Rogers About to Get Something they Didn’t Want: Competition

I got a news-flash email from the CBC today (I’m no one special; I’ve signed up for alerts like this):

The federal government is $4.2 billion richer with the conclusion of the cellphone spectrum auction on Monday, while customers stand to win as five new companies are now well positioned to launch services over the next few years. The windfall is considerably larger than the original $1.5 billion many industry analysts had predicted before the auction began on May 27.

I linked to the related story on the CBC web site, and 3 passages caught my eye. (in all cases, bold and italics are mine) First:

The big winner — and biggest spender — among potential new entrants was Toronto-based Globalive Communications Inc., which currently sells home phone and internet service under the Yak brand. The company has emerged from the auction positioned to launch a national cellphone service with 30 licenses broadly distributed across the country.

Second:

The new entrants are widely expected to build third-generation networks based on global system for mobile communications (GSM) technology, which is what Rogers and its Fido subsidiary use, or its newer fourth-generation offshoot, long-term evolution (LTE).

and Third:

Iain Grant, president of the Seaboard Group telecommunications consultancy, said a national carrier could be up and running by Easter at a cost of $500 million, although other estimates say a launch could take a year or two. The trickiest part of starting up will be negotiating rights for transmission sites, many of which will either be on top of tall buildings or on towers owned by Rogers, Bell and Telus.

So here we are, looking at a Spring of 2009 roll-out for at least one competitor to Rogers/Fido Wireless, and did Rogers position themselves well for such a situation? In my humble opinion, absolutely not. Anyone in Canada has seen this coming (anyone who was not in Rogers management, that is). In the past years, months and weeks, Rogers has made so many Canadian consumers so angry that they can count on no customer loyalty whatsoever. Their brand may very well be damaged beyond repair. Any new cellphone vendor who supports a GSM 3G network will be able to grab a large pool of customers ready to switch immediately, or when their contract with Rogers is up (and you can bet that they’ll put that date on their calendar!)

How did Rogers screw this up so badly? The recent history of Rogers, particularly with respect to pricing and marketing tells some of the story. If you live in Canada and have had any dealings with Rogers, you’ll know much of this, so feel free to skip to the end…

First, over the past 3 or 4 years, Rogers charged some of the highest data and call rates in the world. Then, in 2007, consumers and tech watchers criticized them for being slow to bring the iPhone to Canada after it was available in the U.S. for a year.  In April of 2008, Rogers chief executive Ted Rogers told investors the iPhone would arrive in Canada some time later in the year. In June, Rogers set the iPhone’s debut for July 11 (along with several other countries throughout the world), but were quickly met with harsh criticism about the data pricing plan, which was perhaps the second highest in the world (with Sweden being the highest) . Some high-profile tech personalities in Canada went on television to announce that they were going to jump ship (in some cases paying a sizable penalty). Only after thousands of current and prospective customers signed online petitions protesting these rates,  encouraging Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs to put pressure on the company, did Rogers relent with a drop of the highest rate to a reasonable level ($30 per month with a usage limit of up to 6 GB per month), but this rate is available only until the end of August. On the day of the roll-out, Rogers’ registry networks crashed simultaneously with Apple’s iTunes registering system after the new iPhone was unveiled. The Outage lasted into the afternoon at some locations and it wasn’t until the next week before some customers could activate their phones. Rogers representatives said they expected record first-day sales, but declined to disclose how many phones were shipped to stores or how many they had expected to sell. As I write this, Rogers (throughout Vancouver, at least) is still sold out of the iPhone.

All in all it was a highly visible fiasco. Rogers utterly botched the iPhone roll-out in just about every way it could be botched. They could have finally made many current customers happy with a new device and would be seen today as the sole provider of one of the most sought-after tech gadgets. Instead, they generated several days of bad PR, displayed poor planning, and missed immeasurable marketing and sales opportunities. There have been numerous speculations that the reason they ran out stock is that Apple was so peeved at the high data rates that they actually diverted iPhone shipments from Canada to more reasonable European carriers. Whether or not this was true, Rogers’ lack of candor regarding availability, lack of understanding of the product, and complete screw-up of logistics and network volume on the day of the roll-out is something that will not fade quickly from the memory of most Canadians (and probably not by this coming Easter).

