Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from James Breen – Thomas Weisel Partners.
James Breen – Thomas Weisel Partners
Just with respect to the network, obviously in the U.S. you’ve taken some flack for network quality post the I-phone. We haven’t heard that from you up there. I was wondering if there were things that you did on the network side heading into the launch last year and then this year to bolster the network pre the I-phone launch.
Robert Berner
There’s a number of factors that affect network performance and I think we’re well positioned in all of them. Firstly, in terms of quality, Rogers deployed our 3GUMTSH8 SPA network in all markets at 850 megahertz and that gave us a better building penetration and reach. As you know, most carriers deploy at higher frequencies which provides a greater degree of challenge in the quality.
We’re also deploying at 1900 megahertz for additional capacity but we have both frequencies in all markets, and that means our voice and data will move back and forth between those frequencies giving our customers the best quality and data speeds at any point in time.
In terms of capacity, if you don’t have enough capacity in the market that impacts quality and that impacts your data speed. This is the greatest challenge for all mobile operators, is to achieve these broadband data rates, is to implement enough back hall capacity.
Rogers invested upfront in back hall. We launched 3G with much more back hall capacity than the vast majority of 3G operators around the world. Our back hall at the get go supports data rates at every step of the network and data capabilities and device capabilities from the initial 1.8 megabyte a couple of years ago right through to the 7.2 megabytes that we’ve already deployed nationally.
For SHPA Plus, at 21 megabytes, we’ve deployed and continue to deploy a combination of high capacity IT microwave radios that support up to 300 megabytes per second per site along with fiber optic transmission to our end sites and aggregation points. And we started two years ago to re-architect our entire transport network to an all IT network that supports mobile data traffic well into next generation.
Now customer demand, Rogers was the first carrier to launch broadband data to the homeowner, the first carrier. We learned a lot about customer usage patterns that we were able to apply to our mobile wireless networks and to predict what that usage would be in a very effective manner.
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