Upcoming wireless spectrum auctions are critically important for some of Canada’s newest players in the cell phone marketplace.  Most are working hard to make sure they have plenty to spend to secure new frequencies for advanced wireless services that will help them remain competitive with larger players.

Globalive Holdings, the parent company of Wind Mobile, has convinced backers to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in financing, so long as all of the money is spent on acquiring wireless spectrum.

Wind’s nearly 400,000 customers will appreciate the additional room for growth, and new customers may keep Wind in mind for advanced 4G networks most Canadian providers intend to build and expand into the new spectrum they acquire at an auction next year.

Much of the funding, estimated to approach nearly a half-billion dollars, is coming from Wind’s parent entities, Egypt-based Orascom Telecom and the European conglomerate VimpelCom that acquired Orascom earlier this year.  Because the Canadian government is expected to set-aside some of the valued 700MHz spectrum exclusively for bidding among new entrants in the market, Wind could walk away a big winner, particularly if other similar-sized competitors Mobilicity and Vidéotron Ltee./Quebecor have trouble raising enough money to remain competitive in the bidding.

As far as Canada’s largest cell companies are concerned, set-asides are unnecessary and they prefer a winner-take-all auction.  Rogers, in particular, has been lobbying hard to convince Canadian officials it needs access to the 700MHz spectrum up for auction to roll out service in rural communities and upgrade networks in larger cities.

Those who feel Canada’s cell phone marketplace is already too concentrated have little sympathy for Rogers’ point of view, and expect an auction free-for-all will mean the largest incumbent players will walk away with everything they can bid on.

Among smaller players, assuming the set-asides are in place, analysts expect Wind will probably secure the most spectrum, but Vidéotron is expected to stay competitive and walk away with at least some frequencies for use in its home province of Quebec.  Big losses among the smaller players could fuel calls for additional mergers and acquisitions among those carriers deemed to have been left behind.

The Canadian government is expected to be the biggest winner of all, netting a potential $3-4 billion from the spectrum sale.

A joint venture between Rogers, Videotron, Bell and Telus will bring major improvements in cell phone service in Montréal’s métro by the end of 2013.

Isabelle Tremblay, a spokesperson for the Société de transport de Montréal, which manages the métro system, told the Montréal Gazette there has been a plan in place for several years to have a cellular network in the subway tunnels, which are often cell-phone-free zones because of reception problems.

Montreal métro provides coverage in these areas of Montreal.

None of the carriers involved would confirm the report, originally published in La Presse, but subway cell phone networks are not unprecedented.  Both New York and Washington, D.C. have cell service provided by underground antennas.  Many trains now also provide Wi-Fi service, and Montréal is expected to be no different.

Tremblay said Wi-Fi would come after cell phone service is established.  In most cases, carriers use third party contractors to construct and manage the networks on their behalf.  Only existing customers get to access the respective networks.

A Winston-Salem man with a judgment from a North Carolina court in hand shocked AT&T store employees on Summit Square Boulevard Tuesday when he walked in with a Forsyth County Sheriff’s deputy to serve AT&T a court order that allowed the Sheriff’s Office to seize the store’s assets and sell them to satisfy his $2,000 judgment.

George Kontos says AT&T has been stonewalling his family for more than three months after winning a lawsuit against AT&T for Internet Overcharging.  The company had been stalling Kontos with paperwork requests, but a visit by a sheriff’s deputy prepared to begin selling off the store’s property to pay Kontos managed to finally get AT&T to act.

“AT&T is making arrangements to pay the sum owed to the Kontos family and will deliver the payment to the appropriate entity,” an AT&T spokesperson said in a statement.

Kontos had little trouble arguing his case in small claims court.

(Courtesy: WFMY News)

“When I went into AT&T to look at the plan, I wanted to make sure I had a comparable data plan with what I had been using and the rep pulled up the account and obviously even as an AT&T employee it must have been outstanding for him because his first reaction was, ‘wow you’re paying too much,'” Kontos told WFMY News.

