It's taken many years but wireless broadband is coming to Canada after Rogers and Bell agreed to create a joint venture that will spend $200-million over the next three years to roll out the service to 40 urban centres and 50 rural centres across the country. This is great news if you're living in a rural community that's currently unserved or under-served. It's also exciting news if you live in an urban community and looking for portable broadband service. A part of the JV is Bell buying Craig McCaw's 25% stake - which means McCaw can focus his attention and cash on Clearwire and its expansion across the U.S. The Bell-Rogers JV will not use the Wi-Max standard but, rather, the NextNet technology developed by NR Communications. It is often described as pre-Wi-Max. As for speed, Rogers played it coy, citing competitive reasons while a senior Bell executive happily admitted downloads speeds will be 1.5MBps and 1MBps upstream. Frankly, the only negative to come from the JV is the fact it's not Microcell-Allstream-NR, which unveiled a $135 million plan to launch Inukshuk in late-2003. If this plan had gone ahead, it would have created a third option for high-speed access to compete against Rogers and Bell. This would have provided rural customers with service and made the market more competitive. The high-speed troika failed to come together after Allstream was acquired by Manitoba Telecom for $1.7 billion in March 2004 and Microcell was bought by Rogers in May, 2004 for $1.4-billion.

My apologies for taking yet another crack at eBay's $4.1-billion VOIP binge but I'm still hoping to get a handle of how CEO Meg Whitman sold eBay's board on spending half of its cash on a completely new business operation. Yes, there is the sexiness of pay-per-call but eBay could have easily built that internally or acquired a Silicon Valley start-up for relatively nothing. So what about Skype as a telecom play? The company talks about revenue growth from $60-million in 2005 to $200-million next year with 20% to 25% margins. But what about after that? What if Skype's revenue increases to $400-million in '07, $600-million in '08 and $750-million in '09? Then, you're looking at a deal where the price-revenue multiple would be six times, which would make Skype look like a bargain. Of course, there are caveats. The growth projections hinge on the assumption Skype can continue its growth and take advantage of eBay's user base. At the same time, it assumes Skype will be able to maintain its growth and market share despite intense competition from Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, etc. As Forrester analyst Maribel Dolinov told me last week, the big unknown facing Skype is its ability to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage given the barriers to entry are so low. Yes, Skype has more than 50 million registered users but how many of those use the service on a regular basis - or at least regular enough not to try/leave other VOIP services such as Google Talk? There are clearly many unknowns surrounding Skype's future and how eBay intends to integrate Skype into its eco-system. This makes it an expensive, high-risk deal.
Not surprisingly, Skype Journal's Stuart Henshell is quick to come to Skype's defense - arguing that many of the IM clients appear to have been rushed to market and, as a result, do not have the rich feature feature that Skype sports. It will interesting to see whether the enthusiasm for Skype among developers and folks who love a rebel will retain its momentum now that Skype is a small part of a large dot-com player.