place and I'm out a couple of hundred million bucks in building this stuff that now nobody is using. So these are real problems for us, real economic hardships for us." The CEO wasn't done there, arguing that Industry Canada doesn't have the right to amend the company's spectrum licences. "You can't give a guy a licence for 10 years, ask him to invest $5 billion and then say ‘Oh, we're going to change the terms of your licence after three or four years,'" Rogers said. "Under all this is our position that we cannot tolerate to have our licences amended and that's the bottom line."

Ted Rogers fights back over mandated roaming, tower sharing

News | February 25, 2008

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