Canada Opens Wireless Industry To Competition

FreeKill writes "The Canadian government on Wednesday paved the way for new cellphone companies by announcing new rules for an auction of radio airwaves designed to spur competition in the wireless industry. About 40 per cent of the spectrum will be reserved for new entrants with the remainder open to all bidders, including Canada's big three providers — Rogers, Bell, and Telus. The government will also mandate roaming area agreements which will force existing carriers to share their networks with newcomers for five years, plus another five if the new entrants can build up their own networks nationally."

Comments

This makes me happy!

[B3ryllium]

Canadian Cellphone companies make Satan look like a Buddhist Monk.

They are THAT evil.

Anything to force them to compete on merits and features must be a good thing.

Re:This makes me happy!

[purpledinoz]

Bell raised their "system access fee" from something like $3 to $7. This fee is not quoted as part of the monthly cost!!! So it's completely hidden until you get the bill. WTF! By that time, you're stuck in a contract, and they get to F^&* you for 2 years (or however long the contract is). Rogers has a monopoly on GSM. Which means that they get to @$$ rape companies that need phones to work in Europe. These companies are swimming in profits, and they are achieving this by lowering service and increasing prices. If I were Bell, I would be against this too, because making money is so easy when your customers have no choice. It's no coincidence that Canada has the lowest cell phone market penetration of all the developed countries. F Bell, Rogers, and Telus. If I were an investor, I would sell my stock of these 3. Their profits are no longer going to be handed to them.

Re:This makes me happy!

[CastrTroy]

Personally, I've always liked CDMA more than GSM. I find the audio quality quite bad on the GSM cellphones, and they don't have a wider coverage area either. Maybe GSM is better for data services or something, but I want to use my phone as a phone, and I find that CDMA works much better for voice calls.

A very interesting article

[director_mr]

That was a great article. I loved how they had the response of at least three different perspectives (a current telecom exec from Bell, the Allstream exec looking to go in the market, and a liberal critic) in the article without slanting the information towards a particular point of view. I wish newspapers and reporting agencies would do that kind of reporting more often. I know absolutely nothing about the wireless telecom situation in Canada, so I can't really contribute anything that insightful, but I enjoyed reading that article. It somehow makes me want to find out and learn more about the subject.

Re:Don't hold your breath... networks are expensiv

[vidarh]

For that matter, phone usage in Norway is pretty cheap, and while Norway is small compared to Canada there's also only 4.5 million people, and there's GSM coverage even in the middle of the central mountain ranges, where nobody lives (to the point where they have to regularly issue warnings for people going for walking trips into the mountains not to rely on it as their only emergency preparation, in case the coverage drops due to bad weather)

The reason this worked in Norway is regulation far beyond what is being proposed in Canada: In Norway anyone can start a cellphone network and can demand roaming access from the licensees at cost + a limited profit margin, under the argument that since spectrum is a imited resource, anything else would restrict competition.

As a result, there are tens of cellphone companies, some of which owns their network, some which own parts of their network (where it's cost effective compared to the roaming costs) and some who only sell additional services on top of the other networks.

It's similar to the "local loop unbundling" for fixed line telephony in several European countries (where the companies owning the physical lines are required to sell access to those lines for customers who want to use a different provider at cost plus a limited profit margin again) where the argument is pretty much the same (you can't have everyone digging up streets to lay more cable, so it's either less competition or treat the local loop as a semi-shared resource).

These are typical examples of where regulation leads to more choice and far more competition, and thus a far better working market.

Indeed they are evil

[GreenEnvy22]

I've been slowly switching all our work phones off of Bell and onto Rogers as contracts expire. Both are evil, but Rogers is less evil simply because of some of the benefits of GSM. Will Bell, lets say I want a new handset. I go to a Bellworld store, pick out a phone, pay the $300 for it with no contract, or $50-100 with contract. Now, they charge me a FEE, to switch the phone. I AM BUYING A PHONE FROM YOU!! DO NOT CHARGE ME A PENALTY FOR THE HONOUR OF AN UPGRADE!! It's like $35. I refuse to pay any made up admin fees when purchasing a product. With Rogers, I buy unlocked phones online, and don't even need to tell Rogers I got a new phone, I just pop the users SIM card into the new phone and off they go. Rates are still horrible with both, but I get more flexibility with Rogers. Getting unlimited data plans is almost impossible here.

Re:Don't hold your breath... networks are expensiv

[CastrTroy]

But really how remote are those areas of Norway. In Canada, you can go to places where it's a 4 hour drive between anything over 50,000 people. Lets look at Saskatchewan for instance. Twice the size of Norway, and 1/4 of the population. Not only that, if you compare the top cities in Norway to the top cities in Saskatchewan, you'll see quite a difference in the number of people in those cities. The Number 10 city only has 8000 people. People from Europe don't really know what remote is. They don't really understand what sparsely populated is. I grew up in a Northern Ontario town, and considered it a short trip to drive to Ottawa which was 8.5 hours away. Toronto being only 6.5 hours was an extremely short distance from my view point. You could probably drive accross most of any European country in 8 hours.