Just north of the US border lies the second largest country on earth.  Canada’s population of 34 million is just over one tenth of the US population.  In many ways, Canada is quite similar to the US.  However, the mobile environment is quite different.

Canadians are still in the middle of the pack when it comes to mobile penetration.  While the country was an early adopter of mobile technology, inexpensive land line phone services kept the growth of mobile at relatively modest levels throughout the 1990s.  As of June 2010, Canadian Wireless subscribers numbered 23.4 million. 

 

Adoption of wireless has increased significantly over the past decade.  With 75% of Canadian households having access to wireless phones and with the number of total wireless connections passing land line connections this year, Canada is moving quickly toward complete wireless adoption.

 

The past few years have seen a significant change in Canada’s mobile landscape.  While the big 3 mobile players have maintained the lions share of the Canadian mobile market, a group of new entrants has entered the space and has been working hard to carve out specific niches for themselves.  The efforts of the upstarts have not gone unnoticed by the incumbents and the result has been a surge in network investment, marketing and price competition.

 

An interesting aspect of the Canadian mobile industry is the marked absence of international mobile players on the Canadian scene.  Names like Vodafone, ATT and Telefonica are noticeably missing.

 

Since the 1980s strict foreign ownership limitations have been placed on the Canadian mobile industry.  Those limitations were never challenged by any of the multinational global mobile players.  Not until a few years ago.  In a landmark case, Globalive Wireless, through a sizable investment from Egypt based Orascom Telecom, was able to gain access to the Canadian market in 2009.  Globalive now operates under the Wind Mobile brand in most urban Canadian markets.  As of November 2010 Wind Mobile’s subscriber base is listed at 140,000.

 

Although that is a mere fraction of the subscriber numbers held by Rogers (8.881 Million), Bell (7.125 Million) and Telus (6.852 Million), the numbers show growth in a market that many believe has plenty of room to grow.

 

SaskTel’s 540,000 subscribers and the 475,000 subscribers that are with MTS round out the major players in Canada.  Videotron, Mobilicity and Public Mobile purchased spectrum at the same time as Wind Mobile.  Videotron  has added over 20,000 subscribers over the past few months.  Public Mobile and Mobilicity, which only launched in mid 2010, have yet to release subscriber numbers.

 

Canadians consumers have always been primarily postpaid.  Postpaid represents over 80% of the customer base for Rogers and Telus.  Bell, mostly because of their primarily pre-paid Virgin Mobile brand, have a slightly lower percentage of postpaid customers with 76% reported as postpaid and 24% prepaid as of the end of the 3rd quarter of 2010.

 

Canadians have also embraced messaging.  Canadians now send more than 150 million text messages per day as of June 2010.  In June 2009 that number was under 100 million.  In June 2006 that number was at 10 million per day.  The growth of Canadian messaging, as in many countries, has been nothing short of explosive.

 

Shortcodes, administered by the CWTA, continue to grow in popularity as well as functionality.  With enterprise applications focused on SMS messaging, Shortcodes have come to represent a ubiquitous and easy to use entry into the mobile marketplace for corporations and marketing agencies.  In total, Canadians sent and received over a billion SMS messages through shortcodes in the first half of 2010.  

 

Perhaps the most ambitious development over the past several has been the investment made by Bell and Telus to move off of CDMA networks.  After investing billions of dollars in a joint investment, Bell Mobility and Telus have built and now switched to HSPA+ and has begun to double network speeds to a maximum of 42 Mbps.  This change has broken the exclusivity Rogers has enjoyed for years on GSM and the prize that has eluded them for years – access to the iPhone.  All three major Canadian carriers now offer Apple’s smash hit device and the competition is bound to get even more intense in the months to come.

Cheers

Eric.