Canadian CDMA operator Telus used a CAD700 million (US$577 million) mobile and wireline broadband infrastructure announcement yesterday to reinforce its commitment to a migration to the GSM family of technologies. The country’s third-largest operator unveiled plans to invest more than CAD700 million this year in the province of Alberta, located in Western Canada with a population of around 3.6 million. Much of the investment will focus on the launch of HSPA services in the region by early 2010, as well as the expansion of its high-speed Internet and digital Telus TV service. The total investment is expected to support more than 2,100 jobs in the region. Importantly, in its announcement the operator indicated that the HSPA work in Alberta complements its plans to launch the technology nationally by early next year. Such investment is in spite of slowing growth at the operator, which last week announced it added only 48,000 net new mobile subscribers in the three months to the end of March, 46 percent less than the 88,000 it gained in the first three months of 2008.

Telus is currently building out a national HSPA network in partnership with rival operator Bell. The deal involves vendors Huawei and Nokia Siemens Networks and is reported to be worth a total CAD1 billion. Both operators will continue to support customers on their existing CDMA networks, at least in the medium-term, but have outlined plans to move to LTE technology for their ‘next-generation’ mobile communication networks. Bell and Telus are among a number of CDMA operators set to deploy LTE in the long-term. US operators Verizon and MetroPCS have committed to LTE deployment, whilst Japan’s KDDI and China Telecom have also been linked with a similar, as yet unconfirmed, switch.