It will be interesting to see if the mass exodus from Rogers to whatever new carrier Globalive will fund will be as swift and massive as I expect it will be. Rogers has run their business ‘like there’s no tomorrow’, but in the Spring of 2009, ‘tomorrow’ will arrive.

Whistler in the Summer

We got back on Sunday from a few days at Whistler, where we spent some days of vacation with my brother and his family. While we all never felt very rushed, we managed to get quite a few activities in while we were there, including a gondola and chairlift trip up to the top of Whistler mountain, a ZipTrek tour in the forest above and around the Fitzsimmons river, a hike to Lost Lake, a couple of movies (”Get Smart” at the local cinema, “Jumper” on DVD) and several lunches and dinners out. My niece Renata also got in a couple of sessions on the bungee trampoline, which helped her to bounce a couple of stories (at least) into the air. While I can’t document all of it in pictures and video, here are some high points (sic):

Pam wasn’t quite prepared for how cold it would get, but fortunately, there were some blankets available at the chairlift, about 2/3 of the way up.):

I also thought I’d include a few ZipTrek videos. This gave me a chance to try out Flickr’s video features. I’m not including one that I can’t seem to flip horizontally (my Sister-In-Law held her camera sideways and no matter what I do, including changing the file and saving it to a new movie, the uploaded file seems to revert to that orientation).

Here’s Pam sliding on the wire across the Fitzsimmons River:

Now, from the point of view of a participant. Need I add that this is a blast?

In addition to the rides up in the trees (about 5 times over the river and back), you get a bit of an ecology lecture about the area and some tips on what you can do to be more ‘green’. I really like ZipTrek, who seem to practice what they preach, in terms of an ecologically-aware business. Aside from the vans that they use to transport people to and from their sites (and I heard that once there are electric ones or perhaps hybrids that will serve in this capacity, they’ll switch to those), they are pretty gentle on the environment. They even have a small water-driven generator via the river that provides most of the electrical power for the A-Frame where they house their offices, train employees, and end some of the tours. Our tour leaders were college students majoring in Eco-tourism and Geology, and they made sure that none of us were ever in danger or uncomfortable, despite what looks like an ‘extreme’ sport.

In addition to some good meals together (Monks up there is very nice and beautiful to look at; Pam’s Halibut dusted with porcini mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes was superb), Pam and I also had an excellent celebratory dinner of our third Anniversary of coming to Canada on July 5th at Il Caminetto , one of the restaurants of Umberto Menghi (his Il Giardino and Umberto’s are both downtown). He’s one of the three celebrity chefs in the White Spot commercials, (the other two are Rob Feenie and John Bishop) always talking about ‘the sauce’. We ate a light dinner; Pam chose a subtly flavoured Roast Cornish Game Hen atop chickpeas and mixed vegetables, and I had a simple but perfectly done homemade Fettuccine with cream sauce, peas and prosciutto along with some excellent wine: A good BC Pinot Gris made by the Pentage Winery from Skaha Bench in the Okanagan, as well as an intense Italian Muscat for dessert . I’ve become a big fan of dessert wines, and sometimes prefer them over a cake or tart.

So for trying of celebrity chef restaurants in the area, we are now 2 out of 3. I guess a visit to a Cactus Club would now count for Rob Feenie, since he has become the ‘food concept architect’ of that chain. That’s what the articles say, at any rate.

A nice time was had by all (I think), and we feel pretty lucky to have this beautiful resort area so near to us (for those who don’t live in Vancouver, depending on traffic and construction on the Sea-to-Sky Highway, it’s about a 2 1/2 hour drive from the city). My brother summed up Whistler by and large better than I could: “It’s a bit like Disneyland for adults.”

Summer, Finally

Not so Hazy and Not so Lazy

Maybe it’s because we have our first bona-fide day where you could go out without a jacket. Maybe it’s because the sun truly doesn’t set until nearly around 8:30. Maybe it’s because Granville Market is brimming over with sweet local strawberries, most of the spot prawns and asparagus are past, and the heirloom tomatoes are starting to appear. All of the above is contributing to a feeling that we have finally passed into the summer season.

For me, being between contracts/jobs and with some time on my hands, it means that I can enjoy some of this, although I’m certainly not spending my days at the beach. Next week, being the Canada Day and Fourth of July holiday week, both Pam and I are going to get a little summer break, with a trip to Whistler with my brother and his family. We’ve been looking forward to that for a long time.

