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Sprint Canada offered landline, long distance and internet services, and the company partnered with Fido Solutions to offer customers wireless service. Sprint’s big focus, however, was on competitive long distance rates and taking on the monopoly that Bell held at the time. By the end of 2004 it had just 31,000 wireless subscribers.

In 2005, Rogers Communications Inc. announced it was acquiring Sprint Canada’s parent Call-Net. At the time of the deal, its Sprint Canada subsidiary had about 600,000 customers.

Fido Solutions: Montreal-based Microcell Telecommunications Inc. was one of four companies to win a wireless licence from the federal government and launched the Fido brand in 1996. It was the first provider to offer customers a GSM cellphone network in Canada, which at the time was dominated by the CDMA standard. Fido attempted to increase its presence in the mobile sphere by partnering up with Sprint Canada, which offered Fido plans as part of its phone and internet bundles. Like Sprint, however, Fido was eventually bought out by Rogers, which paid $1.4-billion. At the time of the deal in November 2004, Fido had nearly 1.3 million customers.

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Five years later, competition may have has cropped up in some regions where existing providers such as Quebecor Inc.-owned Videotron ventured into the wireless business offering cellphone service alongside their other products, but new entrants serving Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia are floundering and the federal government’s strategy looks to have failed, leaving many wondering what went wrong and whether there’s any hope for a viable fourth competitor in those markets.