Our coverage of HoFolicity 2012 GTA

[howard]

Here's our video of HoFolicity 2012:




Here's the transcript of the video. I'm not typing out every single word so don't quote this. It's just to give you a gist of what happened while I prepare the video. I'll also be posting some pictures later. If you have any media from the event you want to share please post it here


Here’s a transcript of the video. It's not a replacement for watching the video!!!

Please note that I’m not typing this word-for-word. It’s the gist of what’s said.


Q: What phone are you using and how much do you use it each month?
A: Galaxy Nexus, around 5GB a month, The Galaxy Nexus will be launched on Feb 6th. Person who asks the best question will get one when it’s available.


Q: The previous CEO said that Mobilicity was a dumb pipe. What are your thoughts on that?
A: 2011 was an important year, we launched in Calgary, launched a bunch of handsets including the exclusive Galaxy mini, doubled the number of sites in Vancouver, added lots of sites in Toronto and had a very strong Q4. December was the best month ever - thinks Mobilicity outpaced everyone. We’re not deviating from how we launched the company - we’re the value player.


Q: As one of Mobilicity’s first employees have you had to change your expections from then till now?
A: Yes, when we started our business plan there was no iPhone - a lot has changed. What hasn’t changed is that we want to be a value player - we’re very outsourced which allows us to be nimble and scrappy.


Q: What’s Mobilicity’s interest in the upcoming 700Mhz auction
A: The new entrants need more spectrum to grow, 10Mhz of spectrum isn’t enough. The big 3 in Canada have more spectrum per subscriber than anywhere in the world. Rogers has 10-15x more spectrum per sub than Verizon does. Incumbents shouldn’t get any spectrum in the upcoming auction because they don’t need it. We want it to launch LTE.


Q: If Government puts spectrum aside for new entrants will you be a player in the auction?
A: Yes, the only reason they want to buy it is so we can’t have it.


Q: T-Mobile in the US deployes HSPA on the AWS frequency and doesn’t own any 700Mhz. If you were to get 700Mhz there might not be any handsets that support HSPA on AWS and HSPA and or LTE on 700Mhz.
A: Some handsets in the future will support both these frequencies. Gives the Galaxy Nexus and HTC Amaze as examples on why future handsets may add support. When Mobilicity launched there were no pentaband HSPA handsets. Now there are.


Q: If you can’t get any 700Mhz what will you do?
A: There is more spectrum out there - such as Shaw in the west that owns spectrum but that would probably cost more to optain


Q: Is Mobilicity for sale?
A: Mobilicity was not started to to sell it, it was started to be profitable. They’re trying to get to profitability.


Q: You have 5 handsets that support NFC, are you going to be doing anything with this?
A: We’re not the guys to be leading the curve on NFC payments. This year we’re going to be launching a couple of mobile payment apps (that don’t use NFC) which you can use to add money to your wallet or pay your balance.


Q: When it comes to handset acquisition is NFC a must?
A: T-Mobile wants NFC so we’ll be getting a lot of NFC to.


Q: Visual voicemail - when?
A: On the roadmap


Q: Missed call notification - when?
A: On the roadmap along with femtocells, UMA and ‘last call’. You get one last call when your month has passed and you didn’t pay up.


Q: Tower sharing agreement with Wind?
A: Love it, where do I sign? Talks about how incumbents don’t want to share with them.


Q: Will you have an Android app that lets you check your wallet and usage.
A: amss.mobilicity.ca, app is coming in around 2 months.


Q: More shortcodes like paypal
A: They’re coming, we go through aggregators, it’s coming


Q: Expansion?
A: Didn’t really answer it but mentioned the difficulties of densification. They will expand but not sure when.


Q: Can we get our wallet balance back if we leave Mobilicity?
A: You shouldn’t be leaving Mobilicity!


At this point 2 people from Ericsson who literally manage and run the Mobilicity network came up. The have experience in Egypt, Asia, etc.


more coming...

