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As a fellow Canadian I agree with the sentiment and would love to see lower prices. But to be fair(er) to the telco's, it is a little easier to provide decent

by aquark 16y ago

As a fellow Canadian I agree with the sentiment and would love to see lower prices. But to be fair(er) to the telco's, it is a little easier to provide decent cellular coverage across Singapore than it is across even the densely populated swaths of Canada. As a rural Canadian I'm not sure I could push much more than 2GB through my home internet connection a month if used it 24/7.

sjs 16y ago
That's a common line from the telcos but in reality very little of Canada is actually populated and a huge percentage of our people live within 100-200k of the US border. The most difficult area to cover is BC because of all the trees & mountains. If you look at coverage maps they seem to have little trouble covering even the most rural parts of Alberta. Say Rogers has 1,000,000 3G customers (very modest). How many years does it take to pay off the cost of building the network? 2? 5? 10? At $50-80/month per customer they pull in at least $600,000,000/year. I don't care what their operational costs are they can cover it. That's assuming they have only 1,000,00 customers paying $50/month, while in reality they probably have closer to 5 or 10 million customers paying them upwards of $80/month. I just agreed to pay Rogers $30 for 10MB of roaming data in the US while I'm at WWDC. I'm obviously going to go over that and will be charged $3/MB all the way up beyond the 10MB. That is just greed. They take advantage of people who either have the company paying the bills or don't really know how much data they'll use. There's no way I'll use my phone normally while I'm away, but I should be able to. This has nothing to do with Canadian infrastructure and everything to do with being taken advantage of because we are locked into contracts, and even if we weren't Canadian telcos do not compete with each other. They all have outrageous pricing last I checked. Maybe things have changed with providers besides Rogers during the last couple years but I doubt it. They have no reason to compete with each other if they can fix prices and all make a killing. Prices are too similar across the board for me to think otherwise.

by aquark 16y ago

sjs 16y ago

That's a common line from the telcos but in reality very little of Canada is actually populated and a huge percentage of our people live within 100-200k of the US border. The most difficult area to cover is BC because of all the trees & mountains. If you look at coverage maps they seem to have little trouble covering even the most rural parts of Alberta. Say Rogers has 1,000,000 3G customers (very modest). How many years does it take to pay off the cost of building the network? 2? 5? 10? At $50-80/month per customer they pull in at least $600,000,000/year. I don't care what their operational costs are they can cover it. That's assuming they have only 1,000,00 customers paying $50/month, while in reality they probably have closer to 5 or 10 million customers paying them upwards of $80/month. I just agreed to pay Rogers $30 for 10MB of roaming data in the US while I'm at WWDC. I'm obviously going to go over that and will be charged $3/MB all the way up beyond the 10MB. That is just greed. They take advantage of people who either have the company paying the bills or don't really know how much data they'll use. There's no way I'll use my phone normally while I'm away, but I should be able to. This has nothing to do with Canadian infrastructure and everything to do with being taken advantage of because we are locked into contracts, and even if we weren't Canadian telcos do not compete with each other. They all have outrageous pricing last I checked. Maybe things have changed with providers besides Rogers during the last couple years but I doubt it. They have no reason to compete with each other if they can fix prices and all make a killing. Prices are too similar across the board for me to think otherwise.