Sites about the lack of wireless competition and the spectrum auction
This morning I saw a full page ad for www.wirelessfuture.ca in 24. I’ve never seen this one before. It looks like the site was recently created by a group that’s made up of Videotron, Quebecor, mipps and MTS AllStream. I’ve included a snapshot of the ad from a PDF available on the 24 website, which has a few more figures not shown in the facts section.
Click on the thumbnail for a closer look.
I didn’t see anything new there yet and I’m sore there’s no mention of data plans. Any attention given to wireless data prices would’ve been nice, in particular I wish that the group focused a little more on the practices that led to such bad pricing for data plans in Canada.
Wireless Future isn’t the only new site that’s interested in fostering more competition, there’s also Telegopoly.com. They both want to get people to reply to Industry Canada’s call for comments on the wireless spectrum auction. The Coalition behind Wireless Future definitely wants to make it easier for new competitors to enter. Judging from the breakup of the forums on Telegopoly they want measures that make it easier for new entrants too. After reading a few snippets of comments on both sites it seems that a common theme is to set aside of a chunk of the spectrum just for new competitors. It’s too late to comment now but people can reply to comments to Industry Canada which are listed in the forum.
I managed to find a paper that calculates the ACSI (American Consumer Satisfaction Index) of cellular services in Canada [warning, PDF], finding it rates below e-commerice, retail, insurance, newspapers and cable&satelite TV. Unfortunately the sample size was too low. I hope I can find a similar independent paper that has a higher sample size.
I’d be a lot happier if there was some actual competition in the wireless data area. As cool as 3G is, I’d settle for something much slower at a decent price.
One Comment to “Sites about the lack of wireless competition and the spectrum auction”
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I just got a SMS from Rogers which says that they going to apply long-distance rates on top of my current air time rate to all long-distance incoming calls.
This is just ridicules.
In Canada we have worse mobile service in the world and this is not a joke. Most developing countries have lower price rate for much better quality mobile service. I will vote for anyone on next election who can promise that we will have the mobile service provider that can deliver high quality service with a reasonable price rate. There is no one country in Europe has so high price rate and so poor quality service!!!