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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.