Bell’s No-Frills Wireless Dreams
Earlier this week, Bell Canada posted disappointing wireless subscriber additions in the important fourth-quarter: 160K vs. 210K a year earlier. There were all kinds of excuses: lack of industry advertising for family plans (??) and tighter credit acquisition policies but it was another sign Bell’s losing the wireless war to Rogers and Telus. An interesting story that got little coverage is Bell’s plans to convert its Solo brand into a discount wireless service.
What? A discount wireless service? This may be news to the general public but anyone intimate with the inner workings of Bell knows this is a strategy the company aggressively pursued under the supervision of Alek Krstajic last year. Bell was well down the development path (it had a whack of cool loft space in downtown Toronto, a bunch of TV commercials in the can, and an aggressive marketing plan to offer low-cost, no-frills wireless service) before COO George Cope, whose personal dictionary doesn’t include the word “discount”, killed the project.
What’s particularly interesting is that Bell was apparently prepared to extend this no-frills approach to the VoIP and Internet access markets. This strategy, which Krstajic sold to Sabia while they were flying to the Winter Olympics in Torino last year, was either a stroke a brilliance or a sign of desperation but it definitely outside the Bell box.
So will Cope revive this no-frills plans in an attempt to resuscitate Bell’s wireless subscriber growth? While he’s at it, Cope may also want to consider doing a GSM overlay but that’s another story for another day.
Technorati Tags: Bell Canada
Written by Mark Evans on February 9th, 2007 with
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