With an AT&T employee on his side, Kontos thought AT&T would do the right thing and credit his account for 24 months of overcharging.  AT&T agreed to partial credits for the last five months.  Kontos said he would see the company in court.

In July, a county small claims court judge quickly found for Kontos and handed him a judgment and Kontos has been waiting by his mailbox for AT&T’s check ever since.

Kontos calls the matter a real David vs. Goliath story, and openly wonders how many other customers in the Triad are being overcharged by AT&T.

“Demand that they review your account for the last two years minimum,” he told the station. “Find out what you’ve been paying. Find out what other rate plans exist. Find out what you could have been paying and if you’ve got money that’s owed to you, get it back.”

If AT&T won’t provide an owed refund willingly, and you live in North Carolina, you can use this form — the same one used by the Kontos family — to sue AT&T yourself.

[flv width=”640″ height=”447″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WFMY Greensboro Customer George Kontos Took ATT Mobility To Court And Won 10-7-11.flv[/flv]

WFMY in Greensboro shares the story of the Kontos family, who discovered they were overcharged for a data plan for more than two years.  When the company refused to issue an appropriate credit, Kontos took the company to court and won.  (2 minutes)

Frontier Communications customers may be owed refunds for their Internet service because, a new lawsuit alleges, the company deceptively billed customers fees the company is not entitled to receive.

Four Frontier customers — three in Minnesota and one in New York — are suing the company for add-on charges the company claims are required by the government, but in fact are pocketed by the phone company.

The lawsuit claims Frontier is guilty of fraud, breach of contract, deceptive practices, false advertising and violations of the Federal Communications Act and the Internet Tax Freedom Act.

The plaintiffs claim broadband customers are being billed for certain state and federal taxes, 911 surcharges, and Universal Service Fund fees, even though they don’t apply to broadband service.

“It is merely a junk fee that Frontier imposes on customers,” the lawsuit says.  “The fee bears no relationship to any governmentally-imposed fee or regulation, and is nothing other than an effort by Frontier to increase prices above the advertised price.”

Adding fuel to the fire, Frontier recently imposed a new “HSI Surcharge” on broadband customers, and as Stop the Cap! reported earlier, some company representatives have claimed that fee is government mandated as well.

In fact, federal law bans most taxes on Internet service under the Internet Tax Freedom Act.  Since broadband customers cannot dial 911 from a DSL modem, 911 surcharges should not apply either.  USF fees only apply to voice telephone service.  Frontier, the suit alleges, levies all of these fees on the broadband portion of customer bills.

Frontier has more than 7 million customers nationwide, although the company does not disclose how many of them purchase broadband service.  If the lawsuit achieves class action status, Frontier could be required to return the ill-gotten gains to customers if a judge agrees they were wrongly collected.  That could cost the company millions in retroactive refunds.

Blackberry Butter Spreader

As Blackberry owners enter their fourth day of a serious global service outage, a growing number are now wondering why they are still wasting their time with a phone that has been increasingly abandoned “for something better,” — namely smartphones running Apple’s iOS or Android-powered handsets that now have the largest share of the smartphone market.

Only Nokia is facing market share challenges greater than Waterloo, Ontario-based Research in Motion, the maker of the formerly popular device.  After days of service disruptions, RIM may be getting a lot more acquainted with their town’s namesake than they’d like.

The trouble started Monday with a switch problem at the company’s offices in Slough, Great Britain.  Yes, the same Slough that is home to the workers of British television’s original rendition of “The Office.”

The switch failure soon began impacting customers in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East — the remaining places where RIM still commands a respectable position in the handset market.  On Tuesday, problems spread across South America and India.  Yesterday, North Americans joined the growing crowd of users who found e-mail service and instant messaging spotty, when it worked at all.

Company officials suggest the spreading outages were caused by a cascading series of failures.  When the switch failed, backup systems proved inadequate, and the inevitable sea of “is your Blackberry working?” and “test… test… test” messages started piling up, arriving faster than RIM’s backup systems could handle.  The more frustrated users became trying to send and receive messages, the worse the problems got.

