Clearnet Communications

» see clearnet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Clearnet started in the unglamorous part of radio. Before mobile phones were a consumer product, somebody had to sell two-way dispatch systems to taxi fleets and plumbers and couriers, and that was the business Clearnet was in through the 1980s. Its own origins are badly recorded, the way they usually are for a firm that nobody thought worth writing about until much later. Wikipedia dates the founding to 1984 and credits the Lenbrook Group, with no citation for either claim. What is certain is that by the mid-1990s a specialized mobile radio operator in Ontario was sitting on exactly the kind of license and tower portfolio that the coming digital build-out needed.

Industry Canada awarded it a national 30 MHz personal communications license in December 1995, and Clearnet did something unusual with it: instead of one network it built two. Mike came first, in 1996, running Motorola's iDEN platform, which married a phone to the push-to-talk dispatch radio its existing customers already understood. Clearnet PCS followed in 1997 as the consumer brand, aimed squarely at the people who had never owned a radio in their lives. Two incompatible networks, one company, and a sales pitch that had to be written twice.

It was never the biggest. By September 2000 Clearnet had passed 700,000 customers while Rogers AT&T was at 2.7 million and Bell Mobility at 2 million; even Fido, the other scrappy newcomer, was marginally ahead at 722,000. What it had instead was a national spectrum position and a brand that punched well above its subscriber count, and Telus wanted both. The offer announced on 21 August 2000 was C$70 a share, a 53 percent premium over the C$45.80 close three days earlier, half in cash and half in Telus non-voting stock at 1.636 shares apiece. Telus called it the largest acquisition in Canadian telecommunications history and put the figure at C$6.6 billion, with about C$2 billion of Clearnet debt coming along behind it. On 20 October the conditions were satisfied, Telus paid for the deposited shares, and 98.5 percent of the company had been handed over. The debentures and the stragglers were swept up by compulsory acquisition on 12 January 2001.

~ the case file ~

~ the friendly years ~

The thing people in Canada still remember is the advertising. Taxi, the Toronto agency, made the Clearnet PCS television work in 1999 and 2000, and the campaign leaned on animal and nature imagery at a moment when five Canadian carriers were shouting at each other about per-minute rates. The tagline attached to it was "the future is friendly". Wikipedia's account is that Telus took over the animal theme and the line after the merger, and Telus then ran both for close to twenty years. A brand identity bought for C$6.6 billion and kept in service longer than the company it came from is a specific kind of inheritance.

In 1997, the year Clearnet PCS launched, the mobile question in Turkey was Turkcell or Telsim, and I was answering it with neither, because I was thirteen and the phone bill was not mine. Canada's carrier war happened on its own continent under its own regulator, and it reached me much later and only as reading. A thirteen-year-old in Ankara had no opinion about iDEN and no reason to form one.

~ the half that lasted ~

The odd part of the aftermath is that the iDEN half refused to die on schedule. Telus folded the PCS customers into Telus Mobility and the Clearnet name came off the consumer product, but Mike kept its own name, its own handsets and its own loyal base of contractors and dispatchers who had no interest in a normal phone. According to Wikipedia the Mike network was not switched off until 29 January 2016, more than fifteen years past the takeover of the company that built it. The brand Clearnet spent all that money establishing was gone within a year or two; the one it had treated as the legacy business lasted into the LTE era.

~ the name twice ~

Then Telus brought it back. In April 2011 Clearnet reappeared as a Telus discount division, running on Telus HSPA+ and selling landline and mobile bundles in a limited trial in Kelowna, British Columbia and Red Deer, Alberta. This was the era when Canada had a crop of new low-cost entrants and the incumbents were each quietly fielding a cheap second brand to meet them. Clearnet, by then a name with equity and no owner using it, was available.

Wikipedia says it stopped taking new activations on 2 June 2012, about fourteen months in, and that the domain was pointed at telus.com. So the ledger reads: killed once by a takeover it had earned, then dug up to use as a price weapon and shut again without anybody announcing it. clearnet.com today answers with a Cloudflare error page.

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