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Mobilicity’s attempt to compete in Canada’s wireless market was doomed from the start by Ottawa’s lacklustre efforts to create sustainable conditions for a fourth carrier, the mobile company’s founder said in response to the discount brand’s impending demise.

“It’s sad but inevitable,” John Bitove said in an interview a week after Rogers Communications Inc. disclosed plans to fold Mobilicity’s 150,000 subscribers into Chatr, its other low-cost brand, less than a year after it bought the foundering company for $465 million.

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“There was a lot more (the government) said they’d do that they never did … they took the money and ran,” he said.

Bitove, who also headed Sirius XM Canada and founded the Toronto Raptors, contends Ottawa lured Mobilicity into entering the wireless game — it bought $240 million of wireless spectrum in a 2008 government auction that netted $4.26 billion, about a third of which was from new entrants — with promises of providing support for real competition in an industry dominated by three big players: Rogers, Telus Corp. and BCE Inc.-owned Bell.