Canada is a cesspool of oligopolies, from TV to Cell Phone to Banks, etc.The excuse is always “if we don’t then some foreign/US company could come in and destroy our culture.” Which of course is bullshit. A handful of companies are making billions and billions off the backs of Canadian with worse service and it won’t get any better unless the oligopolies are broken.
Don't forget radio. A lot of USAians don't realize that in Canada (and a lot of other countries) you can't start a radio station, or change your programming, without the government approving the format you choose.
Want to play country music on your radio station? Woah there, podner. There's already a country station in this town, and if you play country music, too, there won't be enough advertising money to go around. So the incumbent stays, and the idea of competition allowing the better station to survive can go pound sand.
> This sounds a bit like the general situation in Australia.
As a Canadian living in Australia since 2011, I have to disagree. Politically Canada is much more of a protectionist nanny state than Australia.
For mobile service in particular (i.e., the topic of this dicussion), Australia is much more competitive than Canada despite also being a very large, sparsely populated country. I pay $25/month for unlimited calls and 18 GB of 4G data (https://www.aldimobile.com.au/plans/value-packs/). Unlike Canada, Australia allows strong, foreign competitors to provide mobile service (e.g., Vodafone and Optus).
Other ways in which Australia is less protectionist than Canada:
- parallel private healthcare system
- parallel private education system (although not at university level)
- buy alcohol anywhere, not just at government owned stores
- no dairy and poultry "supply management"
- foreign owned supermarkets (e.g., Aldi)
Australia is far from perfect (e.g., the natural gas cartel is far too powerful) but on the whole there's far less government interference that protects cozy domestic oligopolies compared Canada.
Sorry, I guess I was unclear. I wasn't talking about the Telstra situation. It's not great but it also not Canada level bad. I also wasn't talking about healthcare/alcohol etc.
I think where Australia suffers is in things like imported goods (often there's an extra 20-40% markup beyond the maybe 5% higher shipping cost. Or sometimes it's shipped directly from China, but still way more expensive. I think many brand owners have just decided Australia will be able to tolerate a higher cost than the rest of the world.
I agree that there used to be a noticeable markup for e.g. electronics sold in Australia when the AUD was worth more than the USD. However, now that the AUD is worth ~USD 0.67, prices are close to the exchange rate plus 10% GST. For example, I recently bought the Pixel 3a for A$650 which is close enough to US$400 + GST.
So sure it's hardly the whole logistics story (volume, volume, volume)... but Australia is actually closer to S.E Asia (where a large volume of e.g. electronics goods are made or assembled) than the U.S.
It seemed like everything you might want to buy that had a brand attached to it was like 20-40% more expensive in Australia, for no particular reason. (Apple products, Intel CPUs and commodities like RAM, SSD and GPU pricing were exempt - those have pretty straight-forward global pricing.)
But.. say, random things like B&H Speakers? Or whatever else. Probably 40% more! Etc. So many things were so much more expensive in Australia for seemingly no particular reason. Freight costs didn't make up for all of that cost disparity - there was something else at play.
I almost left the day job I was sent to do in Melbourne to work on building a price search engine for the Australian market. I couldn't really find anything that was useful/structured enough back then (2012).
I'm curious, has this opportunity been filled since then?
I actually sympathize - Canada is nice. Quebec especially so; doubly for Montreal. Perhaps it's a bit of this protectionism and isolationism that keeps it that way.
I tried living there and that sheen quickly fades. Especially after living in a US city. It's a joke if you think anyone in the world is even attempting to try to imitate Quebec. Montreal is nice because of what is left from the past greatness in the pre 1970s and because of its decline it's now a dirt cheap urban playground with economy-class hipster NYC lite for the unemployed artists whose parents can afford paying their $400/m shared living rent.
Otherwise the economy is incredibly behind the times and incredibly lucky for the political influence it's established over the years being the special child who gets preferential treatment despite having none of the excuses the have-not east coast provinces have, despite receiving the most aid of all of the provinces.
