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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

You know what actually works great for reducing the price of cell plans in Canada is a public option.

There's one province where people pay roughly half the national average for all there telecom needs - and that's Saskatchewan. SaskTel's mere existence keeps all the majors in line.

Manitobans should be absolutely up in arms over the privatization of Manitoba Telecom.

Canada has a ton of land and just not that many people. There's 3 + Videotron major telecom operators servicing a population the size of California spread out over a land area the size of the United States. The Capex and payback period for spinning up a new, competitive, national carrier is wild (there's a pile of bodies there proving my point) which makes this a perfect job for the government.

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> Manitobans should be absolutely up in arms over the privatization of Manitoba Telecom.

There are a lot of us in Manitoba who know this was a crime and we can do fuck-all to change it

> there's a pile of bodies there proving my point

They make great organ donors though!

(Not all were economic failures: you can also be a successful and scrappy going concern and that gets you acquired by bigger pockets with a rubber stamp from government that thinks bigger firms are better for all)

You know the collusion is bad when a government enterprise can be two times cheaper.

You seem to be implying that a public enterprise can't compete so well against private enterprise on price by definition. Why do you think this?

Not by definition but by the nature of the incentives.

They face a lot less monetary risks and people are harder to fire. Not to mention the additional bureaucracy and administrative weight due to the additional laws and regulations that apply to public services and how being a part of the state means facing more administrators and bureaucrats.

>There's one province where people pay roughly half the national average for all there telecom needs - and that's Saskatchewan. SaskTel's mere existence keeps all the majors in line.

Source? Looking at sasktel's website and rogers' website, this claim does not pass the sniff test. Their "basic" plan is $60/month (BYOD) for 15GB of data, whereas rogers gives you 75GB for $65. Even if you don't use 15GB of data and that extra $5 brings you no benefit, the price difference is nowhere near high enough to justify the claim "people pay roughly half the national average".

Probably marketing/promos for new customers vs. actual realized, and I strongly suspect if you click through those Rogers plans you'll land on a much higher total cost.

https://hellosafe.ca/en/telecommunications/cell-phone-plans/...

I clicked through and see no time limited discount, only a $5 "automatic payments discount", whatever that means.

I looked again after your response, the Rogers plans all state "for new customers only" which is probably the discrepancy. Every time I speak with my parents I'm shocked how much they're paying and I have to spend an hour renegotiating.

A few years out of date, but the competition bureau has this review from 2019 comparing pricing between provinces: https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/how-we-foster-competiti...

My takeaway from that is that Sasktel/MTS were much cheaper for a comparable plan, but the average revenue per user is near-identical - so the effect is mostly just that Sasktel/MTS users got more data with their plans. (Which tracks to me, if you halved the revenue of a provincial-scale carrier, they'd be a huge money loser regardless of how many executive salaries got cut or efficiencies got discovered.)

I live in Saskatchewan and pay ~50$ for 10GB of data/month. I'm not on a Sasktel plan, as I found a cheaper option through one of the privatized networks, however Sasktel has a new subsidiary: Lum Mobile, to compete with the cheap plans like what I'm using. I know someone who has some discount at Sasktel and pays ~50$/month for 75GB(!) of data.

When I was in toronto the guy at the hotel had a 306 (saskatchewan) phone number because it was cheaper.

Sasktel is a great provider. I have fiber to the home in my house, for instance.

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