5 ms·

In Canada, we're mostly limited to Bell, Rogers, Telus and Shaw, along with some other provincial crown corporations. Our geography might cause a slight increas

In Canada, we're mostly limited to Bell, Rogers, Telus and Shaw, along with some other provincial crown corporations. Our geography might cause a slight increase in costs, but other than that, limited choice in the market and high barrier to entry keeps our fees high I think.

paranoidrobot 6y ago
In Australia we have three physical mobile network operators on a national basis: Telstra, Optus and Vodafone. All the other brands you see are MVNOs running on mostly Optus and Vodafone, with the occasional one here or there on Telstra.
- angott 6y ago
  MVNOs are unable to operate in Canada because the carriers mentioned above won’t let new entrants use their networks. It’s how they protect their oligopoly.
- hug 6y ago
  There are significantly more MVNOs on Telstra than there are on Vodafone -- I think you'd be surprised how many more. I would hazard this is because there's a giant legislated fence down the middle of Telstra (referred to as "structural separation") that literally demands that Telstra's retail and wholesale divisions not talk to one another. On a tangent related to that, though, I am very confused about exactly how Australia ended up with such a robust, competitive market when it comes to Internet services. Importantly, Net Neutrality has never ever ever been a thing in Australia: Zero-rating content has been a thing since the 90s: when my friends had a blisteringly-fast-for-the-times 10mbps cable internet package (with, from memory, a 50GB shaped cap), you wouldn't bother downloading something until it hit the BigPond Games site, where the downloads didn't count towards your cap. Even now net neutrality is not a thing: All of the physical network operators bundle in unrated Netflix or Spotify or, y'know, whatever. They compete on offering the best value-adds, as opposed to competing on crippling the service the least. I'm thankful for it, but also it strikes me as particularly odd, in the current times where I expect literally every company to be essentially defrauding little old ladies to turn a buck. Do any fellow Australians have any idea what the real reason for this is? Is it to do with the early legislation demanding Telstra's wholesale & retail structural separation? The mandatory (again, legislated) wholesale of ADSL by Telstra? Why does Optus (read: Singtel) play ball? Is it because of the aforementioned issues? I have so many questions.
  - nl 6y ago
    I think one of the main reasons it strong oversight of the sector by both the ACCC and Telecommunications watchdog. It took a long time to force this, but aggressive competition by regional ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) forced Telstra to allow access to their ADSL network, and once that was in these and other companies used similar tactics to force open other markets. Optus aggressively used MVNOs to build market share in mobile markets, and while Telstra still charges a premium the generally decent quality Optus network has kept a cap on how much additional they can charge.
    - ImaCake 6y ago
      I would suspect genuine regulated competition is the correct answer here (as you spell out). This is in contrast to the monopolies and corruption seen elsewhere. The customer service is still horrible, and NBN remains a disaster.
      - nl 6y ago
        Customer service is an interesting one. The independent ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) had excellent reputations for customer service until they were all taken over by TPG. Nowadays Aussie Broadband has a pretty good reputation and interestingly has basically followed the same model: not always the absolute cheapest, but competes on benchmarks like speed, and with an engineering-heavy management team.
  - JimmyAustin 6y ago
    I cant answer your questions on net neutrality, but I do have fond memories as a teenager of waiting 24 hours after a WoW patch came out to grab it from unmetered from GameArena to save my parent's 13gb download cap.
  - megablast 6y ago
    Optus has the most. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_mobile_virtual_network_operators https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_mobile_vi...
  - 6y ago
walrus01 6y ago
When Shaw purchased Freedom, I was optimistic that they would put a serious amount of money into building a sufficient number of rooftop, monopole and tower LTE last mile access sites to be serious competition to Bell, Telus and Rogers. Sadly this has not been the case. The network coverage even in the major metro areas of Vancouver and Toronto is very poor compared to the others. I think Shaw sees much better ROI from their last-mile captive DOCSIS3/DOCSIS3.1 cable customers. Many of whom are on places where the local telco is years away from doing a real GPON FTTH overbuild. So it's 150Mbps+ DOCSIS3 service options vs 10-15Mbps ADSL2+ on long loop length copper.

