Gregory Taylor, the author of Shut Off: The Canadian Digital Television Transition, says he foresaw Shaw's shift from cable to wireless.

The head of Canadian Spectrum Policy Research at the University of Calgary spoke Wednesday on the Calgary Eyeopener about the telecommunications giant offering buyouts to 6,500 employees.

The Calgary-based company said this week it expects to shed at least 650 positions across the country.

A: I expected there might be some sort of moves, because we've seen this over the past couple of years with Shaw. This is not coming out of nowhere.

They're making a big change in the corporate strategy at Shaw and I think the main thing is to look at their move into wireless. Shaw is a company built on the cable industry, and the cable industry— even though it's still extremely strong — is in decline. And nobody sees that decline ending anytime soon.

We're seeing Shaw really make a shift from their traditional area of cable into the really very capital intensive new area of the wireless sector with Freedom Mobile, which they launched last year [after purchasing and rebranding Wind Mobile].

A: They're trying to do as much online through apps and through automated service online instead of speaking to someone individually. We'll have to see if that works, because sometimes people find that quite frustrating. They want to speak to an actual human being. But for now, their focus for where their investment is going right now is less on the personnel required for the workforce and [more focused on] building the network they're going to require to compete with Telus and Bell.

A: As far as ingratiating themselves, they've been a pain for the other three — in that sense, they've really announced their presence. We saw that over the Christmas break, when we suddenly had all of the big three in unison offering these really good deals [on data plans]. And that was kind of a trial balloon. We saw lineups in shopping malls around the country of people trying to get this deal.

But you're right in saying the Big Three are a pretty cozy little group. You're not going to get a lot of differences in pricing of the Big Three. If you take a look across the country, [the province] where you really see differences in your mobile price is where there's a fourth player — in Saskatchewan for example, where there's SaskTel.

A: The cable services have been pretty consistent. Now when I say consistent, it depends on your age group. People basically over 40 are carrying the cable industry right now — but the cable industry has not seen the big plunge that some people had foreseen. There's been a slow decline in cable. It's dropped about 4 per cent. And if you take a look at these cuts they're offering in their workforce, it works out to about 4 per cent of their workforce.

I don't think cable is going to suffer. I don't think the prices for cable can go up very much more. They're already getting people really on the verge of cutting their cable and they can't afford to lose many more.

But the one thing you never see in the cable industry is a drop in prices. That doesn't seem to cross their minds.

And they will nickle and dime it up in the coming years.