Investel to launch national Wi-Fi based wireless service

Investel Capital Corp.’s TNW Networks Corp. (TNW) will soon start deploying a Wi-Fi-based mobile technology as part of a nationally available wireless service that the company is claiming will be disruptive to the Canadian market, despite regulatory uncertainly caused by a CRTC complaint regarding a similar service. Last week, the company announced that it had acquired — subject to regulatory approval — RuralCom Capital Corp. and with it, its Tier-2 850 MHz mobile licences. Those licences will be used as part of TNW’s new service. According to TNW, its Internet Personal Communication System (iPCS) will provide voice and text services through data. In a press release, TNW CEO Sandeep Panesar said that “iPCS will totally disrupt the Canadian wireless landscape by finally providing Canadians who still pay some of the highest rates in the world, with a low cost next generation wireless alternative." The service will provide 500 MB of data per month for $10, with additional 100 MB blocks of data being available for $2.90, according to a Friday press release. While TNW’s spectrum holdings will be in northern British Columbia and the Yukon, the service will be available nationally and internationally, the company said, via open Wi-Fi and roaming partners. It expects the technology to be up by March 2017. The announcement comes as the CRTC is considering a complaint over permanent roaming from Rogers Communications Inc., who wants to disconnect Iristel Inc.’s Sugar Mobile from its network because it said Sugar Mobile was selling service outside of Ice’s operating territory. Sugar Mobile, which also uses a combination of WiFi and relies on roaming partners outside of its parent company’s operating area, has been allowed to continue roaming pending the regulator’s decision. Panesar said in an interview there is a difference between the two companies. TNW’s service will be compliant with roaming regulations, he said, because its technology will “deregister” from the roaming network when it is connected to Wi-Fi spots, which he said Sugar Mobile wasn’t doing. In addition, as part of its fair use agreement and CRTC regulations, customers will not be allowed to use more than 50 per cent of their data on the roaming network for three consecutive months, he said. Lawry Trevor-Deutsch, TNW’s senior vice-president of corporate affairs, said the company will monitor usage, with those going over for three consecutive months being disconnected from the roaming network. Panesar said he doesn’t anticipate this to be a problem because they don’t expect their customers to be roaming for that long. He added the company won’t market or sell products, such as SIM cards, outside of its operating territory, though they will hold outside awareness campaigns where they will be offering SIMs to customers for free. Trevor-Deutsch also said the launch won’t be affected by last month’s filing for bankruptcy protection by a related company owned by Investel. That company, which is involved in an ongoing dispute with Telus Corp., was previously named Téliphone Navigata Westel Communications Inc., and has been renamed to a numbered company. But Stuart Jack, a partner at Nordicity, said in a phone interview that he isn’t so sure the service isn’t similar in nature to Sugar, and noted that that WiFi hotspots aren’t necessarily abundant everywhere. He also said the current 4G environment could cause some issues for the service. “If you look at the issues of this category of service providers, in the current generation of technology, they’re still going to have these issues that Whatsapp has,” Jack noted. He said that those issues include quality of service over VOIP, which would be helped by 5G deployment. “Until 5G comes along, they really can’t have a seamless service,” Jack said, adding that he doesn’t think it’s truly disruptive “at this point.” But Panesar said in the interview that his company is “perfectly fine the way it is now. In fact, its is designed to work over…current 3G/4G/LTE systems, with a combination of Wi-Fi in the mix.” He added that the iPCS service is not the same thing as Whatsapp, which he said can’t control call quality. “We are a wireless provider; we have our own interconnection agreements with all of the roaming partners and we do our own backhaul, which means we control the call from one end right to the other and we can preserve call quality,” he said. Jack predicted that when telecom service becomes “another application of IP data, combining the whole suite of applications to the network, then you truly will see a whole plethora of niche players coming in.” TNW will be “much better positioned” to move the technology forward in a 5G environment, he said. “I think the potential makes it interesting.” CORRECTION: A statement about why Téliphone Navigata-Westel Communications filed for bankruptcy has been removed from a previous version of this story. — With reporting by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Investel to launch national Wi-Fi based wireless service

News | December 14, 2016

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Investel to launch national Wi-Fi based wireless service

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