Bucking trends in an arena that has done little in recent years b...

the 262,900 the same period in 2004. Prepaid wireless subscriber net additions fell to 13,700 from 54,800. John Gossling, vp-financial operations, told the CitiGroup conference in Phoenix Rogers expected a decline, acknowledging it failed to compete aggressively on price against Bell Mobility and Telus. “We didn’t play in the free-phone space, we didn’t do the gift with purchase -- free DVD player, free hairdryer, whatever,” Gossling said. He said his company’s 54% share of the 3rd quarter postpaid market wasn’t “sustainable… against 2 big national players.” Rogers seems to have slipped thanks only to an earlier acquisition of Microcell and its Fido wireless service, Seaboard analyst Brian Sharwood told us. “If you take the numbers apart from the aberration of buying Fido, they look quite strong,” he said. “The churn numbers also look pretty good… They want to get churn under control and they're down at 1.5%.” Rogers’ cable results were more disappointing, he said. Rogers said cable TV subscriber net adds rose 35.6% to 8,000 from 5,900 a year earlier. Internet subscriber additions were 62,200, up from 57,100. Sharwood said he had expected more adds, based on very positive late 2005 data cited last week by Videotron. “The disappointing numbers are the numbers on both the IP phone and corresponding high-speed Internet and mostly basic cable,” Sharwood said: “Videotron had quite strong high-speed Internet and quite strong basic cable growth and that hadn’t happened in the industry for quite some time.” UBS analyst Jeffrey Fan dubbed Rogers’ net wireless subscriber additions “light.” But, he said in a research report, “overall, we believe the subscriber results were in line to better than consensus expectations… We believe underlying fundamentals remain strong.”