There's a very good reason MTL rents are 20x cheaper than NYC despite the large stock of high quality old buildings. And it has nothing to do with what they’ve achieved recently.
Around 2013, the Canadian government considered allowing Verizon to enter the Canadian market by buying WIND Mobile, a small budget carrier which was looking for foreign investors. They were faced with a huge fearmongering campaign orchestrated by the big three carriers, with TV ads like this:
When I was travelling in the U.S. a few weeks ago, I was able to buy a month's unlimited data and North American calling and SMS on some random MVNO from some random phone shop in middle of nowhere NY, including a new SIM and activation, for less than one pays for a month with a cap here in Ontario.
Even the corrupt, cronyistic telecom arrangements in the U.S.† are dramatically better than those in Canada.
† Not that the U.S. is particularly bad for this, by world standards.
Sadly, telecommunications (Rogers, Telus, Bell) and air transportation (WestJet, Air Canada) are affected by oligopoly.
The situation in Quebec is slightly better thanks to a 4th telecom company, Videotron, which brings mobile plans and internet prices lower than in the rest of Canada.
It's funny how sometimes you'll see the exactly same "promotion" offerings from the Robelus trio...
> The situation in Quebec is slightly better thanks to a 4th telecom company, Videotron, which brings mobile plans and internet prices lower than in the rest of Canada.
Saskatchewan also sees better prices and promotions due to the presence of Province-owned SaskTel iirc.
SaskTel is a bit... all over the place. Sometimes their plans are a great deal, sometimes not. When got my first smartphone, I had a $60CAD/mo unlimited everything plan. You get to stick with your plan until you do a subsidized phone upgrade, so I held onto that for a long long time. When I got a new phone, there were no unlimited plans for two upgrade cycles, and the high data (13GB was my last one) plans were expensive ($110/mo). My most recent upgrade they started offering a $90/mo unlimited plan again.
Edit: also, the three major carriers (Rogers, Telus, Bell) generally offer different packages in SK than they do for the rest of the country, to remain competitive with SaskTel. Another fun thing: while Rogers has some towers in the province, the LTE towers are all generally owned by SaskTel and there’s an agreement in place to let the other use them. In exchange, SaskTel customers get to use Bell and Telus towers in the rest of the country without incurring roaming charges. That used to not be the case and we’d be limited to 250MB of data out of province.
Used to be there were competitive Manitoba plans but Bell bought MTS and those disappeared (now you maybe save $15/month vs the half price it used to be). It’s just a matter of time before one of the big three buys SaskTel, either Bell or Telus most likely.
More than telecommunications, it’s irritating how much of cable and network TV is owned by these companies, with lucrative US licensing and distribution rights for many properties so they can sell you a four-way bundle of home phone, cell phone, TV and Internet. So few companies can offer all of the above, and while it’s nice that we’ve CRTC-mandated limited competitive sharing to a limited extent on Internet lines, for everything else the CRTC is incredibly anti-consumer, only going after the worst behaviour when it’s been happening for a decade as “normal”.
It's not just telecommunications and air transport. Everywhere you look, you'll find sectors where foreign competition is prohibited or strictly managed in a way that keeps prices artificially high.
An example? Cheese. Under CETA (the Canada-EU free trade agreement), only Canadian dairy producers can import cheese from the EU into Canada. These producers will set its price artificially high as to match the price of Canadian cheese plus a premium. This way, they ensure consumers will buy Canadian cheese instead, as it appears to be cheaper.
The fact of the matter is that just about everyone (US, EU) subsidies their farmers from general tax revenue. The US supposedly gives as much in subsidies as the entire Canadian market.
If Canada were to open its market to foreign product, Canadian farmers would probably be wiped out because of cheaper imports. So if Canada would want a domestic industry, they too would also have do subsidize their own farmers--and that would be done from general tax receipts.
So the taxes of someone who is lactose intolerant would be going to help produce milk. Someone who is vegan / vegetarian would be helping to grow chickens.
With the current system, the only people paying more are the folks who actually by the product(s).
