Bell’s No-Frills Wireless Dreams
Earlier this week, Bell Canada posted disappointing wireless subscriber additions in the important fourth-quarter: 160K vs. 210K a year earlier. There were all kinds of excuses: lack of industry advertising for family plans (??) and tighter credit acquisition policies but it was another sign Bell’s losing the wireless war to Rogers and Telus. An interesting story that got little coverage is Bell’s plans to convert its Solo brand into a discount wireless service.
What? A discount wireless service? This may be news to the general public but anyone intimate with the inner workings of Bell knows this is a strategy the company aggressively pursued under the supervision of Alek Krstajic last year. Bell was well down the development path under the corporate banner SmartCo (it had a whack of cool loft space in downtown Toronto, a bunch of TV commercials in the can, and an aggressive marketing plan to offer low-cost, no-frills wireless service) before COO George Cope, whose personal dictionary doesn’t include the word “discount”, killed the project.
What’s particularly interesting is that Bell was apparently prepared to extend this no-frills approach to the VoIP and Internet access markets. This strategy, which Krstajic sold to Sabia while they were flying to the Winter Olympics in Torino last year, was either a stroke a brilliance or a sign of desperation but it definitely outside the Bell box.
So will Cope revive this no-frills plans in an attempt to resuscitate Bell’s wireless subscriber growth? While he’s at it, Cope may also want to consider doing a GSM overlay but that’s another story for another day.
Technorati Tags: Bell Canada
February 9th, 2007 at 8:35 am
Mark,
What is the cost and practicality of doing a GSM overlay? Bell is certainly challenged with Global accessibility and Neat technology due to CDMA. My quandry is, if you spend Billions on a new network on top of your existing one, what is the cost benefit versus missing additions numbers by 50k? I know this is simplistic short term thinking, but I think this is a lot of cash and they are already changing over the POTS to IP…
February 9th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
I suspect there will be more fuel for this fire com March 14th when local number portability hits the wireless market. I for one am ditching my Telus service as the coverage is atrocious in my neighbourhood.
February 9th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
It’s facinating that Bell continues to look at external market factor to explain their decline. As someone who pays Bell over $1000 a month for a number of converged services (not including my business), you think that when I call tthem with an issue they might want to consider being at a minimum, polite.
They have without a doubt, the WORST attitude towards their customers (and I have services on Rogers and have dealt with both companies on-going). Bell Canada could give a shit about us. I for one, can’t wait for number portability.
February 9th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Not sure how much a GSM overlay would cost but it would definitely be 100s of millions of dollars.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:46 am
[...] Krstajic is no stranger to the low-cost wireless world. After leaving Rogers in 2003, he joined BCE as chief marketing officer before becoming CEO of Bell Mobility in 2006. At Bell, he helped create a new business called Bell Vanguard Inc. that was going to roll out a low-cost wireless service in Canada. Bell Vanguard has funky office space downtown, a large staff and TV commercials when to roll when BCE abruptly cancelled the project. (More details can be found here.) [...]