On the Prairies, gophers chew through buried cables and disconnect entire rural communities. In B.C., landslides rip out poles and drag wires in a tangled mess down the mountainside. Maritime fog has been known to cripple service and heavy snow and rain can disrupt satellite signals, while in southern Ontario, it's another story: If you plant a cell tower down in a place that disrupts someone's view, better be ready to paint your tower green or dress it up like a tree.
Canada is not a simple place to build a wireless network. The vast country creates a host of challenges, from feisty small-town mayors to wild swings in population density (and temperament: one man in B.C. chained himself to an old-growth tree set to be chopped for a tower).
Because of this, it has always made sense for Canadian telecom companies to share the building and operation of cell towers.
But as a new surge of wireless competition begins to wash across Canada, divisions and competitive concerns are keeping the new entrants from teaming up and saving cash in the war for market share and survival.
Building completely separate networks across Canada means the new entrants are incurring higher costs. In days gone by, many new entrants threw themselves at the incumbents with expensive attacks, only to stumble and eventually get bought out.
Ganging up on the big boys
Facing the might of the wireless incumbents, today's three new wireless players are looking to save by sharing the cost of building networks where they can.
"The economics of co-operating amongst the new entrants are irrefutable and very compelling," says Anthony Lacavera, chairman of Globalive Wireless Management Corp.
"There's nothing that the incumbents would like better than to see all three of us [each] try and build a network while they beat up on us."
The pure wireless new entrants like Globalive, Public Mobile Inc. and Data & Audio Visual Enterprises (DAVE) Wireless Inc. have had to start from nothing. Globalive is the only one even claiming to be building a "national" network, though it has no wireless spectrum in Quebec. The task is monumental.
Blanketing Canada is an expensive proposition for any operator. Carriers have thousands of relay devices across the country, made up of costly cell towers and antennas fixed to corporate rooftops or the sides of mountains.
Aside from the cost of the equipment, geographic factors such as the need to helicopter in supplies and workers onto a mountainside, or digging into the Canadian Shield, add to the expense. Some carriers, though, have found ways to cut corners. Churches, for example, often request to host antennas in their steeples to pull in extra cash, which saves on tower-building costs for telcos.
Krista Jones knows the challenges well from an earlier era in Canadian telecom. As vice-president of network planning and engineering at MetroNet Communications in the 1990s, she convinced her company that building a cross-country fibre-optic phone network was impossible - without help.
"You have to cover the costs of the Canadian terrain through infrastructure sharing," says Ms. Jones, who now works with start-up telecom companies at MaRS Discovery District in Toronto. "Competitors had to get together."
MetroNet was part of a wave of providers hoping to compete against the incumbent providers, like Bell and Telus. It was known as the age of the CLECs, or competitive local exchange carriers, an era of hope among upstarts aiming for cross-country build-outs.
"I would say nine out of 10 failed," she says.
The wave crashed. Even those who cut costs by sharing failed against the might of the incumbents, and then passed on expensive infrastructure to them at pennies on the dollar
Who wants to help a rival?
Mr. Lacavera, Globalive's chairman, remembers the destruction of the CLEC days. He almost lost his holding company, which operates other telecom businesses, when many of the largest telcos he did business with filed for bankruptcy.
