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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Streaming games on my Mac from Google Stadia in perfect lag-free 1080p!
Which works for me because I am mostly on wifi or (current situation notwithstanding) on a very short commute.
(7GB data would be no good at all for me - I'd burn through that in about 30 minutes!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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>
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.
Or at least that's what the rogers rep told me.
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.
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.
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...