[flv width=”512″ height=”308″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Blackberry Outage 10-13-11.flv[/flv]

The Blackberry outage caused a sensation in the United Kingdom, where the phone still maintains a significant market share.  British reporters and analysts had no time to throw softball questions at Blackberry officials.  Watch as Sky News and the BBC report the service failure as a veritable crisis for the company, followed by an increasingly uncomfortable managing director for Research in Motion’s UK operations who faced sharp questioning from a reporter intent on getting beyond the pre-written damage control statement.  In the United States, the declining market share for the Blackberry gave ABC News license to have some fun with the service outage, poking fun at the phone that is increasingly irrelevant to Americans.  (11 minutes)

RIM Founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis Apologizes

Blackberry users are dependent on RIM’s networking infrastructure because the company distributes messages through its own servers.  That can deliver more control to RIM’s network engineers, but also exposes the company to spectacular service failures when things go wrong.  And they have gone wrong repeatedly, as customers worldwide report regular sporadic service outages.

Wireless phone companies faced the wrath of angry customers, who initially blamed them for the service outages, but in fact the problems reside with RIM’s own network.

Loyal Blackberry customers have been forced, much to the amusement of other handset owners, into desperate measures.

“My God, I actually had to walk down the hall to my co-worker’s cubicle to ask him a question,” wrote one angry customer.  “Damn you, Blackberry!”

“So much for today’s lunch meeting,” shared another. “Nobody knew what to do or where to meet until someone suggested we call everyone on the phone.  The phone??? Are you kidding me?”

The New York Times shared other serious side effects of the outage:

By Wednesday morning, Wall Street was alight with e-mails from technology departments notifying employees of the problem. Bankers’ meetings fell through when attendees couldn’t look up the locations. Employees were reduced to leaving voice-mail messages.

Perhaps more concerning is the ultimate future of Research in Motion, which has seen better days.  Just three years ago, Blackberry enjoyed a 46 percent market share for mobile devices around the world, according to data from IDC, a research firm. This year, it’s 12 percent and dropping (and is already much lower in North America.)

The Blackberry toe spreader

Wall Street is furious, of course.

“[The outage] is symbolic of what’s going on at the company,” Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC partners who follows the telecom industry told the Times. “It’s a bloodbath.”

The same can be said for the company’s stock price, which one analyst compared to a train wreck in slow motion.

This morning, Research in Motion made the riskiest move of all — trotting out the historically idiosyncratic and impatient RIM Founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis to apologize.  He appeared more contrite than an earlier appearance with the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones.  Lazaridis turned up to that earlier interview with his press handler and a lot of attitude.  He soon found himself being questioned by the reporter about the company’s user privacy policies in the Middle East.  After slamming the reporter for the question, Lazaridis ended the interview.

Today, the founder of the company still couldn’t answer the all-important, “when will service be fully restored?”  But as of late this morning, RIM’s co-Chief Executive Officer Jim Balsillie claimed all is well again with the Blackberry, but wouldn’t answer questions about whether customers were entitled to refunds for lost service.

That’s a question mobile carriers are starting to ask RIM as well, particularly as customers look for service credit for the outages cell companies were not responsible for causing.

“This is it. This is the boiling point. Someone has to go over to Waterloo and slap those in charge at RIM,” wrote Crackberry.com forum user BlackLion15.

With tomorrow’s release of Apple’s latest iPhone, RIM officials may prefer a good customer spanking over the alternative — customers throwing their Blackberries in the trash and switching to a new handset.

[flv width=”512″ height=”308″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Lazaridis Before After.flv[/flv]

Before and After.  During better days for Research in Motion, RIM Founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis had no time for ‘impertinent’ questions from British reporters and called an early end to one interview.  Earlier today, he checked his attitude at the door to issue an apology to upset customers.  (3 minutes)