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Naguib Sawiris, executive chairman of Orascom and majority investor in Wind Mobile, had some salty things to say about Canadian wireless and the three carriers that currently rule it in a recent interview. Sawiris says not only that Rogers, Bell and Telus are “a joke” and that he wouldn’t invest in them for being big and slow, but he also has purportedly received buyout offers from them, that, though profitable, would have been against his nature as an industrialist. On the flip side, Sawiris made clear his interest in acquiring other smaller carriers that followed in Wind Mobile’s wake, like Mobilicity and Public Mobile. That is, of course, once they crashed and burned.
Orascom’s involvement got Wind Mobile caught up in foreign ownership regulations during their launch late last year, but they were eventually allowed to operate, and Rogers was to provide a roaming agreement outside Wind Mobile’s home zones. Sawiris has done telecom work in some pretty unstable areas of the world (including Iraq, North Korea, Algeria, and Pakistan), but says Canada is especially hard to work within.
“There has been too many constraints. We have not been able to launch this operation in the way we usually launch our operations. … Every time you put up a [cell] site, you need to ask everybody from the grandmother to the children in the street to the next door neighbour to his cousins.”
There are still plenty of hurdles to overcome in Canada. Aside from setting up new home zones and expanding their existing network, Quebec will be a particularly tough nut to crack; it seems that within the province, emerging service provider Quebecor has a lock-down on the same AWS bands on which Wind Mobile operates. Even if there were ways around the technical issues, it could be tricky wrestling customers from a native Quebec company, the province being a “nation within a nation” with francophone loyalties running high and all. However, judging by Sawiris’ attitude, the more hostile the market, the more likely Wind Mobile is to attack it: “We go where people don’t dare to go. We’re crazy, we’re adventurous.”
The whole interview with Sawiris is pretty interesting, and worth a gander at the via link.
[via Globe and Mail]
About The Author
Simon Sage
Simon Sage’s education largely surrounded writing, technology and online community, leading him to begin his blogging career at www.BlackBerryCool.com and to quickly discover a vibrant and active community surrounding BlackBerry and mobile technology. In exploring RIM’s platform, he has learned what enterprises are looking for in mobility as well as what makes the innocuous BlackBerry so appealing to them. Recently Simon’s been covering RIM’s gradual move into an already-crowded consumer market, and the impact of burgeoning challengers, such as the iPhone, as well as long-time leaders, like Nokia, on BlackBerry’s advancement. With plenty of content under his belt, Simon will be branching off a bit to see what other smartphone manufacturers are working on while still using BlackBerry as a barometer. At IntoMobile, you can count on his posts being even-handed, well-informed and thought-out.
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