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Loading ...Give Yourself a Break on Wireless Data Access Rates in Canada!
May 27th was supposed to be the day that wireless data rates would potentially fall. It is now longer the case. MTS desolved a consortium formed to bid in an upcoming auction of Canadian wireless spectrum. This is very good news for the three heavy-weights: BCE, Telus, and Rogers. When the auction was announced, Telus fell from the high $50’s to $41.05 on the stock market. Rogers bottomed to $32.92 from $50. It is clear that Canada is in major need for another viable wireless competitor. Canada needs a new company that will offer wireless data access at a rate compariable to other countries. Otherwise, there is really no incentive for the big telcos to reduce rates.
What will happen to data prices with the arrival of the iPhone in June?
Rogers announced last year that it will release the faster iPhone to Canada in June. That’s great. More data consumption from more users should mean lower rates, right? Wrong! Rogers is the only network with 3G. 3G is fast for data transfer, and is something that the newer iPhones will need. So, until there is another wireless entrant emerging from the auction (we’ll know 3 months from now who it is), high data rates will stick around for a while longer.
Incidentally, when Rogers made the iPhone announcement, the stock rallied $1.60 to $44.50. Perhaps the best way to subsize high data rate plans is to buy shares in Rogers.
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(4 votes, average: 7.5 out of 10) Loading ...Why is Canada More Expensive than Rwanda for Mobile Data Access?
Yes, you read that title correctly. The price of mobile data access is higher in Canada than it is in Rwanda. In fact when I first looked into this in April of 2007, some mobility providers in Canada were charging rates almost 21 times higher than Terracom in Rwanda. Mobile data rates are also significantly cheaper than Canada in Egypt, Botswana, Vietnam and Bolivia. In fact, why limit comparisons to things terrestrial? Sending data using a Canadian mobility provider costs more than sending the same amount of data from the Hubble Space Telescope! Canadian rates are so high that I almost have to wonder if mobility providers in Canada are deliberately attempting to grab a big chunk of cash at the expense of killing off their own market and taking down one of IT’s hottest growth areas at the same time.
The use of mobile devices for applications is currently exploding. Even exterprise software giants such as SAP are committing themselves to adding mobile functionality to their offerings now or in the very near future. Internet domains within the .MOBI TLD are being registered at the rate of tens of thousands per week and Google, a company that seems to know what it’s talking about, has declared that growth in mobile data services is so important that it has developed its own platform (Android) to take advantage of the huge opportunities out there.
Canada, as a nation, can be described as large, wealthy, and technologically advanced. We have a long history of excellence in communications technology, perhaps borne out of necessity. Canadian research powerhouses such as Northern Telecom and Research In Motion continue to advance our national state-of-the-art, as well as the world’s. Mobile communication today, along with the network engineering and security they require, is quite possibly developing faster than any other part of IT. We develop incredibly advanced technology in this country, technology that much of the country cannot afford to use due to greedy and short sighted price gouging by mobile service providers. Bell, Rogers, Telus, Fido, all should be helping Canada to stay on the leading edge of mobile application delivery, but instead, they have chosen to make fat profits even if it means crippling the industry and destroying its promise. This is, plainly put, a national disgrace.
In my posts later on this week I’ll discuss specific cases where Canadian data rates have shut homegrown companies out of our own markets, and I’ll have suggestions about what individual Canadians can do until mobile data pricing is reduced to sane levels. I’ll also look at how the CRTC (which is governed by the Canadian Telecommunications Act) has failed to address these issues.
Mobile data offers opportunities that should be Canada’s for the taking. We have to prevent corporate greed from doing this much damage to our future.
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