Geek post: Mobile data costs in Canada
I’m hereby fed-up with the lack of competition within the cellular market in Canada. I know plenty people before me in the blogosphere have bitched, too, like:
- - Thomas Purves
- - Mark in Oshawa
- - Roland Tanglao
- - Boris Mann
- - Mobile Muse
- - Darren Barefoot
- - Richard Akerman
…to name a few!
But now, it’s my turn to weigh in on this travesty.
The lack of cellular service providers here effectively creates a ridiculous monopoly, which has driven the pricing for accessing mobile Internet services way up over the past few years. (So much for progress?)
Before Fido was swallowed up by Rogers Wireless, we Canadians had an opportunity to purchase an unlimited data plan for $50 – The people that got on that bandwagon before the buyout were lucky enough to be grandfathered to that plan. Now, Rogers has eliminated that rate option, and gone with a miniscule, fixed data package for double that.
With only four major players in Canada (Telus Mobility, Rogers Mobility, Fido [err, right... It's Rogers now], and Bell), one has to wonder what kind of price fixing is going on to ensure that they can charge a small fortune for a customer to access a limited amount of data every day. No wonder RIM is up in arms about the data rates being a huge roadblock to their success in Canada! Who wants a Blackberry when, without ANY phone access whatsoever, the unit still costs an average of $100 a month to operate on a tight 200 mb plan with most providers.
Realistically speaking, no matter which provider I choose to go with when my plan is up at the end of the year, I’ll be spending easily $150 for not much more than basic use if I want some connectivity to the net with my phone plan.
When you compare that to an average of about $50 in the States for a similar plan with many providers, it’s pretty ludicrous. It seems the only way around this is to get a huge group of people together and obtain a corporate group discount with better data rates. That doesn’t seem like much of a solution to me.
Colour me frustrated. Anyone have any ideas? Barring that, does anyone have a grandfathered Fido plan they want to sell me? 
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My work switched all the on-call staff onto a business Rogers plan (they pay for our phones) and I think we get something like 50MB a month each? Or maybe I’m wrong. Enough for 70 emails a day, I think I was told.
For a couple months before we switched I was on Telus and paying an extra $40 or something for the data service on top of my phone plan. Maybe for 3MB a month? It was ridiculous. I could tap out more than 3MB of morse code in a month. Geez.
I’m not sure if this’ll ever change, though. I don’t think enough people are bitching about it.
Yeah. I have a laptop, and can usually pick up free wireless around town. I’ll stick with that.
Neil just got the HTC Tytn through Rogers, and he’s pretty pleased with the device. I’m looking into it myself.
It’s a VERY expensive handset. Twice the price of a blackberry – but it has one big advantage: wifi.
Now his work is paying the bill for the voice/data plan, so I can’t comment on the actual size of the bills, but between our network at home and random free hotspots around town he’s generally able to deal with email, calendar sync and mobile surfing without using the precious data reserves.
Considering the outrageous price of data these days, I think the extra price of the handset would pay for itself in avoided overages within 6 months or so.
This may not be for you, but the company I work for now uses private two-way VHF radios with a switch-board that connects us to the phone network. It is an expensive system to set up, but very cheep to run and operate. You do get privacy because the signals are encrypted and the switch-board is automated. Of course this would make sense for a business, but I use mine for personal calls too 24/7.
It is sort of like going back to the “Old School” way of doing things as this was the type of system implemented before cellphone became the norm. I’ve never had a dropped call with these guys!
Gill: Yep, that’s my plan. I’m just not sure how to implement the bitching for the CRTC to actually hear it. Letter writing doesn’t seem to work, national paper articles don’t phase them… What will? It’s so frustrating because we can’t just stop using the service in protest. Grrr.
Donna & Jen: Ya, I have a PPC, and use that, but often, I just want to have my phone, and nothing else, and the hotspots aren’t that great around downtown, I’ve found.
Tom: Unfortunately, it’s not the talking — I’ve got a grandfathered Telus plan giving me 750 minutes for 45 bucks a month. It’s the data that is so horrifically overpriced.
Oooh, we should SO talk! I went through this last month when I went BlackBerry shopping. I almost had meltdowns in every retail outlet I visited – after hours of scouring the Internet, looking for an unlimited plan and coming up empty.
In the end, I got a Motorola Q from Telus. Somewhat miraculously, it is very much an unlimited data plan. It’s a bit odd: it’s under their Ampd (ampd.ca) brand. It’s an online service designed to deliver streaming video and audio – basically, a mobile entertainment device. As you can imagine, I can blow the 200 MB limit before I finish my first glass of juice in the morning.
But the Ampd plan is capped. I’m paying $135/month for unlimited. E-mail me, call me…whatever….or go to Telus and challenge them. I suspect this will likely disappear soon: all the vendors have been pulling their unlimited plans – the morons in the stores all told me “because there’s no demand or need for it.” Yeah, right.
We’re getting hosed. Time to fight back. Thanks for raising it.
(Oh, one more advantage: the Q costs $100 with a three-year plan. Dirt cheap by high-end smartphone standards. And it’s been nothing but a workhorse for me since. I love this device….and remember what I used to do for a living, so…)
hi Tanya,
Videotron wants to be a fourth player. there will be auctions for the 4th telco in ottawa this summer, although the other big 3 are pushing to stop this happenning.
Karl Pierre Péladeau, who heads Québecor (who owns videotron), said Telus, Bell and Telus have an oligopole in canada and he wants to fight on price.
i lived 6 years in france, and now canada 2007 feels a lot like france 5 years ago.
“I’m just not sure how to implement the bitching for the CRTC to actually hear it. Letter writing doesn’t seem to work, national paper articles don’t phase them… What will?”
I’ve been prodding people to come up with the business case, with market research, instead of whining about lack of services. So far I’ve only seen in comments, not in prominent articles (on blogs or otherwise), that lost of people on cheap plans means more money than few people on expensive plans.
The companies don’t seem interested in building a platform (which is how I’d use it: I’d love to help create things on top of mobile Internet services), otherwise the companies would have done it years ago. I argue that the companies to either the bottom line or the potential for market share, but I don’t read a lot of other people arguing that as well, so I’m starting to get discouraged that it will ever happen.
I totally have to agree with your rant, especially considering my work deals directly with mobile internet service.
Mobile data is generally quite expensive anywhere in the world. In South Africa, on a contract plan with a mobile provider, we are paying ZAR500pm for 1GB (US$72). Vodafone in the UK charges GBP20.00 per meg for pay as you go users accessing 3G data. Ironically you can get unlimited data for GBP45.00 per month from them.
We do however have pretty good 3G and HSDPA coverage here which makes it a pretty good option. (Mobile is about 3x more expensive than DSL as a rule of thumb locally).