In case you are wondering why that's the case: https://cansumer.ca/canada-phone-plan-pricing/
> The Big 3 Canadian telecom companies (Bell, Rogers and Telus) own 90% of the market and charge higher prices due to a lack of competition.
> The Big 3 Canadian telecom companies (Bell, Rogers and Telus) own 90% of the market and charge higher prices due to a lack of competition.
Here you get 20GB for 20 euro on prepaid with unlimited calling (which I never use at all - all my calls are on Whatsapp etc :') ). Or 5GB for 10 euro. I use the 20 euro plan as my 4G backup for when my fibre goes down and I worked a whole week off the 20GB during the first lockdown when there was such an issue (I do shut down some stuff like steam downloads and netflix with a script on my router when it's on failover). It really saved my bacon. The good thing about it is that it's even prepaid so I can just load money up on it when I need it.
Strange thing is, we have 3 mobile operators here too (not counting the many MVNOs). Shouldn't be a barrier to decent competition. If you have more than 3 the available radio spectrum starts getting diluted anyway.
(I don't really understand it though, because Freedom Mobile has agreements to roam on the other networks and while the cost is much increased, for people who leave the city once every month or two it doesn't add up to the cost of the more expensive providers. These days Freedom even includes some included roaming in their plans, presumable to help customers see this line of thinking.)
When Wind was around, the Egyptian billionaire owner gave an interview saying that if he could take his entire investment out of Canada at a 10% haircut he would do it in an instant. Wind operates in 170 countries. He compared Canada to China and North Korea.
More here if you're bored. I would also say to Americans looking to move to Canada in light of... recent events, be prepared to be frustrated with the lack of choice in banks, telecom, grocery chains, and doctors. https://financialpost.com/telecom/tight-reins-leaves-our-tel...
There was even a way to, say, register a phone number in Saskatchewan and use it in say Ontario, leveraging a cross-carrier agreement to basically use Rogers or Bell infrastructure at Sasktel prices. I think they found and closed this loophole, though.
[1] It is also plausible they installed the tower to reduce the cost of phone service. There are cases where a microwave tower is necessary to deliver any communication service to the area, so the tower is already there to provide cellular service.
MVNOs would only disrupt their ability to buy sports teams. This does come up in elections, but so far they have gotten away with window dressing.
Like the devastation it brought to all the other countries where it's been a success? :D
Sometimes I don't know how these lobbyists manage to make this stuff up.
For a period of about two months I was tethering my smart TV to my phone while the broadband was being upgraded and was a bit shaky. I was using around 200GB a month.
I would never want to go back from unlimited.
And no, it's not an MVNO, I use Orange Spain. The tariff I mean in particular is "Go Fly": https://www.orange.es/tarifas/movil/prepago
It looks like they now upped the allowance to 65GB (35 standard and 30 as temporary "gift" :) ). Didn't even realise that. They often have temporary deals like that. I mainly use my work SIM in my phone.
I think there's even better deals available here in Spain but I use Orange because they have a cell on top of this building and the 4G coverage is full bars (high buildings around so the signal reflects back to me).
The speeds are fast though so you can be sure when you tether just as MS Office is updating you run out of data in about a minute.
- Newspapers
- TV stations/channels
- Radio stations
- Content streaming services (a la Netflix)
- Land-based telco (phone, cable, fiber)
- Wireless telco
Each of the providers in Canada does all of those things to some degree or other and because they own news outlets they wield a lot of political influence. Combine that with the fact that most of the people who have been in charge of our telco regulator have ties to these media conglomerates, it becomes pretty clear it's a captured market. So much so that it's newsworthy when someone actually doesn't just rubber stamp everything[1]. It also means external competition is limited to being unprofitable, so newcomers who enter the market don't tend to stay long and generally just get bought out by the incumbents.
It's a mess and no political party seems to think it's an issue worth pursuing.
[1]: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/c...
Just as an example, many tried to shorten the "month" to 28 days and they got a combined €228M fine in early 2020: https://www.repubblica.it/economia/2020/01/31/news/bollette_...
€228M for essentially a 7% hike in pricing.
Fixed lines, on the other hand, are fast, cheap and there's no data cap.