How do Canada’s data prices compare to the rest of the world?
cbc.ca/player/play/2160703043525
cbc.caPosted Jan 12, 2023, 10:47 PM UTC
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cbc.caI moved from NZ, my wife moved from Australia. Both places offer far better plans which are cheaper too! Can Canada change? It feels like Canada's companies favour profit and the Canadian Government hasn't regulated competition well enough.
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The government is protecting the big three because they are afraid of foreign companies coming in. They are intimidated by the dominance of American companies and culture and want it to be strictly Canadian. If you don’t believe me, it’s legit what the Broadcasting Act is about. It’s the same with other sectors as well. Also in tv, which is why the government wants to legislate what we see online to promote more Canadian content
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The government isn't afraid of foreign competition, the business owners who own the politicians are worried about foreign competition and are using their financial leverage to maintain the status quo.
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Bingo
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Doesn't matter to us plebs if it is an American screwing us or a Canadian. And it's not like that money will stay in Canada anyways.
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I'm the opposite. Moved to Aus and do contracts in NZ. Both countries have better access to health care and better mobile plans.
Another example of a protected monopoly is Air Canada. Also, Canadian airports have some of the highest airport taxes in the world. The end result is ridiculously priced domestic flights.
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When did you move? Data is finally kinda affordable these last few years (though still not competitive globally). It wasn't so long ago (2015?) that in a trip to the UK I picked up a sim with 5GB data LTE for 10 pounds (presumably monthly was much less). At the time a 4 gig plan in Canada was $80 without financing a phone, and the cheapest you could do was $40 for 1 gig. We had a few extra perks as well, the law didn't require you to shut off people once they went over or give any feedback on usage. So anyone who foolishly went over would pay the astronomical $10/100mb overcharge rate despite it not costing any more for the companies providing data. Describing that to friends anywhere else in the world left them open-mouthed haha. These days I believe companies are required to report at 90% usage and cut your plan at $50 of overcharge, so truly crazy stuff can't happen anymore but I know this exploitative system was a nightmare for a lot of parents.
As for the prices in general people always blamed how spread out the country is, but when I looked into it back in 2015 after coming back from London the profit margin after all expenses of most telecomm companies was something astronomical like above 30%. No idea if that remains the case today, I'd assume it's dropped a fair bit since then. Having grown up with how absurdly overpriced data was I'm comfortable with paying $40 for basically unlimited, even if it's twice as much as many other places.
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That land mass to population excuse doesn't hold out. Australia is similar but has far less expensive plans despite being overall a more expensive country to live in.
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$30/m for my Euro number with 30GB, unlimited text/calling in the same country across the EU and unused data gets rolled over to the next month. 5G network, no contracts.
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And 20 times the population in the same landmass size (including European Russia). The vast majority of cost is land purchases, and building infrastructure. Costs scale to the size of the landmass you need to cover, and are divided among the population that live there. I'll never understand how so many people can't do this very simple arithmetic.
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The important question, does the government want 5% GST on a small bill or a big bill? As long the government collected a % they will always favor a big bill.
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Maybe... but if the government doesn't get as much on the small bill they'll still get the same cut when that extra money the consumer has is spent on pretty much anything else.
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Most working Canadians are going into debt just to pay for essentials. There’s no GST charge to interest on debt so I doubt they’d be losing out.
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Bring in Verizon and T-Mobile into the mix. The Big 3 in Canada are price fixing among themselves.
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Yeah let's bring in another giant player into the oligopoly game!
A better way to deal with this would be to nationalize the data backbones and infrastructure, and put "service" providers on the last mile only. The government paid for the infrastructure anyway, but for some screwed up reason transferred ownership to whatever corporation did the installation.
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My 50$/50GB seems pretty reasonable
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Poorly
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In Europe right now, paying $30 CAD equivalent per month for unlimited data (and everything else).
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We should let Rogers buy Shaw. That will increase competition.
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Easy, overpriced and unreliable
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Big business in Canada is insanely corrupt.
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