Alek Krstajic, CEO of Freedom Mobile, proudly watched the signage of Wind Mobile’s Queen Street West location come down to unveil the new Freedom Mobile brand direction.
Krstajic declared this is a fresh start for the wireless carrier, which desires to remove the baggage of years past from the its various regulatory and foreign ownership hearings.
“There was some baggage over the years regarding Wind Mobile. We now have shed a lot of that baggage because we have a new network. We have new, committed owners from Shaw Communications. We felt there was a need to have a fresh start and build our own brand,” said Krstajic during an interview with MobileSyrup.
On customer service
“Wind Mobile worked hard to care for the customer and we are taking that to the next level.”
On its device lineup and the iPhone
“Obviously I cannot speak of specific conversations. We launched the V20 and there is a ZTE device launching in December. I think you are going to see a number of other handset manufacturers in 2017 come on the street. I think you will see the next iPhone with the Band 66 chipset from Qualcomm so that it will be available. Those are sort of things that we will have to wait and see but I think it would be a good assumption to say that one day there will be an iPhone that works on AWS-3.”
Wind Mobile licence?
“Wind Mobile is a brand that we license and a brand that is owned by foreigners and we felt that it was time for a true Canadian brand, so we are materially different.”
“The timing was really about wanting to have this fresh start. The licence with the folks at Vimplecom with Wind in Italy would run for another 10 years. As we became more successful we would have to pay higher licencing fees and it came to a point where we decided to own our own brand.”
On future rate plan discounts
“I don’t think it serves Canadians to have pricing at a level where you can’t stay in business. What you’ll see from us is the LTE rate plan are a little bit higher that flanker brands but more affordable than the incumbents are at. The key here is to be patient for growth, impatient for profitability, and a result become a sustainable fourth player. You won’t see us do anything crazy.”
“I think we have a great offering here with our new LTE network. It’s essentially a super highway with no traffic on it whatsoever. I think the customer experience on our LTE network will be better than what the incumbents are experiencing and because we are not shifting over a million customers I think you are actually going to see that performance advantage last for quite a while.”
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