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Canada Opens Wireless Industry To Competition

Posted by samzenpus on from the free-the-waves-eh dept.

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."

3 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Not very different by Rog7 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Telus, Bell and Rogers don't really act that much different than what you've just described, these are companies that have transformed from the traditional local monopolies of phone & cable.

    These sort of enforcements to make them "share" have happened before and they've become very clever at finding ways to discourage competition anyway.

  2. but phone networks are so dumb by troll+-1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So they have all this great bandwidth and all they can think of is more phones?

    Phone systems are a relic of the last century. A much better use would be mobile IP addresses where consumers choose their own devices for Internet, text, voice, or whatever and cell phone companies can't limit our choice of devices or nickel and dime us for trivial stuff, like opening a port for email and selling it as a service (I'm sure glad the cell phone companies aren't running the Internet).

    So perhaps we need to stop thinking in terms of phones and start thinking more about expanding the wireless spectrum to be part of the Internet because that's where we'll get real choice and innovation.

  3. It won't change much by spungo · · Score: 2, Interesting
    All that will happen is that:

    (1) little companies will come forward

    (2) said little companies will find it tough competing against big players, due to unfair practices

    (3) Federal govt will ignore problem due to incompetence and/or backhanders

    (4) little companies will end up getting bought out by Rogers, et al.

    (5) Big companies increase their monopolistic stranglehold