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Last Visited: 7/9/2009
Led by CEO Alek Krstajic, the company aims to launch before year end in Southern Ontario and parts of Quebec with $40-a-month plans that include unlimited local calls and text messaging.
"We need flat-rate billing," Krstajic said during a telecom conference this week in Toronto.
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Krstajic, a former executive at both Bell Mobility and Rogers Cable, told several hundred attendees at the Canadian Telecom Summit this past week that two of the three new players would not be around in 12 months.
Not surprisingly, as Public Mobile's chief executive, he argued that Globalive and DAVE Wireless would be the most vulnerable because both are proposing to go head-to-head with the deep-pocketed existing players.
By contrast, Public Mobile plans to build an ultra-low cost network between Windsor and Quebec City using a slice of unwanted spectrum called the G-block, which its backers, including American firms Columbia Capital and M/C Venture Partners, purchased for just $52 million, about a fifth of what the others paid in the same markets.
Public Mobile's strategy targets the roughly 30 per cent of Canadians who do not yet own cellphones, while deliberately avoiding high-end devices such as the iPhone and the BlackBerry, which require both voice and data plans.
Krstajic said he is hoping to fly under the radar of the incumbents by focusing on a segment of the market that the existing players have already deemed unprofitable.