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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

Just goes to show that Canadian telecom policy is controlled by telecoms, not by the government. It's very cozy and regularly functions to discourage competition.

Canadian telecom policy still revolves around "facilities-based competition", where it's believed that new entrants should build out a new network. It's designed to fail. Even the incumbents, Bell and Telus, share a 3G/4G mobile network to avoid redundant infrastructure. Ironically, the two contracted Huawei and Nokia to build out this network: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/bell-teams-up-wit...

Huawei was marketing 5G directly to Canadian consumers for a while, but was careful to never mention/imply that 5G could lower pricing. That would be a thermonuclear threat to telecoms with dire consequences.

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People complain about the lack of cell phone providers here in the US, but damn! Canada is way worse. The cost of phone plans is outrageous and the major telecoms do everything in their power to stop new entrants from messing up their gravy train.

I think it's far more difficult to build a competitive network in Canada vs the US. Canada is as big as the US, but has 1/10th the population. Building and maintaining infrastructure for low-density population areas is extremely capital intensive. I am not saying the existing Telco oligopoly is a good or ideal situation. Just mentioning that US and Canada have some differences in this regard

Most of the low-density population areas aren't covered anyway. By landmass, it's single-digit percentages or low double-digit percentages of coverage (And often it's weak outside of urban/suburban area).

One of the least dense provinces, Saskatchewan, has some of the best pricing in the country because the government has yet to selloff the provincial telecom to private investors. Manitoba too before they decided to privatize and sell off to an incumbent.

And high-density is no panacea for cost. Tall concrete buildings everywhere can mean more infrastructure costs. Especially if regulations require you to fit infrastructure into the facade. Medium-density is the least engineering: Just put up a tower and call it a day. And in Canada, antenna permits are federal. Once issued, local govs can't stop you from putting up your monstrosity of white panels on a midrise or a big metal antenna.

But you don't have to just compare Canada against the USA. Australia or Iceland have rates that Canadians can only dream of, with similarly geo-population situations.

There's a reason we fight hard for our crown corperations out here in Saskatchewan, if this was left to the market we would be screwed. The farther away from populated centers you get, the harder it is to get decent service however. I grew up out in Melville, SK where the fastest connections at the time were 15mbps DSL connections (this was around the time that Google Fiber was starting to roll out elsewhere). Once you get farther out, copper isn't even an option so cellular and satellite links are needed. The only nice thing about fiber is digging up ditches is relatively cheap

Some of us are excited to see how systems such as StarLink develop, maybe bringing decent rural access to the network is in the cards.

Next time you make a page that requires 10Mb of assets before loading, please remember there are people dealing with terrible connections. I know my first 100mbps connection was a godsend.

+1 for SaskTel. I've done work for them on their monitoring systems, seemed like a decent org.

More imporatanly, as someone in AB I am jealous of their cheap phone plans...

> Australia or Iceland have rates that Canadians can only dream of, with similarly geo-population situations

I worked on the NBN in Australia -- they've got their fair share of ISP-related issues down under.

I agree with you in concept, but I don't know that the geography fully explains the discrepancy. As an example, there are government incentives to do the build out to more rural areas, but that might be true in the US as well.

We also tried to implement more carriers several years ago, with a wireless spectrum auction that reserved spectrum for new entrants. These startups tried to focus solely on urban areas with their build outs, and then could roam on the big 3, but struggled immensely. IIRC, one of the big complaints was we don't allow foreign ownership, which made it difficult to raise the immense capital needed for a proper build out. How much that plays into it I don't know, but unless Canadians want to put together a massive amount of capital it seems unlikely to force stronger competition.

Wind mobile was doomed because they were issued 1.7ghz spectrum. That’s going to make any urban-area buildout prohibitively expensive because it doesn’t penetrate well.

That's actually the inverse of the problem. Yes, 1.7Ghz doesn't penetrate well, but in cities you want density, because you have population density. Low band is still useful, but not nearly as advantaged as in rural areas.

In rural areas, using 1.7Ghz vs 600Mhz or 700Mhz spectrum means building 4x the amount of towers to cover the same square miles.

That's opex, capex *4. It's really expensive, with no benefits at all as you're not capacity constrained at all on radios/spectrum in rural areas.

Canadian and US urbanisation rates are essentially identical.

This isn't a case of looking at a map and population count whatsoever. It's an incredibly moot point when you look at where 95% of people live in both countries.

Coverage coast to coast along highways is the same distance but 1/10 the Canadians?

Australia has similar population size and density issues as Canada, and yet they manage to provide plans at 1/2 the price we pay here.

Australia is similar as well, most of the population is in few cities with huge empty outback. The rates here are around 25 USD for unlimited text and calls with around 30 gigs of data.

