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.

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.