Planning for the Autumn Demise of Classical Radio in Vancouver

Summer is also the time when a few things end. This morning was the last time that Tom Allen would do his ‘cage match’, a whimsical feature of ‘Music and Company’ where he would pit one piece of music against another and call for a vote. This week’s final cage match theme was: ‘With a bang or a whimper’, since it will be the last one of these bits of fun…forever. Representing an ending with a bang was Chabrier’s ‘Ah Hurrah’ from the Opera, Le Roi Malgre Lui. The opponent (representing a ‘whimper’ or soft ending) was the last movement from Haydn’s clever Symphony No. 45, ‘The Farewell Symphony’ (where one by one, the musicians leave the stage until there are only 2 first violins left to end the piece, a cleverly choreographed hint to Haydn’s patron, the Prince Nikolaus Esterházy that his court musicians as well as his composer were all homesick and wanted him to close up the summer palace so everyone could return home to Eisenstadt).

It was a typical cage match; one part joke, one part serious, one part drama. Like just about everything Tom Allen does on the program, it makes one think a little, and sets up the day. I will sorely miss this along with some of his other regular features. Probably my favourite comes at about 6:30 AM: This Day in… which observes some event in history that shares today’s date. Today’s was the first solo circumnavigation of the globe in a boat by Joshua Slocum, a Nova Scotian seaman who finished the trip that he had begun in Boston three years earlier in 1895 on today’s date. Like so many other ‘This Day In…’s, I didn’t know about this event, and felt the joy I often do from gaining a bit of knowledge just as I’m starting the day.

Without going off on another rant about the stupidity and wrongness of the CBC getting rid of the best classical music morning program in the world, I’ve finally accepted the inevitable and made plans. A couple of weeks ago I picked up (on sale) a curious new device at London Drugs: a BLIK Internet Clock Radio. It’s a standard-looking radio (unfortunately with inferior speakers to the Bose Wave Radio that we’ve been using for the last 10 years or so) that ‘tunes’ to a streaming radio station on the Internet rather than local FM (although you can do that, if the Internet is down). I’ve tested it, and while there is about a 20-second delay while the station ‘resolves’ to the URL you’ve chosen, it will indeed allow you to awaken to over 9,000 different stations all over the world (although in practice the number one would want to tune to is a small fraction of that number). I was able to set the presets to the BBC’s Radio 3 (which I knew well from my days as a Grad Student), the local CBC Radio 1, NPR in Boston, as well as the national NPR station. I’ll look for some other stations, as there are 8 preset slots. As you can imagine, retrieving and sifting through 9,000 stations in a tree-like menu using a terrible LED screen is a bit of a challenge (oh, if only Apple would make one of these- I guess they do, it’s called a Mac Mini with mouse, keyboard, speakers and a small flat-screen monitor running a browser with some preset streaming radio station bookmarks, but even something like that is too large for a night-table). Most of these stations have us waking up at 9:00 AM Eastern on North America, or 68(!) hours ahead in the UK. I fear that at noon 2:00 in the afternoon in London we may not get a completely morning-friendly classical music feed, so I’ll have to search further until I find a new place to tune to. Both Pam and I hope that we don’t have to resort to NPR, which always put me in a bad mood in the morning, particularly now that it has moved so much farther to the Right politically than it used to be (hearing the appalling Cokie Roberts sneer at the Democrats every Monday morning got my blood boiling early in the week - funny, but that was my word, but apparently it’s still what she is doing, defending Dick Cheney on the TV Program ‘This Week’).

While they are getting rid of Classical Music on Radio 2, I do remember the somewhat encouraging news that the CBC said that they were going to add a streaming classical music channel on the Internet. I doubt if it will have the incomparable Tom Allen on it, but at least there will be a Canadian alternative for our move from FM Radio to almost exclusively Internet radio from Labour Day on.

The CBC Taketh Away, the CRTC Giveth…

While I’ve been howling and gnashing my teeth about the imminent demise of Classical Music on CBC Radio 2 (and don’t tell me it’s not going away; 10AM-3PM weekdays of Beethoven’s Fifth and Vivaldi’s ‘The Seasons’ is a deathbed), for once, there’s something good to say about CBC Radio, although the CBC actually has relatively little to actually take credit for: Apparently, CBC Radio 1 has secured a license for an FM station in Vancouver from the CRTC (the Canadian Radio-télévision and Telecommunications Commission). At some point in the near future, CBC Radio 1 will be available at 88.1 FM in our area. Vancouver is a bit out of date in this regard, as much of the country already receives Radio One on both the AM and FM dial (the history of CBC Radio One is detailed on Wikipedia).