Right now in the UK I’m paying £30/month for unlimited 5G data. 30 day contract, 5G roaming in many European countries. I’ve seen download speeds as high as 400 Mbps.

Streaming games on my Mac from Google Stadia in perfect lag-free 1080p!

Right now in the UK I’m paying £8/month for 7GB 4G data, 30 day contract, EU roaming, unlimited calls and texts (Plusnet, SIM only).

Which works for me because I am mostly on wifi or (current situation notwithstanding) on a very short commute.

In my case, 5G is my WiFi! With the added benefit of being a battery-powered router (Huawei E6878) which I can take with me for fast WiFi wherever I need it. Why pay extra for wired broadband?

(7GB data would be no good at all for me - I'd burn through that in about 30 minutes!)

Wow, thanks for that. I just realised I was still paying £9.50 a month to Plusnet for much less. Took just 2 minutes to login and update the tariff (reduced the data too since I no longer have a commute). I wish they'd do this automatically but obviously it's not in their interests.

Giffgaff is really good about actually getting you on to a plan that suits you. They'll automatically update you to the latest plan at the price point you've set. They'll email you suggesting cheaper plan if you're not using all/most of your allowance. I've even had them gift me an extra GB of data when I went over my plan's allowance.

> ”Building and maintaining infrastructure for low-density population areas is extremely capital intensive.”

The solution is to share infrastructure in sparsely populated areas where it would be uneconomic for each operator to build it's own.

The UK, despite being vastly smaller and denser than Canada, has long had poor mobile coverage in rural areas.

The UK government is now requiring (and contributing funding towards) geographical 95% coverage by 2026. Operators will use shared rural infrastructure to achieve this.

https://www.mobileuk.org/shared-rural-network

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/shared-rural-network

Is it really though? I mean, it used to be.

Rogers wants $75/mth (CAD - $55 USD) for 10GB data and unlimited talk and text. Let's compare to the US:

- AT&T wants 65++ USD ($87 CAD) for a comparable plan.

- Verizon wants 70++ USD ($94 CAD) for a comparable plan.

- TMo wants 70 (all in) USD ($94 CAD) for a comparable plan.

And each network in Canada is dramatically better than AT&T and TMo, and roughly comparable to Verizon.

Back in the day, there was a huge difference, these days, it's kinda the same. I remember when the iPhone first came out and you could get an unlimited AT&T plan for $60/mth and Rogers wanted $120++. Those days are long past, though.

Wow, in Belgium you can get the same for around 15 EUR and in Italy you can get 50 GB for less than 10 EUR...

Yes, the US is one of the highest priced mobile markets in the world, so it is not exactly fair to compare to them. The rest of the world pays far lower rates than the US and Canada.

And in Romania you get 50GB for 2 EUR (basically the plan is unlimited data, but with speed limited to 256kbps after 50GiB.). The speeds are quite good too, I personally reached 100Mbps on 4G on my phone in some places.

The 5G plan includes 80GB traffic for the same package.

++++++++++

I'm actually using this 2EUR plan as my main internet service at the moment, as I temporarily moved to the country side. I could get a 1Gbps FTTH connection for around 10 EUR per month ( or cheaper for lower bandwidth), but so far I decided not to bother.

50GB did last me for 20 days, with a lot of video content, some repos downloaded, arch package updates etc. The 256kbps limit I'm experiencing now is more than ok for anything text-based but YouTube only works seamlessly/without buffering in 240p.

A friend of mine is Romanian, and it is impressive how good their telecommunications are managed. This is something many countries can learn from.

Here in the UK, the government has grand ambitions, but it doesn't really materialise. Most people with "fibre" broadband are limited to 20-60Mbps. Although if you live in a major city you can get 200-300Mbps.The infrastructure is ancient, and by taking half measures they spend more in the long run for far less.

This is something that annoys me about 5G. It will cost a fortune to roll out (making data so expensive it won't be fully utilised). 4G on my phone right now is 35Mbps. 5G is more a tickbox exercise than bringing better connectivity to people.

</rant>

Connectivity was one of the major reasons I was looking at flats in Cluj a little while ago, even roaming on a UK SIM up in the mountains I was getting rock-solid 4G at all times (and even down in Salina Turda).

I have 4 lines with TMobile and pay $140 a month.

https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/magenta

Unlimited everything... Even 5 gig of data when in Canada.

I don't think Rogers, Telus or Bell have anything close to that.

I was running the numbers based on a single line. Didn't bother doing the family plan options, but I do know the big3 in Canada have family plan options too. TMo is even in the US as huge outlier. I too enjoy a $40/mth unlimited plan with 5 of my favorite loose affiliates.