[ECBomb]

Thanks Howard, appreciate it~

[howard]

At this point 2 people from Ericsson (Christian and Nevin) who literally manage and run the Mobilicity network came up. The have experience in Egypt, Asia, etc. They’ll explain technical aspects of how the network operates including shrinkage (hmmmmm... it was cold).


=================================


Q: A lot of people on HowardForums have been complaining about data speeds... blah blah blah, bit torrent, some legit traffic being throttled, blah blah blah.
A: It’s a challenge to run a network. You get good value on Mobilicity so we can’t accommodate bit torrenters. Unlike the incumbents who have fixed line service we can’t offer offer service like this because our costs are higher. Uses the analogy of a salad bar. You can eat what you want but don’t take 7 plates at once.


Nevin: A base station is like a glass of water. It can only hold so much water. Voice always takes priority over data. You take a map and decide how much you want to coverage so you go put out a bunch of sites. Then you launch and have to adapt based on where you subscribers are. Data is the same, the base station has a limit.


The network could have different tiers of users where one type of user has priority over another user’s data.


Stewart: Mobilicity is trying to upgrade the network up to 21mbps. They’re looking at offering different levels of services for different users, maybe a cap, maybe not. We’ve been in business for 18 months and are still figuring things out.


Q: What challenges are there for deploying 21mbps, why don’t we have it now.
A: Network needs to be optimized - a lot depends on how users move around, on the season (leaves on a tree can affect this). If there are too many base stations it could cause your handset battery to drain faster. It really depends on capacity. You also need more capacity


Then they talk about cell shrinkage. Increasing the number of people on a base station reduces the coverage of the station.


They’re newest base stations are Ericsson 6000 series - it’s supposed to be awesome (not their words obviously) and very flexible. I has the ability to supports LTE. Same base stations that Rogers users.


Q: Why are there no repeaters in the PATH?
A: Rent is too expensive (multiple 7 figures). It will happen eventually. There might be an ‘easier’ way of doing it.


Q: 2011 was the year of densification. Any numbers?
A: 2x number of sites in Vancouver, 50 or 60 new towers in Toronto, 20 or 30 that are coming in the next 60 days.


Audience Q&A time. Ryan and Anthony from Mobilicity come up

[arikah]

If there are too many base stations it could cause your handset battery to drain faster. It really depends on capacity.

Wait, what? Unless you are going crazy and putting towers up every 50m, this is BS. Yes your phone uses a tiny amount of battery when being relayed to the next tower when you are moving, but you use much more power trying to stay connected to a tower when it is clearly going out of range. It also doesn't seem to bother people on any network downtown where there are literally dozens of towers in a single city block, in fact they seem to get better battery life because their signal is always full bars so the phone doesn't have to strain to look for signals.

Then they go on to say that having more people on a tower kills the tower range...

anyway thanks for the post howard

[computergeek541]

50 to 60 new towers in Toronto during 2011? I'd like to see a list of those locations. At the very least, such as list would allow customers see where improvements were made.

[Hadoken]

Howard put on a great show, but my personal feeling on it is that users who were dissatisfied with Mobilicity's stance on data and throttling won't feel much better after hearing some of what the top brass had to say.

Mobilicity brought in two of their network engineers from Ericsson, which was nice, but unfortunately many of the questions people have are regarding throttling and data policies, and the people who are responsible for that aspect of the service were not there.

To his credit, Stewart Lyons was as transparent as he could be regarding topics such as tower sharing and costs associated with running a network, but those looking for some dramatic improvements in the near future probably won't be seeing them.

[howard]

Remember, these Q&A's are extremely paraphrased! Reading this is not a replacement for watching the video when it's up!

Fenry:
Q: Anyway to disable voice mail notification?
MMS doesn't always work, why?
Some phones don't find signal right away, why? (ie Panache)
can we roam with a zero balance wallet?
can we get customers to test a phone before it launches?

