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People didn’t see us coming

Telus was blindsided. “I don’t play to lose,” said Guy Laurence, chief executive at Rogers, explaining how his company succeeded where Telus failed.

The Mobilicity takeover may be small in dollar value, but its assets are prized given the ever-increasing need for spectrum, the radiowaves that carry signals from cell sites to cellphones and back again.

The deal also muddies the waters for what’s now an acceptable sale for other owners of unused airwaves who’d love nothing more than permission to flip them for a pretty penny. One analyst said Quebecor Inc.’s unused spectrum could now be worth up to $1.5 billion, five times what it paid for it.

Just a few months ago such a transaction would have seemed outlandish, but how Rogers managed to take over Mobilicity and Shaw’s spectrum may pave the way for others to do something similar, potentially consolidating an industry that the government has worked so hard to open up.

“It was a Rubik’s Cube that was extremely difficult to unlock, but ultimately we prevailed,” Laurence added. “We tried to understand the motivations of all the sundries and then we started to unpick them, one move at a time. People didn’t see us coming.”

Telus certainly didn’t.

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For a bankruptcy battle that dragged on for almost two years, Mobilicity’s last days wrapped up swiftly.

Time constraints levied by Rogers and its purchase of the operating entity known as Data & Audio-Visual Enterprises Wireless Inc. permitted the parties to skip a formal sale process and creditor vote.