Don't be fooled. Chatr is Rogers folks

To fight new competition, Rogers is launching a new discount cellphone brand, just quietly not mentioning Rogers is behind it.

Rogers Communications Inc. (RCI.B-T35.75----%)launched its discount cellphone brand, chatr wireless, in major urban centers across Canada on Wednesday morning.

The move, which was previously announced, is Rogers' way of targeting the cheap, unlimited talk-and-text market, which new wireless entrants such as Wind Mobile and Mobilicity have been focusing on since their launches earlier this year and in late 2009.

Fagstein sums it up this way:

Let's count that, by the way. Eight mobile brands run by three companies. And I'm not counting the weird stuff involving third parties like Petro Canada Mobility or President's Choice Telecom. While most companies think of centralization and imposing a national brand on its subsidiaries, Canada's wireless companies do the opposite.

When your reputation as an industry is so shattered that you have to create fake competition to appeal to a large segment of the population that hates you, and then when that doesn't work you create a second fake competitor ... honestly, I don't know what to say.

The worst part is that Canada's Big Three wireless companies don't think this explosion of "brands" is evidence of a larger problem.

Read more here and here