Loud and clear: Clearnet proves itself a powerful contender in the Canadian wireless market with a new PCS network and a growing EMSR business

It is testimony either to the worldwide wirelesss boom or to Clearnet's own marketing savvy that the Canadian PCS operator broke all North American records by adding more than 50,000 subscribers after just two months in commercial service.

Most likely, Clearnet's success to date can be credited to a little bit of both.

In many ways, the growth of the Canadian wireless marketplace is attributable to the high profile that wireless service has enjoyed in the U.S. market. After acquiring its national PCS licenses in January 1995 from the Canadian government-which, unlike the U.S., issues licenses in an application process rather than selling them at auction-Clearnet began launching its networks in metropolitan centers in October 1997, nearly two years after the dawn of the U.S. PCS age.

"We are really where PCS in the U.S. was 14 months ago," says George Cope, president and CEO of Clearnet.

Borderless connections After watching their U.S. neighbors gain access to more wireless choices, Canadian consumers and businesses were no doubt itching for alternatives of their own. Clearnet not only gave that audience a highly functional new digital network, but it also demonstrated the ability to hand off calls from its 1.9 GHz digital networks to existing AMPS networks regardless of which vendor's gear the other network uses. That trait potentially makes Clearnet's service available to 90% of the Canadian population.

Interconnection with other operators' networks is a matter of both software interaction between switches and fortunate timing when it comes to customer equipment suppliers, Cope notes.

"The biggest issue was the switch connection-the different software has to talk to each other," he says. "We're most thankful that someone came up with dual-mode handsets in time for our launch."

Customers roaming on analog systems still get the Clearnet prompt on their handsets and still get charged the same Clearnet rate no matter where they are, which makes the interconnection virtually seamless to end users, Cope says.

The ability to provide that level of integration is one crucial function of the technology and equipment Clearnet selected to deploy its digital system, says Jeff Von Ende, director of wireless sales for Lucent Technologies in Canada, which supplies all of the infrastructure for Clearnet.

"It's one of the inherent benefits of the [code division multiple access] technology that it's built on North American standards," he says.

Technological intelligence Seamless integration and nationwide roaming for its customers is certainly one of the larger reasons Clearnet opted to deploy CDMA networks, but the decision also has implications beyond national boundaries.

"The biggest providers in the U.S. were going to go CDMA," Cope says. That is a crucial point, given the increasingly global nature of wireless usage-particularly for business travelers who might count portions of both the U.S. and Canada as part of their regularly traversed territory.

But despite its clear allegiance to CDMA now, Cope says Clearnet remains unbiased, having thoroughly studied the attributes of both CDMA and GSM.

"We didn't really have any religion on any one technology," Cope says. "We always thought both technologies were completely viable." In fact, Clearnet uses a form of GSM technology in the enhanced specialized mobile radio (ESMR) portion of its business, he adds.

Still, Cope says, CDMA not only demonstrates the ability for national and international roaming and dual-mode, dual-frequency handsets, it also provides greater network capacity, superior voice quality and longer battery life. "You don't have to be a battery jockey," he says.

"Some of the advantages-like longer battery life and quality-have been big, big home runs for us," says Wade Oosterman, vice president of marketing and sales at Clearnet.

Selling the goods Where Clearnet parts philosophically somewhat from its North American CDMA neighbors is in its theories about customer segments. Because the carrier operates an ESMR business in addition to its PCS systems, it tends to divide its business and residential groups more clearly than U.S. carriers.

"We probably draw a brighter line around the target markets because we have two networks," Cope says. "Where it gets into a little overlap is in the white-collar business market."

Clearnet's Mike network-the brand name for its Motorola-supplied integrated dispatch enhanced network (iDEN)-supports nearly 45,000 business customers, providing low-cost dispatch and group calling functions in addition to digital voice.

"We invested in iDEN because we think it's better for the commercial marketplace than PCS," Cope says. "It does everything PCS does, but it does more."

The EMSR network provides more functionality to business users at what generally amounts to a lower cost, which is the chief concern of business users, Oosterman says.

"The only thing they really care about is whether they get a payoff on their investment," he says.

For both its wireless services, Clearnet has launched the same kind of cutting-edge, flashy and attention-grabbing marketing and advertising campaigns that some U.S. PCS providers have developed. On the consumer side, the carrier focused on customers' concerns about coverage, cost and quality by avoiding technological discussion altogether.

"One of the key tenets was to stay completely away from technology," Cope says. "It's just a phone, so we decided to take the technology out and make it just a phone."

"We wanted to give people the straight goods," Oosterman says. Clearnet created what it calls a "visual vocabulary" that is bilingual, nature-based and appealing to several different demographic segments, he says. "Nature just works incredibly well everywhere."

For the ESMR business, Clearnet created a disembodied figure to act as an icon-a sort of friendly, high-tech host designed to help guide users through the intricacies of the network.

"On Mike, we knew we had a technology that had so many features it had a danger of being too complex," Oosterman says. "Our goal is to create a spokesperson for this powerful tool."

In doing so, Clearnet opted to steer clear of conventional spokespeople and create its own celebrity-or at least a celebrity head-instead.

"We knew that if we didn't give this thing a body we'd get a head-turning look," Oosterman says, no pun intended. "He's a very popular individual in Canada."

Ulterior motives Clearnet is encouraged by the strong success of its consumer PCS business so far for reasons that go far beyond the desire to be a strong national wireless competitor. Like wireless operators the world over, Clearnet has visions of wireline displacement and domination.

For Clearnet, it's all about getting the customers to like you so that they keep coming back for more. The first step is the carrier's investment in CDMA, which puts Clearnet in a position to offer high-quality, building-penetrating service at a cost that entices customers to use the network for more than just mobility services.

"To grow the pie, you have to deliver affordability," Cope says. "We've designed our cities to have in-building portable coverage, and the core technology is better than anything we've seen."

Clearnet could provide wireline-like services today from a technical perspective by adding software enhancements that would create dial tone, call forwarding and other functions that make the carrier's service more characteristic of wireline offerings, says Lucent's Von Ende.

But the biggest hurdle is one that Clearnet appears to already be well on its way to surmounting: the challenge of giving a high-tech, complicated network service a simple, human feel so inviting to customers that they want to use it more. Given its hard customer numbers after less than three months in service, Canada is getting the message.