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Posts: 8 | Thanked: 4 times | Joined on Feb 2008 @ Ottawa, Canada
#7
I did some sleuthing and came up with a Q2 of 2007 transcript of some Rogers meeting of some sort. Thank god for the Internet and public companies.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/4306...scripts&page=9

Some of the important things to note:

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen at this time we have time for two additional questions. Your first one John Henderson. Please go ahead… from Scotia Capital.

John Henderson - Scotia Capital

Yes, thank you, and congrats on some great numbers. The question is around sort of Inukshuk and wireless data. And I just wanted to get a sense of where Inukshuk revenues are going, do they show up in your data revenue line at all? Do they impact postpaid ARPU? And then also just an outlook on, I guess capital spending for Inukshuk for 802.16e and when we might expect that to get started?

Robert W. Bruce - President, Rogers Wireless

Yes, it's Rob Bruce. The numbers do show up in the revenue. I would say with respect to Inukshuk, it's still early days. We continue to take up a modest approach in terms of how we roll out Inukshuk and the guidance that we've provided in the past in terms of capital is, we're still at it.

Edward Rogers - Senior Vice President, Communications Group

It's Ed Here. This is really turning out to be better than we ever forecast. You may have read recently that Sprint and Craig McCaw's company have done a deal in the United States that remarkably tracks the deal that ourselves and Bell have done. We will be converting it to WiMAX over the next couple of years. And it is now a stationary service, you can't use it in a moving vehicle or anything. And that will happen in the next couple of years. So it’s a… plus I've always said it was a investment in the future with '08, '09, '10 as the start of the maturity years. And I think we made a fabulous decision to get into it. Our board was a little nervous, as you can imagine, but the Rogers boards have always been a little nervous when I was proposing things over the years.

John Henderson - Scotia Capital

Thanks very much. That’s great.
So what I can gather from this transcript is that they've been spending money on upgrading the network and bringing it to the full "Wimax" standard 802.16e which will allow for roaming. All we need to figure out now is whether or not the existing model will work with the fixed network hardware they have installed. If not, then we might have to wait a year or two before they upgrade the hardware in major urban centers.
 

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