Why is this worth noting? Well, in our condo and car, we don’t get any AM signal at all. We’re on a lower floor, facing north, and there isn’t a single AM station that we can pull in, it’s all FM. As for the car, I suspect there’s just not a very good AM antenna in it.

So, while we lose music, we do gain CBC Radio 1, which is news, current events, and some very interesting and fun shows, like Quirks and Quarks, a science program, and Definitely Not the Opera, a program about pop culture. There’s no Classical Music (but then again, as of September, there won’t be any Classical Music on radio except for that sliver at lunchtime on weekdays), and a large helping of popular music, Blues, and Country (which I won’t be tuning in for, thanks) but at least I will get something else to listen to on the airwaves in terms of the spoken word without having to resort to NPR back in the US via Internet.

Still, if I had my choice, I’d gladly sacrifice Radio One reception if I could keep getting the music I love on the radio, but as I’ve sadly come to accept, that won’t be the case for very much longer. Fortunately, Internet Radio is on the horizon, and I’ve already been making plans for ways to pipe BBC Radio 3 as well as classical stations elsewhere in the world (including back in Boston, NYC, Seattle, LA and Baltimore) through the house when CBC 2 dies (for me, anyway).

I Get To Attend an Opening…Again

Ah yes, I remember it well: The long lines in the Cambridgeside Galleria Mall, the T-Shirts for those nearer to the front of the line, the excitement as the doors finally opened… The Apple Store opening in Cambridge, Massachusetts was one of the first ones that Apple had. We were used to the fact that although we weren’t Cupertino (or even San Francisco), Cambridge was one of the East Coast centres for Apple’s presence. After all, in the early days of Macworld Expo (and I doubt if many people who own an Apple product know this at this point), there was a West Coast Macworld Expo in San Francisco in January and an East Coast Macworld Expo in Boston, usually during the hottest week in August. It wasn’t until that fateful day when Bill Gates’s 20-foot face appeared on the screen behind Steve Jobs during his keynote (and it was hissed by the crowd) that Steve made sure that there would be no more MacWorlds in Boston.

I know, I know, there were probably other reasons, but Jobs’s annoyance at the disagreement of the Boston crowd with his strategy of having Microsoft invest in Apple during their darkest hour probably didn’t help the show. In the following year, Jobs refused to give the keynote, and the show moved to New York City. It continued on a few years there at the Javitts Center, but attendance at that venue quickly petered out. As many have pointed out, the Internet can now disperse information about products far faster and farther than any show floor could. There is now only one MacWorld Expo, each January, and it remains a San Francisco tradition.

When we moved to Vancouver, I missed that sense of being on Apple’s radar. Despite the fact that many here use the Mac (in fact, in recent years it’s increased), I found the local Certified Apple Dealers a bit ramshackle, with relatively small variety of peripherals and messy, poorly maintained display areas. My first job was working for someone who hated the Mac, and he was relieved when I didn’t insist that I use one in his small office (I would have been the only Mac user in the shop). At IBM, we all were assigned Thinkpads, of course. The consultants from Victoria often had Macs. At Blogger and smaller business events, the Mac was predominant. Nevertheless, the absence of the iPhone in Canada, the higher prices for products, and constantly hearing the rumors that Apple Hated Canada didn’t help matters.

Our days of living in a relatively less important spot in the Apple universe are about to end. On this coming Saturday morning, I hope to be in line for the opening of the first Apple store in Vancouver. We’ve been waiting for this for some time. Its going to be in the heart of downtown, at the Pacific Centre Mall (actually the previous location of Holt Renfrew, a high end Department Store, who have moved into new digs nearby). I believe that it’s only the fifth store in Canada, with the other three in Toronto and one in Laval.

To put things in a bit of perspective, another Apple store opened in Boston (across the river from Cambridge, but certainly near our old home) last week. It’s the largest Apple Store in the world, taking up three floors and sporting an all glass facade, on Boylston Street. Oh well, I guess Boston still looms larger in Apple’s realm, but at least we’re no longer off the map.