paranoidrobot 6y ago

In Australia we have three physical mobile network operators on a national basis: Telstra, Optus and Vodafone. All the other brands you see are MVNOs running on mostly Optus and Vodafone, with the occasional one here or there on Telstra.

angott 6y ago
MVNOs are unable to operate in Canada because the carriers mentioned above won’t let new entrants use their networks. It’s how they protect their oligopoly.
hug 6y ago
There are significantly more MVNOs on Telstra than there are on Vodafone -- I think you'd be surprised how many more. I would hazard this is because there's a giant legislated fence down the middle of Telstra (referred to as "structural separation") that literally demands that Telstra's retail and wholesale divisions not talk to one another. On a tangent related to that, though, I am very confused about exactly how Australia ended up with such a robust, competitive market when it comes to Internet services. Importantly, Net Neutrality has never ever ever been a thing in Australia: Zero-rating content has been a thing since the 90s: when my friends had a blisteringly-fast-for-the-times 10mbps cable internet package (with, from memory, a 50GB shaped cap), you wouldn't bother downloading something until it hit the BigPond Games site, where the downloads didn't count towards your cap. Even now net neutrality is not a thing: All of the physical network operators bundle in unrated Netflix or Spotify or, y'know, whatever. They compete on offering the best value-adds, as opposed to competing on crippling the service the least. I'm thankful for it, but also it strikes me as particularly odd, in the current times where I expect literally every company to be essentially defrauding little old ladies to turn a buck. Do any fellow Australians have any idea what the real reason for this is? Is it to do with the early legislation demanding Telstra's wholesale & retail structural separation? The mandatory (again, legislated) wholesale of ADSL by Telstra? Why does Optus (read: Singtel) play ball? Is it because of the aforementioned issues? I have so many questions.
- nl 6y ago
  I think one of the main reasons it strong oversight of the sector by both the ACCC and Telecommunications watchdog. It took a long time to force this, but aggressive competition by regional ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) forced Telstra to allow access to their ADSL network, and once that was in these and other companies used similar tactics to force open other markets. Optus aggressively used MVNOs to build market share in mobile markets, and while Telstra still charges a premium the generally decent quality Optus network has kept a cap on how much additional they can charge.
  - ImaCake 6y ago
    I would suspect genuine regulated competition is the correct answer here (as you spell out). This is in contrast to the monopolies and corruption seen elsewhere. The customer service is still horrible, and NBN remains a disaster.
    - nl 6y ago
      Customer service is an interesting one. The independent ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) had excellent reputations for customer service until they were all taken over by TPG. Nowadays Aussie Broadband has a pretty good reputation and interestingly has basically followed the same model: not always the absolute cheapest, but competes on benchmarks like speed, and with an engineering-heavy management team.
- JimmyAustin 6y ago
  I cant answer your questions on net neutrality, but I do have fond memories as a teenager of waiting 24 hours after a WoW patch came out to grab it from unmetered from GameArena to save my parent's 13gb download cap.
- megablast 6y ago
  Optus has the most. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_mobile_virtual_network_operators https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_mobile_vi...
- 6y ago

walrus01 6y ago

When Shaw purchased Freedom, I was optimistic that they would put a serious amount of money into building a sufficient number of rooftop, monopole and tower LTE last mile access sites to be serious competition to Bell, Telus and Rogers. Sadly this has not been the case. The network coverage even in the major metro areas of Vancouver and Toronto is very poor compared to the others. I think Shaw sees much better ROI from their last-mile captive DOCSIS3/DOCSIS3.1 cable customers. Many of whom are on places where the local telco is years away from doing a real GPON FTTH overbuild. So it's 150Mbps+ DOCSIS3 service options vs 10-15Mbps ADSL2+ on long loop length copper.