Not really family plans these days. Any additional lines are charged as normal and you just get the convenience of a single bill - no discount.

Or at least that's what the rogers rep told me.

Wat? T-Mobile wants US$35 (incl taxes!) for a much better plan. Includes Netflix even. And they only start throttling at 50gb.

https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans

The Canadian networks are “better” because every Canadian rations their usage. I’d wager that Canadian networks are wayyyy underprovisioned compared to even the crappiest US network.

That's if you want 4 lines.

Check out the top div on that page, you'll see they conveniently want to sign up both you and everyone you know to qualify for that rate. I priced it for a single line in both the US and Canada. With that in mind TMo is a huge outlier in the US, too, and John Legere is responsible for singlehandedly dragging AT&T and VZW kicking and screaming into the 21st century of pricing over the last 5-6 years.

They also have far and away the worst network in the US, trust me, I've used them for years -- and love them. Their network is still hot garbage though. Frankly the best TMobile network you can get is when you roam onto Rogers, Bell or Telus in Canada.

I would be curious about the underprovisioned thing... that's very possible. I travel to the US frequently (well before the world turned upside-down) and I would say in 8/10 US cities I visit I experience frustratingly worse cell coverage than I do at home. Slow speeds, call drops, etc. This isn't just on my personal phone but also on all of the cellular devices we bring with us. (we provide equipment for trade-shows, etc. and much of it runs 4G). I hadn't considered network provisioning as a possible cause of this.

Parent post has it backwards, the US networks are way underprovisioned, which is why they're just so darn slow -- well, that and Shannon's law. The Canadian networks are at minimum adequately provisioned.

I moved from an unremarkable city in Canada to San Francisco and the cellular service here is terrible. Only Verizon is comparable and even then that just means it is reliable. T-Mobile is a joke in SF.

Just wait until you try and use T-Mobile at Tacolicious -- or anywhere else -- in the Mission haha. You'll be lucky to get 1Mbit/sec no matter how many bars it shows.

You should read this [1]. "For years, Sweden-based tefficient’s annual reports on global wireless prices have been a headache for Canadian telcos, showing that our wireless providers make more money per user than telcos anywhere else."

So how do you make yourself look better. Do not provide the data for the report. Canada has been removed from the list. No longer the worst.

[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/tefficient-canada-wirele...

Depends where you live. I pay 22$ CAD for a nice plan with 2gb, unlimited texts and voicemail. I'm with Fizz.

It's good as a Canadian plan, but atrocious elsewhere in the world.

We are acutely aware.

I’m seeing CAD 32 [0]

[0] https://fizz.ca/en/mobile

I'm not by any means defending the Canadian telecoms, but I'll say one thing about the networks of the big 3: they are rock solid. While visiting Germany, I was impressed by the cheap prepaid data plans, but I only got EDGE in the rural areas and the LTE connections in the cities were not great. At the time I was playing Ingress and I quit in frustration. I was so irritated I even tried Vodafone after trying T-mobile.

In the US* the connections aren't great, either. Not as bad as Germany, but in general I got slower practical speeds almost all over the country (and the big cities like NYC were terrible).

In Canada I got excellent 4G performance when driving the whole way between Saskatoon and Calgary as well as any time I take the train between Toronto and Montreal.

* I've been told Verizon is the best quality network in the States, but I have only been able to get prepaid plans from AT&T and T-Mobile.

> Just goes to show that Canadian telecom policy is controlled by telecoms, not by the government

I worked for a (very) large Canadian telcom for 4 years.

What you said is absolutely 100% correct.

In my region my employer was forced to allow competition in the internet space, and they submitted rates to the CRTC that were astronomical. The CRTC replied and said they would force them to lower the rates, so my employer said they would stop building out their fibre network expansion.

The CRTC caved, the telco got it's way, and to this day the ISP with the largest operating area of any on the planet has zero competition.

> Just goes to show that Canadian telecom policy is controlled by telecoms, not by the government. It's very cozy and regularly functions to discourage competition.

It's easy to say that, but Canada has a smaller population than California, but spread over the surface area larger than that of the United States. How many carriers, and how much competition, can you possibly expect in that environment? Especially in an industry that requires so much infrastructure.

Canada at the national level has Bell, Telus and Rogers/Fido. There's a few more regional players like Freedom Mobile, and then there's Videotron in Quebec.

Then on top of that there's the former Crown Corporation (now subsidiary of Bell/BCE) NorthwesTel, which provides services in the Territories (i.e the north of the north, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut).

> It's easy to say that, but Canada has a smaller population than California, but spread over the surface area larger than that of the United States.

That is an extremely misleading statement. Approximately 75% of Canada's population lives within 150km of the US border, and even that is not a uniform distribution , there are dense urban population clusters.