Should Canadians pay a bit of a premium to be able to supply some of the things that we depend on to live ourselves, in our own way, on our own terms? For food I think yes. I am happy to know that the milk and cheese I consume did not come from American mega farms with all their problems.
Instead of trade barriers exclusively based on place of origin, you could have food safety rules that enforce animal welfare standards before the product can be sold in Canada. The U.S. also produces higher quality hormone-free milk just as good as the Canadian one, but the artificial trade barriers put in place by Canada make it almost impossible for foreign producers to sell it here, regardless of its quality. It leads to higher prices for final consumers, and at the end of the day only benefits the local dairy industry and the few families behind it.
You need to be part of the supply management scheme, that is, you need to be producing and supplying milk in Canada. So an import-only business wouldn't be able to do it. I am not too sure on the details, but you can read more about it here: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-comme...
It's funny how each of these companies also have sub-companies with different brand, like how Videotron started Fizz.
I moved back to Quebec a month ago and was doing a survey of the mobile plans: Videotron, Bell, Rogers, Telus, Virgin Mobile, Koodo, Fido and Fizz. It was hilarious, 6/8 companies had the exact same 4 + 5GB for 55$ deal.
In the past, every single graph of pricing I've seen shows them all moving together in lock step. It's unbelievable to me that after all these years nothing has been done to solve this. Here's hoping this election this will get more attention from the politicians...
Iirc a large part of Canadian airline ticket prices come from the fact that airports impose large fees on tickets to pay for improvements to the facilities, rather than subsidizing the cost from municipal and provincial taxpayers.
Canadian airport usage is supported through user taxes rather than general revenue.
There are some startups now in Canada offering lower fares but it's not that much cheaper and they frequently fly to international destinations, which are more lucrative anyhow.
Most (all?) EU airports are not subsidised by govt (indeed I imagine it would be illegal under EU state support rules). Ryanair/easyJet/wizzair etc all offer crazy low fares.
I think the US would benefit from such a policy, and it did exist for a short spell around 2000.
Doesn't help much in the area of mobile phones though.
With regards to air transportation, I would think that most traffic flows more north-south and less east-west, so I'm not sure how many airlines can survive given Canada's population and the distribution thereof. Certainly we do have some 'regionals', Porter out of CYTZ being fairly well-known.
Videotron also has a network sharing agreement with Rogers though, so their retail behavior is different, but you're basically on Rogers outside Ottawa and Quebec.
The comment I wanted to make there is the main reason why Rogers signed that agreement was they got unused Toronto spectrum licenses from Videotron.
The big 3 are monsters, but the set-asides that the government does in spectrum auctions imo does more damage in making spectrum more expensive than it does in supporting anyone not named Rogers/Bell/Telus.
Alcohol is Canada-wide too! Each province runs its own liquor distribution system. Up until this year, it was impossible for me, in SK, to order a case of wine from a vineyard in BC without having that wine go through SLGA (sask liquor and gaming). The feds seem to have dropped this requirement though [1] and now it’s up to the provinces to work out the rules for interprovincial liquor.
Pricing in Canada for mobile plans are downright awful! I can buy a plan from Australia and use it there in Canada for cheaper with international roaming.
I remember only 10 years ago that Canadian telcos still considered moving between state lines as ‘roaming’. I don’t know if it’s still the case.
It's even funnier when you find out that cell phone infrastructure is incredibly centralized. Most calls in Ontario go through Toronto.
The only mobile phone innovation in Canada is new ways to charge customers in ways that nobody else does. E.g. charging 15 cents for an incoming text message unless you have a text messaging plan.
I recently had a discussion with a colleague about this:
Wouldn't it be much more efficient to start a telco with just 1 plan: unlimited everything for a fixed price.
Literally just charge $30/month or so (I haven't done the math on what is economically viable) for a flat fee plan. No strings attached, except maybe rate limit after a substantial amount of data to prevent abuse (like 50gb/day).
Also: no contracts, let people cancel when they want. And don't sell devices, just the SIM card.
