Videotron CEO hints at Quebec wireless rollout

Canadian cable company Videotron is planning to launch wireless service in Quebec this summer, although the company is staying mum on launch specifics.
In an address at the 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto, Robert Depatie, president and CEO of Videotron, shared some insight into the company’s launch. “We are engaged in extensive network testing and are on the verge of launching Quebec’s most competitive, and its most complete wireless service. Our 3.75 generation network will be fast, able and stable, with technology and entertainment capabilities that will go above and beyond what is presently out there. Our wireless network will soon be at the heart of our strategies and our wireless plan, like all our service and product plans, will be focused on the customer and on how will we deliver value.”
The Canadian company, a subsidiary of Quebecor Media, won AWS spectrum licenses for Quebec, Toronto and eastern Ontario, paying more than $554 million (Canadian) for the license. Videotron today operates as an MVNO with 85,300 customers, but its main business is cable TV and broadband Internet service. It counts nearly 1.8 million cable TV customers in Quebec and nearly 1.2 million cable modem customers.
“We see our wireless network as an excellent means to extend the Videotron experience to mobile users, certainly, but also to fixed users who are beyond the reach of our fixed broadband services,” Depatie said. “Our goal is to provide our customers with an ecosystem, an environment that can respond to customer requests and requirements and that can create new services. … Full choice, full flexibility, full ubiquity. With this, our customers will have three screens, three different formats, which means three different types of challenges for our systems and processes. Our job is to make it work, to put the customer in control and make sure that the choice, the flexibility and the ubiquity are truly there. All of these three equal the Videotron technological ecosystem,” Depatie said.
Videotron has inked roaming agreements with Rogers in Canada and T-Mobile USA Inc. in the United States.
The Canadian government in 2008 auctioned more spectrum to bring greater wireless competition to the country. Rogers Wireless, Telus Corp. and Bell Mobility dominate the marketplace today. New entrants include Vidoetron, Globalive Holdings and Mobilicity.