Totally, I know that, but even with that, the density isn't comparable. I mean, how many Californias can you fit into this coverage map? [1] I'm guessing a lot of Californias -- Alberta alone is 1.67 Californias by land area.

And then there's the geography. You can drive to each major point in California in a couple hours, but it's not as easy to get to Moose Factory or Fort Mac, let alone lay the backhaul to supply the towers in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

[1] https://www.bell.ca/Mobility/Our_network_coverage

Also here Finland I am paying 22 euros for unlimited 150mbit/s 4g connection and population density is pretty similar to Ontario.

And even then, most of the Canadian population are East, and South -- "South" in a Canadian sense.

Around 30% of the total Canadian population is in the Greater Toronto Area, and if you toss in the most populous Quebecois (Montreal-Trois-Rivieres-Quebec) cities that number is around 50%.[1]

You see the same thing in the US and Australia as well -- the Eastern coasts were settled first, and that's where the population is to this day.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canada_by_provin... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis

I'd expect rates as good as Iceland's, which has an even lower population density than Canada, and covers a much higher percentage of their country.

Canadians could only dream of their rates.

Compare the coverage maps though. They have 199 towers total and cover a tiny, teeny strip of roadway around the perimeter [1]. On the other hand, Bell [2]. I'll give you one guess which of these networks costs more per capita to operate.

[1] https://www.cellmapper.net/map?MCC=274&MNC=1&type=LTE&latitu...

[2] https://www.bell.ca/Mobility/Our_network_coverage

Coverage 100x the population across 100x the landmass would cost the same per capita.

That's not taking into account geography, though. The entirety of the coverage in Iceland is along a thin ring of highway that encircles the island, and a big dense infill in Reykjavik. It's not the same at all.

I'd bet pricing would be comparable if Bell's network just extended along the Trans Canada Highway, and in each major city. Even that's not a fair comparison since Iceland is literally encircled, so you never need to drive more than half the length to get between any two points.

But Iceland has nearly nationwide coverage with a lower population density than Canada: https://vodafone.is/english/mobile-coverage/

And Iceland isn’t exactly flat/seismologically stable.

If anything, Canadian rates should be far cheaper than Iceland’s because Canada telcos only cover a small fraction of the landmass.

Outside of AB and Sask, the coverage usually is along the trans-Canada and populated pockets.

That cellmapper.net site you're looking at has crap data. Look at their Bell map, it also shows coverage over like 4 highways and nothing else.

I agree with all your points, but does this go to show that?

I'm not aware of what was going on behind the scenes. It could easily have been that the Canadian government told the telecoms a long time ago that they wouldn't be allowed to use Huawei, but kept this secret for the sake of contract negotiations. Do you know this not to be the case?

> It could easily have been that the Canadian government told the telecoms a long time ago that they wouldn't be allowed to use Huawei, but kept this secret for the sake of contract negotiations.

I figure the government ran its Huawei-ban proposal by the telcos and they balked and said: "don't regulate it, we'll just not choose them". It's a direct access to government influence that the public could only dream of. Meanwhile, the public gets told "well, if you don't like being ignored when new laws are created/passed, vote for someone else in [0-4] years".

Basically, just pissed that CDN telecoms get to craft the law (or lack thereof) in their favour.

Wouldn't it have been more in their favour to choose Huawei, at presumably much lower cost? It's not like consumers who didn't like that idea could switch to someone else. The only explanation I can think of is that the government called the shots here, while sparing the telecos from a tough negotiating position.

I think the directive came to not use Huawei, and the telecoms structured it as “ok, we just won’t select Huawei” instead of “Gov bans Huawei”.

-Canadian telecom policy still revolves around "facilities-based competition", where it's believed that new entrants should build out a new network.

Didn’t CRTC force the incumbents to sell wholesale network access to new players like Freedom Mobile?

It was at punitive pricing, to the point where you feared going off network. For example, Wind (Freedom's name at the time) charged 5c/mb for data ($50/gb). And Wind absolutely would not let you connect to the incumbents network if you were in the "Home" zone.

I think the voice pricing out-of-network was okay, but the incumbents definitely cooked the books on their costs on data.

They once had a plan for $39 with 6gb data and unlimited calls/LD in-network and anywhere in USA. But it had small limits for out-of-network in Canada.

Meanwhile, they incumbents charge cheap-enough prices to American or French providers so they can allow their subscribers roam in Canada with many gb included in the base plan. A French subscriber roaming in Canada would have 5x the data as a local plan at half the cost.

I remember reading the roaming deals are sweetheart deals that goes both ways. So similarity, the French telecoms would charge Canadian incumbents a very low price while roaming on France.

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