This way you'll have:
- no need for usage metering systems
- very simple billing systems
- minimal need for marketing
- much less support calls (at least no angry customers due to unexpected costs)
- a very simple self-service portal
Now, I know I'm being naive here, it'll be next to impossible to start a service like this because the physical infrastructure (the base stations) are owned by the ancient behemoth telcos that have roamed the earth for past century.
But just imagine how great a telco can be if you were just to trim the fat, legacy and greed away.
Now that I'm thinking about it: you could just limit a connection to ~30mbit permanently and remove any data limit.
30mbit is enough to stream 4K video, so there is currently no actual use-case for more bandwidth on mobile devices. Those who are 'abusing' the unlimited plan to replace their wired internet connection at home will now have a choice: 30mbit 'slow' internet from their mobile plan, or get a separate fiber/cable/adsl line for more bandwidth.
The base stations are very much capable of sharing their available bandwidth equally through TDM, so it wouldn't impact other users that much.
I think it's unreasonable to assume that streaming is the only use-case of a high-speed connection. If I need to download something large, there is no upper limit to the bandwidth I can benefit from.
More generally, I think claims that there's no valid use-case of X are essentially always wrong. It's fine not wanting to provide a service if you're upfront about it, but framing it as anyone who does this is doing something dodgy is just a way of diverting blame.
30mbit is huge though. For plenty of people 30mbit would be faster than their home internet connection, especially if they're allowed to tether unlimited devices behind it.
To play devils advocate, a more fair system would charge you a flat fee to maintain the connection, and a price per gigabyte to use the pipes. The more that people use the pipes, the more money you can put toward investment in fatter pipes.
This is effectively what I have from Three Mobile here in the UK.
They seem to have stopped offering my plan, but I pay around £22 per month, SIM only. Ihave used in excess of 100GB per month a few times (we used it as our home internet while the cable line was being sorted out), and am very happy. I even get the "Feel At Home" package that means I can use up to 12GB a month in the US, Australia and a ton of other countries for no extra charge.
But as a small business customer I have no access to their web portal (!?) and they seem to have stopped selling this plan.
You have just described how a lot of MVNO operators work.
In France, you can get an unlimited subscription for 20€ / month.
As far as I remember, no strings attached, no phone either unless you want to, unlimited voice, texts and data. There is some kind of data cap, it is pretty high and if you reach it, you don't have to pay anything, your speed might just be limited for the month (although it has never happened to me afaik).
> I think this will happen with the new wave of telecom companies that rely on satellites instead of ground towers
Maybe. If you look at the total available bandwidth of the satellite systems vs their potential subscriber base, I think metering will probably happen at a lower level than many people expect.
Perhaps they'll upgrade to much better radios in the future and the whole issue will be resolved.
That sounds like the T-Mobile One plan that they offered for a while, but it was $70/month and they were still struggling. The network is expensive and customer acquisition is really expensive.
For us living in Canada, we know we pay more than anyone else. And we're constantly reminded of how the Bell, Telus and Rogers mafia keeps it that way.
I live in Canada and everyone says this, I don't think it's really that true.
I was in California for this summer - I paid about the same for a cell service there as I do here...
All numbers in USD.
For a quick comparison of "premium" cell providers, an unlimited (15gb before throttling) verizon wireless line is $70 per month [0]. A comparable Canadian plan for Bell is $56 per month for 10gb before throttling, or $71 per month for 20 gb before throttling.
Most people don't pay that much in reality, because of group discounts and so on, but that applies in both cases.
The story is similar if we look at budget cell phone providers. Google Fi (US) provides unlimited talk and text for $20gb/month with data for $10gb/month. Freedom mobile (Canada) doesn't provide as much flexibility, and you have to select your amount of data up front, but for any amount of data it's cheaper. E.g. for 2gb it's $30/month instead of $40. [2]
Verizon’s price drops by 50% once you get to 4 lines. You won’t find that in Canada.
And once you hit 15gb, you’re still getting 600kbps.
Freedom limits you to 256 (or 128 outside their limited footprint) once you go over.
