I read once that we pay the highest rates for mobile data (or at least I think I did) in the world but I don’t recall reading why. Maybe it had something to do with near-monopolies or infrastructure?
Are there any changes coming that may change this?
I may have once worked for one of these companies, and they aggressively lobbied the government to prevent MVNOs from happening in Canada. An MVNO would be able to compete with the big telcos, and force them to lower prices. What kills me is that the big companies have “discount brands” that are only a tiny bit cheaper, and then they use their existence to claim that there’s lots of competition in the market!
Some of the crap I saw… So glad to have gotten out!
Came here to say the same thing from slightly different perspective.
I worked at a company that provided Value Added Services to all the carriers. Somehow (lobbying, I guess) all the revenue share we received was treated by them as R&D money, even though it was pure profit. In short, they were making a ton of cash, sharing some of it with us, and then not re-investing it back into their networks like they were legally required to do.
They are an exercise in failed capitalism
lobbying, I guess
No, it’s absolutely lobbying and regulatory capture. When I worked in the telco space, back when long distance competition came to Canada, the CRTC was a constant revolving door of lawyers and company VPs from the telcos. The running gag in our office was that if a decision didn’t go our way, that the C-Suite would have to fire someone for the failure, so they could go work at the CRTC and influence the next decision in our favour.
But it wasn’t a gag. Three of my co-workers from that time ended up taking their turns at the CRTC as analysts and commissioners.
Not mobile, but I remember TekSavvy blasting the CRTC head for having some pints with his buddy, the CEO of Bell. You know, as the head of an impartial regulatory body should.
Because profits can be leveraged. I went on holiday to India. I got a local 4G Sim card there and it worked everywhere. It cost less than £6 per month for 4Gb data per day allowance and unlimited calls. The infrastructure and hardware costs will be fixed and not much different to Canada, Europe etc.
I’m not sure that is a great comparison. I’m no capitalist, but you make people pay as much as they will. More importantly for this example, everything including the hardware will be cheaper in India, especially the entire labor force of the telecom company. A better comparison would be the US or EU.
Even the EU is a lot better. Hardware and staff costs are higher here, but there’s no reason for it to be the highest in the world.
It’s an oligopoly with laws that prevent any new competition or effective change
EU is better for a particular reason tho, we can all thank Xavier Niel, (ex ?) CEO of Free. It’s a provider that emerged after the others, and started slashing the prices for internet at home, and then mobile.
The slashing was so big and the others providers lost so much, they had to align even tho at first they were providing a much better service. (Although Free also had a very good customer service at first)
This kind of thing barely happen anymore nowadays, if at all, Terminal capitalism and all that
A better comparison would be the US or EU.
30gb a month, 5G, 20 bucks.
Because 2 companies (bell, rogers) control almost the vast majority of telecomm rights in Canada - and the government is too spineless to change that. (These companies also own many media outlets that do not publish stories critical of their parent companies.) Those two companies have a duopoly and charge what they please. As Canadians, we deserve better. Why should those two companies reap huge profits that we all pay for?
A lack of competition. The snag is that Canada has low population density - which means that yes, you can afford to cover most big cities in cell towers, but not outside the city limits – because you might only serve users who are in a car or on a train as they pass through that cell – and it’s prohibitively expensive to put up a multi-million dollar cell tower to serve users who are passing through for a few minutes at a time.
This is why all of the cell infrastructure is owned by two companies – because when mobile phone service came to Canada, the fees were high enough, and the costs low enough, that they could afford to build out sites because they were insanely profitable – in addition to getting funding from the federal government to build out this infrastructure. That’s why they’re the incumbents – they have a critical mass of cell sites, and upgrading hardware every decade or two is cheap compared to purchasing/leasing the land and building a tower from scratch (including bringing in power and fibre).
I find comparing mobile prices to Australia is more apples to apples, Australia has similar population density as Canada, with a similar urban/rural divide.
Granted Australia is cheaper than Canada as well, but it’s not as outrageous as some other comparison you could make.
I’m currently paying $34/40GB with Fido on a BYOD plan. My plans have been decreasing in price while increasing in data over the years. About 10 years ago, I was paying about $10 per GB.
Well that’s crazy because I pay 45 PLN for 100GB during day and another 200GB during night here in Poland which is about 12 USD or 15 CAD. These differences are absolutely insane.
I do think things are getting better but not at the rate of other countries and a lot of good plans seem to be for new customers or for a limited time.
Usually this happens because people are willing to pay what they are being charged. And they are being charged maximum they are willing to pay, because of monopoly.
Most people think of how much it costs to provide a given service and compare things based on that. In reality companies charge how much the customer is willing to pay. If there is a competition the customer generally won’t pay more than what the competitor will charge. That’s why it is so sweet to have monopoly in the market.
With mobile phones being a necessity of modern life, the monopoly can charge even more than what the market will bear and people will warp the rest of their spending in order to afford it.
Because there are only 2 phone networks in Canada. If you are in the East you are on Bell, if you are in the west you are on Telus.
If you can’t tell by now Bell and Telus are the best of friends and share their network with each other, but not Rogers. Rogers only has towers in major urban areas.
So now you have a duopoly, and they can charge whatever they like to you and their partners.
Thankfully regulation is slowly catching up. Currently they can’t cap your data any more. Sure they will throttle your Download speeds, but the 25gb data plan is for 4/5G speed, after which its dialup levels of network speed for unlimited data.
It’s not much, but when the alternative is surprise fees it is better than nothing. /s
Rogers has lots of towers outside urban areas, you might be thinking of freedom. I get reliable service even when I’m out in muskoka
Here on the east coast outside of urban areas Rogers doesn’t work and you lose a connection easily.
I’ve visited communities who have to use Bell if they want to use cells and even then the service is dodgy
Sask also has our own network, and it seems to help things a lot. Been a while since I’ve shopped for plans, but there was a time when the big 2 charged about 25% less in Sask because they had to compete with Sasktel. They’ve also got their own MVNO now, Lum Mobile, which is the first to have a vastly different pricing structure than the other options. Buy 3 month/1 year plans up front, and the data bucket is an until you use it thing instead of being a monthly bucket. For about $450 (including all taxes/fees) I’ve got my cell service paid for the whole year, and will probably still have some data left to carry over then.
Supposedly there’s been some big discounts coming around with the newer MVNO’s, but its hard to gain traction when people are so used to just walking down to the nearest carrier store for phones/plans, and often choose an expensive monthly plan over buying their devices up front.
How much do you pay? In US I pay $220 a month for 4 people but that includes financing phones. Unlimited 5g data etc.
This is with Verizon, a major carrier…I’ve never tried a cheaper company
In Canada, you can expect to pay $75-$125 per person for a plan with “unlimited data”.
These plans will have a cap for how much of that data is 5g speeds, afterwards they throttle your speeds harshly.
I do not use one of the major carriers and I primarily use wifi at home and work, so my phone is about $100 a year.
Wow that sucks for those rates but I would prefer to pay more for cell phones and have free health care haha.
Corruption. All levels of government are ok with the effective monopoly that owns telecoms in Canada.
