Rogers Cantel Mobile Communications has moved its Personal Communications Services into the consumer arena with new price/service packages and advertising for the debut of Amigo Digital.

The Rogers Cantel launch of the Amigo brand in 1994 made it easy for consumers to walk into a store and walk out with an activated Amigo cellular phone.

Now, the company is taking the Cantel/AT&T-branded Amigo Digital, an enhanced version of the product, into the market in the same way.

For $35.95 a month, customers get a service package that includes a digital pcs phone (a $459 value) at no extra charge when they sign up for a three-year term. They also get 500 free off-peak minutes per month, their first incoming minute free, caller ID, visual call waiting, exact pricing and detailed billing.

A new business package is priced at $49.95 per month.

Carleen Carroll, director of corporate communications for Rogers Cantel, says newspaper ads in national and regional papers, plus radio spots, are now underway as part of a national campaign from Gee Jeffery & Partners of Toronto. The Cantel animated phones return on Sept. 15 for the television portion of the launch.

The advertising message is that cellular users can have it all – digital pcs phones, more talk time and lower costs – with these new, all-inclusive packages.

The digital pcs product that Cantel has been rolling out since its launch in Montreal last November is situated at 800 MHz, the same level as its analogue cellular network.

Carroll says enhanced services are available at this level because digital technology allows more information to be transmitted.

Cantel’s analogue network currently reaches 93% of the Canadian population; the digital network now reaches about 75%, but is expected to be fully rolled out by the end of 1999.

Carroll says, until then, the Amigo Digital phone indicates when it is using the digital network and when it has moved away from digital to use analogue.

Cantel still has a way to go before the enhancements to its digital product are complete and it can offer service at 1.9 GHz.

As a condition of their licences granted by Industry Canada in December 1995, Bell and Cantel cannot roll out pcs at 1.9 GHz until the new entries – Microcell and Clearnet – have either implemented roaming agreements with the incumbents or have launched their service for at least one year without roaming agreements.

Microcell launched its Fido pcs last November while Clearnet has signed a roaming agreement with Cantel.