T-mobile’s $40/month plans (if you can string in 4 friends/family) will have unlim streaming video, 5gb of roaming in Canada, an SD Netflix subscription, 1 hour of in-flight wifi and start throttling you at 50gb.
edit: That's $40 with taxes and fees included. They advertise it that way!
Each of the above are unthinkable in Canada. We choose phone plans based on their restrictions, not their extras.
I know, population density and all, but compare to Australia, Russia or Iceland, and Canadians are still getting hosed.
Don't even get me started on France. Going in a month and will soon order a SIM card. And the provider will mail anywhere in France at no charge...
I'll add that I am on T-mobile living in Canada and have been for 6 months and haven't switched over because all in we have two people @ $100, 24 gb data, unlimited can, us, mexico, and all sorts of other random data perks. The quality of the service has been great for the most part. No penalty fees for being in the US or in Canada - except any Canadian people calling us or texting us get charged since it's international (ridiculous). Technically we're supposed to be kicked off our plan but we keep returning to the US to keep our plan alive (and for business, etc). Not saying it's amazing - but way better than the Canadian telco plans we've seen.
1. You will have better coverage with T-Mobile than with any Canadian plan because T-Mob has roaming agreements with all of our "competitors".
2. Through Voip.ms, you could setup a local Canadian number and give that out to people to call you. It'll cost you a dollar a month and about 1cent/minute for forwarding the calls.
I have one that goes straight to their voicemail-to-email gateway for calls I never want to answer :)
Also - aren't the roaming agreements mean we get the lower tranch of quality connections / data? I always figured they would choose their own customers over roaming customers.
Thanks for the pro tips. Do you find the connection time is a bit slower as my assumption is the network is trying to figure out where I am / get handshakes from telcos.
For a plan with exactly the same conditions and data amount, I am paying 10 GBP = 16.43 CAD instead of 46 CAD after tax. And that was a competitively priced plan in Quebec.
10 GBP for a phone plan is insanely low. I don't know how it is in Europe, but in the US it's definitely nowhere as cheap, which is the comment the person above was making. I too was in California, and I pay 40USD for everything + 2GB of data. In Quebec, I'm not sure if I got a special deal, but I got 55CAD for 9GB of data, which with conversion ratio is roughly 40USD.
That's the thing: A luxury plan in Canada is a basic plan overseas.
When I visit France and buy a 10 EUR plan that's "Good for a Canadian" for my 1-2 week stay from a random provider, people look at me funny because the brand is associated with the unemployed and refugees.
> the brand is associated with the unemployed and refugees
Come on. There is no provider associated with the unemployed and refugees in France. 10€ pre-paid should get you unlimited call and texts and something like 1Go of data and no one will bat an eye.
Plans are actually quite cheap too. I pay 15€ for unlimited everything and you can get as low as 2€ for 2h of call, unlimited texts and 50Mo of data.
Similar here, from Quebec but worked in Milan for a while. I got prepaid plans in Milan for the equivalent of $29 CAD for 80GB of mobile data. It reminded me of how fucked up the market is back home.
The problem is that you're comparing two corrupt markets. You're absolutely right, it's not much better in the US: Behemoth providers making absurd profits not based on any kind of free market with the money to afford the lobbying and advertising to keep it that way.
One of the providers[0] in Sweden: 8 GB data - $7.52, 25 GB - $12.6. $17.6 for 100 GB. All accounts carry over unused data up to 100 GB indefinitely. 13 GB data anywhere in EU/EES.
UK is probably the cheapest market relative to GDP per capita. Three offers unlimited data, calls, texts and roaming with no throttling including 5G for £17/month.
Actual competition is a hell of a thing. I'm pretty sure there are some backroom price fixing agreements between the Swedish operators, the profit margins wouldn't hover around 30-40% if there wasn't.
There were some dawn raids on these companies last year by EU antitrust authorities, but they didn't find any actionable evidence. :/
In my experience Freedom is just fine if you live in a city with good coverage and don't plan on spending much any time travelling through areas they don't serve. But if you travel much locally it's a non-starter.
wut...does the CEO come to your house and shine your shoes too? One local provider in my country does 6GB for 12CAD (equivalent), and they have great coverage...I think most unlimited plans are actually cheaper here.
