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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....
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
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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.
...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).
Not exactly. TekSavvy does pay bell a wholesale rate ($20.50 per customer), but Bell doesn't give them a complete service.
That $20.50 pays for Bell's service of maintaining the last-mile connection between the customer's modem and the DSLAM in the CO.
The ISP (TekSavvy) must pay for a connection to Bell's ATM network in order to get the traffic from the CO to the ISP's network ($1300 for a GigE). From there, the ISP is responsible for internet connectivity. TekSavvy's primary transit is through Peer 1 (premium customers) and Cogent (unlimited customers) with various other things in the mix (TorIX, Teleglobe, etc). I know they recently purchased some InterNap hardware, but I'm not sure if they're using them for transit too.
As you mentioned, the ISP is responsible for providing technical support. However, many issues require TekSavvy to open trouble tickets with Bell (who provide pretty bad service to TekSavvy) in order to get problems resolved. This is because many problems with DSL involve incorrect settings made by Bell techs at the CO, a constant annoyance for TekSavvy.
Anyhow, that base fee only provides the last-mile. The ISP themselves pay to get the traffic from Bell to themselves, and from there it's entirely through the ISP's own network.
The end result is that TekSavvy can provide far better customer service and performance at lower prices than Bell. This is why they're signing up 1500-1800 customers per month. That figure, BTW, comes directly from TekSavvy themselves, who post on DSLReports a lot of information that most ISPs keep secret.