Mobilicity

» see mobilicity.ca as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 2008 Canada tried to manufacture competition. Its wireless market had three large carriers and some of the highest bills in the developed world, so the government set aside blocks of AWS spectrum in that year's auction which only new entrants were allowed to bid on. A company called Data & Audio-Visual Enterprises Wireless, founded by the Toronto businessman John Bitove and known as DAVE Wireless, spent about 243 million dollars on ten of those licenses, covering most of the large English-speaking markets including Toronto and Vancouver.

The consumer name arrived on 2 February 2010 at a Toronto press conference. The CRTC cleared the company to operate in early May, and service opened in Toronto on 15 May 2010. Vancouver and Edmonton came that November, with the Ottawa and Gatineau area a day later and Calgary the following April. The pitch fit on a storefront window: no contract and no credit check, with the plans sold as unlimited.

For about two years it worked. Mobilicity had 143,500 subscribers by the end of September 2011, 206,500 by that December, a quarter of a million by May 2012 and 271,337 on the last day of 2012. That was the high point. The count fell every quarter after it, to 215,944 by September 2013 and 157,000 by April 2015, the figure its own chief restructuring officer gave the court.

The weakness was underneath the marketing. The set-aside spectrum was the leftover kind, the network was 3G while the incumbents were building LTE, and the coverage stopped at the edges of five cities, so a customer who left town paid dearly or lost service. An Ontario court let the company begin restructuring on 26 April 2013 and the stay was extended ten separate times over the next two years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ no credit check ~

The absence of a credit check is the part worth keeping. Mobilicity was selling to people the three big carriers either would not take or would only take on a two-year term with a deposit, which in practice meant people with thin credit files, students and new arrivals to Canada among them. That is a real market, and it is also a market with no money in it, which is why the subscriber numbers and the revenue never pointed the same direction.

Prepaid carriers aimed at exactly this customer were a worldwide pattern of those years, and most of them ended the same way: bought by an incumbent, folded into that incumbent's own budget brand, with the cheap plan quietly repriced afterwards.

~ the spectrum was the point ~

Nobody who bid for Mobilicity wanted its customers. Telus tried to buy the company in 2013 and was blocked, because the set-aside licenses came with a five-year transfer restriction designed to stop precisely that. By June 2015 both Telus and Rogers were bidding again, and this time the restriction had expired.

Mobilicity's creditors approved a 440 million Canadian dollar deal on 23 June 2015 under which Rogers took the whole company and divested certain licenses to Wind Mobile, and the Ontario court and the federal regulators signed off the following day. The purchase closed on 2 July 2015. Seven years after the auction built a fence around that spectrum to keep the incumbents out, an incumbent owned it.

~ the last of the independents ~

Rogers announced on 10 May 2016 that the brand would go and the subscribers would move to Chatr, its own discount label. A migration site called My Chatr Move went up on 27 July, new Mobilicity activations stopped on 15 August 2016, and the remaining customers, over 150,000 of them, were moved across through the fall. Dealer locations closed where volumes were low or where a Chatr store was already nearby.

Of the three new entrants the 2008 auction produced, Public Mobile went to Telus in 2013 and Mobilicity to Rogers two years after that. The third, Wind Mobile, became Freedom Mobile under Shaw, and when Rogers bought Shaw in 2023 the regulators made it sell Freedom on to Quebecor. Bitove's own verdict on the experiment, given to the Canadian press in 2016, was that the government had taken the check and run.

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