I would invest in a carrier pigeon or something at that price. Sending tasty memes by pigeon...the future is now.
> Ours just did. We only laugh because we don't believe them, not because it's a problem.
Yeah, to be believable it would need to be a explicit promise to significantly and permanently reduce the revenue of BCE Inc. - and that kind of promise would have BCE shareholders in an uproar.
As far as I can tell, they don't seem too concerned.
> And US/international roaming... is so high that I just go without or buy a local SIM.
I've found trying to function internationally without my normal SIM to be essentially unworkable due to losing my ability to receive 2FA SMS codes, and since moving from the Lumia to the Pixel line-up, the phones I use no longer have dual-SIM capabilities.
UK, we have a lot of MVNOs, and (I believe) it is required for owners of physical networks to provide access to MVNOs (I believe this isn't the case in Canada). We have a problem with investment but prices are good.
I used to use freedom. My wife used to say it was short for “freedom from service.” There were a lot of dead zones in the town I lived and it was useless on road trips.
They're better than they were: They've got 700MHz spectrum so they can actually penetrate in a building. And they usually include a gb or 2 on Rogers' network.
I'm actually tempted to switch, but already on an okay plan from Public where I've learned to ration.
Just wish Freedom sold a trial plan or something for a month so I could see what it's like living with them. Paying $50 + $10 SIM + taxes discourages me.
Maybe. Keeping track of cell phone deals is a full-time job.
Meanwhile, residents of other countries just go to the mall, walk out with a plan that'll meet their needs and improves every year, and doesn't think about it again :)
I linked my sources, and I didn't shop around at all to find numbers I just used the first ones Google pointed me at. I wouldn't put it past bell to be providing me numbers based on geolocation though.
I would point out that 95 CAD is 71 USD though, so you're paying about the same as the verizon line I linked.
So what, you'd say we have "the cheapest cell service in the world" if we took our currency and reissued it with 1000 pre-2020 dollar equaling 1 post-2020 dollar [0]?
Electronics cost the same amount regardless of what currency you buy them in, which is at least a good portion of the cost of running a cell company. Wages are also similar in the US and Canada.
The Canadian GDP per person is slightly greater than the American GDP per person after we convert everything to the same asset (e.g. USD) [1]. So it's not like we are poorer than americans and we need to adjust for that. It just happens to be the case that a loonie is less than a dollar bill, and a toonie more than a dollar bill.
[0] There is precedent for doing this, though not in Canada, typically it is done after hyper inflation to make amounts of currency seem more reasonable.
Yeah, but the reason we know we pay more is reports like this. If this stands, five-to-ten years from now they can say "well actually that's not true anymore blah blah blah our fake reports" and there is no independent data to counter their claims. Smart move on their part.
This is insane... how can the Canadian populace (and by extension, the government) not pass laws that forbid this nonsense? Its incredible that the Canadian people are not up in arms over this shit.
I lived in Canada for 2 years. The week I moved there is when T-Mobile started offering free unlimited roaming in Canada. In my time in Canada I kept my T-Mobile plan and didn't even have to get an unlimited plan since I already had unlimited roaming. Since my bill was sent to a Washington address, I guess I got in on some loophole. The best part was that my coverage was phenominal... I had access to Telus, Wind and Bell in my area.
My prior trip to BC scouting for a home (a month earlier) cost me hundreds of dollars in international calls and data usage. The phone plans in Canada are shockingly bad. Being able to circumvent them was a godsend.
I remember the spectacular pricing of around $10-15/MB in Canadian mobile networks back around 2004-2005, just when 3G was getting started. (So it was really 2G pricing.)
As a reference, typical European pricing was around $2/MB at the time, IIRC. The US of course had their typical "plans" that made price comparisons hard.
It's fascinating that the network owners in Canada have managed to keep prices so high, for so long.
We were launching a mobile J2ME-based service back then; I remember thinking we'd get back to Canada when they'd got their data pricing in order but that never happened...
