It cost operators of WIND Mobile, Globalive, nearly half a billion Canadian dollars to secure the AWS frequency band back in 2008. Now that investment is starting to pay off for the provider, who exceeded 100,000 subscriptions in July this year, well on their way to their self-stated target of 1.5 million customers in three years. The roll out of their services was a gradual one, launching in Toronto and Calgary last December and growing to include Edmonton, Ottawa and Vancouver by June this year.
WIND offer a mixture of Android and Blackberry handsets along with one or two unmentionables. Although any unlocked handset that supports AWS (UMTS 1700 / 2100MHz) will work on the start-up network.
Bearing in mind that Blackberry are a Canadian Company and their biggest technology exporter, Its remarkable that Android have done so well.
One of the nice, and refreshingly different, things about the way WIND operate is their contract free approach, sure you have to pay full whack for the handset but they tend to offer these at cost value. Lets hope their success is a long lived one.