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Comment by CountSessine | Hacker News Reader

It's even worse than that because we didn't have a commerce-clause the way you do. Canada actually has trade tariffs between it's own provinces. It was only in 2017 that the provinces signed a free trade agreement with each other, and even then it was a very limited agreement with enforcement issues.

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I’m Canadian and I think this is insane. Free trade between the provinces seems like a no-brainer. I also think we should be taking a harder look at our protectionism against American companies. I understand the value of having healthy domestic industries but the prices of cellphone plans here, for example, are nothing short of outrageous. We already pay so much more than Americans in taxes, must the services we buy from private companies also be so much more expensive than stateside?

Just to give you additional data point with cell phone prices.

I’m French but I’m living in the Us since a decade or so.

Cell phone prices are considerably cheaper in France ( €30 gets you unlimited everything on mobile and €80 is a combo for fiber + mobile plan )

But yet, that a heavily regulated market. If I’m correct there is 5 licences. All other companies have to buy and resell bandwidth thought those 5 licence. They tend to be French company.

Here I pay close to $200 total for the same service ( actually lesser service, I can’t have fiber where I live )

Maybe those expensive price are not due to that regulation? ( or maybe it is. I don’t know, but I wanted to give you a counter example )

Excellent points, but perhaps part of the reason for the price difference is because the US population is much more geographically dispersed, so the infrastructure costs are much higher.

Most people live in metro areas.

It depends how you define metro area. The US census 80% urban has a very broad definition of urban. My 7000 person town with many houses on dozens of acres is classified as urban because it’s within 50 miles of a major city and near some smaller ones.

30 euro seems reasonable. In the US you can get unlimited everything for $30 a month (well, after some amount of data in the gigs I think it downgrades from 5G in the fine print).

Maybe I missed that, what carrier do you have in mind?

Mint MVO on T-Mo network

https://www.mintmobile.com/plans/

There are a lot. Mint Mobile is $30/mo for unlimited if you pay for a year at once (a little more if you pay monthly). Visible is $30/mo but goes from 5G to 4G after 50GB (more expensive options have higher caps). There are lot of other ones out there, mostly trying to get people in the $20 range but with smaller limits on total data.

Right right right, my bad.

Now I remember why I switched from cricket. From time to time, I need data in Europe. On my US phone. That being said I should just switch when appropriate.

Thanks for reminding that.

I took the opportunity to check what the prices are in France now.

€20/month, and €10/month if you bundle it with your internet connection. ( bringing to a total of €40 )

I just checked the operator that historically has the better price. ( free.fr )

You're welcome for the reminder. People forget those alternatives exist.

Apparently Mint offers a US/Canada/Mexico plan for only a little more.

But when I travel internationally, I get a prepaid SIM when I land. It's cheap enough.

Canada has more expensive cellular service than the US which its self has more expensive service than EU.

It seems likely that population density is playing a role not just regulations. Sure there’s gaps in every country, but companies need to do more than just cover major cities or what’s the point of having a cellphone?

Along these lines, recently Alberta and BC got in a fight about oil pipelines and Alberta threatened to have its province owned liquor distributor monopoly stop buying BC wine lolol.

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