A: We have a team that tests the handsets.
There is a app on the SIM - that's why it can take a while to find signal.

AllanVS
Q: Why no unlocking?
A: We're not going to because there's no business case for it. If a customer has a legitimate need to unlock the phone they've helped them out before.

hc no 'i'
Q: why is Mobilicity still considering themselves unlimited?
A: We're setup to be unlimited. We know how to do it better and cheaper. No plan to move away from unlimited. Long discussion on data ensues.

mr. conviviality
Q: Are you going to have better roaming rates? Will you offer roll over for roaming packages
A: Our rates are already low. Customers are not telling us it's that important. They're looking at offering roaming roll over.

motoi730
Q: What is your average customer?
A: Our average customer is smart. They get a lot of value because they use their phones a lot.

telecomzombie
Q: couldn't really make it out but it was a story about how he was disappointed with Mobilicity because of how data is shaped and some popular apps like Dailymotion don't work (it works fine on my Galaxy Nexus). He eventually left in Q4.
A: They're still working on data. Q4 was huge and they have to optimize the network further.

hadoken's friend:
Q: The top 1% of users consumer 50% of data. How are you going to make these people pay more?
A: It's hard to keep up with demand and it's very challenging on the wireless side. Don't know the answer to that. Smartphones are a huge demand on network capacity.

loykee
Q: A certain group of customers just want a feature phone (a dumb phone). are you going to keep offering these types of devices?
A: There aren't a lot of OEM's releasing dumb phones - but we'll do our best to find them.

Congrats to loykee on winning the the Galaxy Nexus!

[howard]

Each attendee got one of these sweet shirts:



Entries from this contest were used to make the shape of the HowardForums logo.

If you couldn't get one of these shirts I'll be giving away 10 of them tomorrow so keep an eye on the Mobilicity forum.

[howard]

Myself and Stewart Lyons:


There were around 45 attendees. A big thanks to all who came + those who let me know they weren't coming so that I could give their spots away members on the waiting list.



A big thanks to Mobilicity (especially Sheryl!) for organizing, paying for and making their CEO Stewart Lyons along with Anthony and Ryan available for the event. My hats off to Mobilicity, it takes a lot of guts to be this transparent with an public, independent site like HowardForums. They could hide behind a
forum that they host and moderate themselves but they choose to hang out with us.

Thanks to Mobilicity for the awesome T-shirts and hats.

Kudo's also to Ericsson for sending Nevin and Christian out. It's rare to get these sort of insights.

I had a great time. It's always a privilege to meet and hang out with all of you. I learned a lot tonight and hope you all did too (especially after I post the video).



Congrats to loykee for winning the Galaxy Nexus and I wish the best to you and your upcoming baby (she's 38.5 weeks pregnant). If you had a great time at the meet consider naming your baby HoFo, or HoFolicity

Hope we do this again!

[HF_visitor]

Thanks! Great info. Some info does make me feel more comfortable staying with Mobilicity, and may get another line in the future if they do improve on coverage and have consistent data/service and look like surviving for long term.

[Fenrry]

I have a few pix but don't know where to upload, on the other hand I still have a few questions...

[e-man]

To Howard and the folks from Mobi: Thanks for another great event! It was very much appreciated!

[AllanVS]

The question I wish I'd asked: "If everyone on the network gets throttled after 100mb/15min, and you (Mr Lyons) say you download around 6gb a month... are you throttled, or is your account given 100% speed 100% of the time?"

[howard]

I asked him that before. He says their lines are no different and are also throttled.

The question I wish I'd asked: "If everyone on the network gets throttled after 100mb/15min, and you (Mr Lyons) say you download around 6gb a month... are you throttled, or is your account given 100% speed 100% of the time?"

[AllanVS]

I asked him that before. He says their lines are no different and are also throttled.

For some reason ... I just don't believe that. That'd be like Bill Gates actually paying for Windows/Office etc.