O Canada! > Canadian > Canadian Broadband > Rogers and possibly Bell shutting down Portable outdoor

Rogers and possibly Bell shutting down Portable outdoor

You mean the "portable internet" offering (aka: Inukshuk ?)

It is not surprising that they would be shutting it down. Remember, they want to convince the government that they need 700mhz to serve rural areas, they don't want to have a service there already

They may be ceding the market to Xplorenet. and/or hoping that they can offer affordable LTE service.

Am curioius though if they configure an LTE account to work from only one tower (no moving allowed).

Incumbents need to figure out a way to offer affordable internet to rural areas without making this available to urban deweller who will have to pay his ARPU to contribute to the incumbant's profits.

Consider a permanent resident of a small village in cottage country. He need to get affordbale internet, but in the summer, urbanites need to be able to use their expensive fancy smartphones and laptop and pay the big bucks, while the locals need to continue to pay low prices.

reply to Radar E 33
I never understood how they call this a "rural" internet solution since it covers mainly cities, were better service (cable and DSL) is available anyway.

Just look at the map

»hispeed.rogers.com/expand/map_frames.html

I wouldn't call this rural at all. Most people who can get this service can get cable or DSL. That probably explains why they want to shut it down.

Well no, they're shutting it down because the tower equipment they've invested in is inadequate to handle the load so if they wanted more capacity it's either spending more money on a proprietary hardware platform with an uncertain future contrasting with the eventual worldwide move to LTE. If they're going to spend capital it will be on newer technology that will benefit everyone.

As for the rural brand, it is the same thing except you get an outdoor modem with the antenna. When it was launched they claimed the real intention was for people on the go who need semi portable internet access but since most of the towers run out the rural area they could sell it to rural folks to recoup some of the costs. But now that wifi is pretty much everywhere and the urban areas have HSPA/LTE access, there is no need to keep the hardware since rural access was only a secondary benefit.

As for alternative solutions out in rural, they are few and far between. Satellite would definitely work anywhere but it is more costly. The reason for limited options is the cost of providing it is too high which is why very few providers take the risk and the ones that have, well they've been acquired mostly by Xplorenet who is not interested in providing quality service.

reply to jfmezei

»www.digitalhome.ca/2011/12/roger···service/

the article confirms Rogers shutting it down.

I don't get how they can reach 30 million Canadians with the coverage map that I see on Rogers' web site

reply to Radar E 33
They only resold this services to get the 300 millions dollars from government. they has never been really interested to exploit this network.

reply to mlerner
The platform is deprecated. Totally dead for several years. There is no future for the hardware, so once spares are exhausted, it will no longer be possible to maintain it. I guess they are shutting it down now to reduce the cost of maintaining several disparate platforms now that HSPA/LTE provide better capabilities.

I wonder what will become of the spectrum. Nobody in Canada is really using those bands for anything more than a trial other than Inukshuk.

How much cash did the canadian Gov't give to Inukshuk? Nobody has ever been able to give me information on that.

A condition of the license was that they cover a certain amount of the population in certain areas and they did reach that goal. But long-term viability of any grant-built network is always difficult: if it was uneconomic to build out and serve now, how will the situation be different in 10 years when the equipment is no longer serviceable? Few or none of the grant programs seem to deal with that reality, especially as smaller communities become less and less profitable over time.

3G HSPA coverage maps seem to be about the same as the CDMA/GSM coverage maps. What isn't covered with new networks that was previously? Not that given current prices 3G/4G is an economic alternative to fixed broadband given the cost/GB.

Where is this $1BN figure coming from? First we hear $300M, now $1BN. I have a hard time believing they got that much cash from the Gov't for Inukshuk. That sounds like the whole amount of funding for the federal programs in a half-decade.

reply to jfmezei

reply to Radar E 33
Around our area it's mainly deployed in rural regions - in Bell's case it's a Wimax based platform. Not 100% sure of which vendor they went with in our area for the Wimax, but the technology isn't dead at all... in fact it's being deployed more than ever as of recently (by other competing providers).

Major carriers are not deploying WiMax for the future, it is LTE only. But in Bell's case they were/are using Motorola's pre-WiMax with a slightly proprietary stack.

Major carriers with cellular space in respective regions are upgrading to LTE yes over many years.

reply to pstewart
They are using the same pre-wimax gear that Clearwire was prior to the transformation into Clear. It was sold as Expedience by NextNet which was taken over by clearwire and then sold to Motorola. The chassis isn't compatible with the new Wi4 platform from Moto. So it is deprecated in the sense that it is EOL and MD'd. It is to 4G fixed wireless what DBIC/1megmodem was to ADSL.

I'm unsure if the current Bellus (NSN/Huawei) or Rogers (Ericsson) radio vendors offer an LTE solution in that band at this time. If they did, I don't know if it would make sense to use it.

reply to pstewart
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