Slashdot Mirror
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."
... Telstra would complain that they are providing free air, and that it's giving competitors a free ride. they would at the same time propose that the the government pay them to provide the air and that it also be allowed a monopoly on the air.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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.
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.
In news this week: Canadian government regulation on mobile telecom industry is welcomed by readers of Slashdot. "Truly wonderful example of succesful goverment regulation!" -Anonymous Slashdot commenter
In other news: FCC castigated by readers of Slashdot for trying to regulate cable TV industry. "Yeah, like more government regulation is what we need!" -Anonymous Slashdot commenter
(This sig intentionally left blank)
Canada didn't use to have 3 national wireless carriers. It was only a few years ago, that Rogers bought out Fido. A few years prior, Clearnet was purchased by Telus. The consolidation was great for the wireless providers...
Fido* was the price leader. They started billing by the second, unlimited voice plans, etc. Except they didn't make much money (actually they went bankrupt once). When Fido got purchased by Rogers, the competitive pricing pressure was taken off of everyone. Rogers got the best of it, since they became the only choice for those who need GSM (and those international users who end up roaming on Rogers). So prices have stalled, and in many cases edged up.
Naturally, we scream for more competition. I'm sure some company will win the frequencies, but I wouldn't bet on them succeeding.
Networks are bloody expensive to build. And, since Canada's land mass is larger than the US, with only 30M potential customers, it's more expensive to build on a per-capita basis. Granted, you don't need to provide service to the bulk of the unpopulated land, but still, a town in Canada is a whole lot smaller than a town in the USA.
Even today, Telus and Bell share their "home" networks with each other in the West and East respectively to provide national coverage while they complete their build-outs.
So, yay for more competition. Whoever it ends up being, I wish them well, and luck... they'll need it.
* Fido is operated as a distinct brand on the Rogers network, but a lot has changed - lots of nickel and dimeing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Take off, eh?
-Bob & Doug McKinzee
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
...and you're about to give a great example of why the rest of Canada resents Ontario (btw, I live in Ontario too, though I haven't always)
then I realized the vast bloody majority of us live in Ontario12.8 million out of 33.1 million is a "vast bloody majority"? McGuinty really needs to get on that whole "reinvesting in schools" thing.
our population density in many areas is comparable to many statesYes, let's compare a small part of Ontario with entire states. Forget the rest of Canada, and even the rest of Ontario (Ontario isn't even close to the most dense province population wise; remember that it not only has the largest population, but has the largest land mass too).
I would be shocked if a phone company came along with the balls to say "our coverage area will only be in the golden horse shoe". I suppose if they priced competitively it might work for a little while, but I suspect that sooner or later customer's would take a drive more than two hours from their home, and get pissed when their phone stopped working.
There is absolutely no reason that I pay $100 - $150 a month for BlackBerry serviceActually their is a great reason. Collectively we let them. When alternitives come along we don't flock to them, we just stick with the guys that are screwing us and when alternitive are not present we don't cancel the service and wait for them to be reasonable, we just pony up the money (as you are doing apparently).
(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
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The fact Telus and Verizon offer similar plans is not surprising, becuase there is cross-ownership between the two and they are partners, so they'd align at some levels...however there are a lot of differences.
local/long distance calling is 50 dollars a month for 400 minutes within Canada. I pay the same thing for my phone plan in America.
That is but one component of the services these companies offer. You completely ignore everything else:
* When Telus advertises "$x for y minutes" that "y minutes" is ALL you get. You get NO data transfer, NO voicemail , NO caller ID, NO call waiting...NOTHING. Even Mandatory "system access fees" and taxes are extra.
* Telus offers inflexible "SPARK" packages--if you want a specific feature you must get a more expensive package that is also bundled with features you don't want. "A la carte" is difficult to get, and when you do get features that way is quite overpriced.
* Telus data plan, at least for consumers, is VERY antiquated. They still charge by the KB or each HTTP request (and it can add up very very quickly). If you get a package the limits are so low they're a joke. They still ascribe to the "walled garden" strategy when it comes to web browsing too--if you go to one of a hundred or so "partner" websites it is part of the flat rate, and if you go to other sites, even if you have one of their packages, they STILL charge you by the HTTP request!
* They literally have ZERO "unlimited" plans, and the closest to unlimited you can get is EXTREMELY expensive.
I'm not familiar with Verison's rates, but from what I've seen of the US industry as a whole they are fairly more competitive than Canada now. What is sad is that US cell service is a joke compared to most of Europe and Asia, making cell service in Canada even more embarrassing. Considering that Canada got such a huge jump on the US in the area of broadband to the home it is tragic that wireless service didn't achieve the same thing (it's also sad that Canada's lead over the US in broadband has shrunk considerably too).