Canada’s Cellphone Oligopoly
Gone are the days when cellphones were a luxury, or a tool for a few business elite. They are now a normal and essential part of life – both in business and personal affairs. Many families, like mine, have done away with fixed line phones completely, and this trend is growing. In fact, look all around the world, and you’ll see people getting more connected and benefiting from this amazing technology – EXCEPT IN CANADA.
Yes, Canada, that backwater of cellphone oblivion – nowhere near advanced as some dynamic, modern economies like Uganda and Tanzania.
First Rogers Wireless, stuck in 1989, with their refusal to come up with a pricing plan that will actually promote their new iPhone product (which, thanks to their monopoly on that protocol, and their takeover of Fido, is Apple’s only choice in Canada). Now, Bell and TELUS charging for incoming text messages, including SPAM. Imagine if we had to pay for spam email? I’d be broke!!
It’s time for cellphone executives to pull their collective heads out of their collective behinds. They’re not just hurting consumers, their dragging our country down (in a very real and serious sense, by damaging our competitiveness, productivity and technical innovation). No serious Internet company in Canada (like mine) is going to develop applications for wireless devices – why? There’s no market!
Worst of all for Canada and for cellphone shareholders, they are hurting their own bottom lines as well by limiting their market. But they don’t see it that way – clearly they don’t see a business case for Canadians using new technology en masse.
And isn’t that what this is all about? Larger corporations and Government clients have their blackberries and pay exorbitant fees for them – of course, it’s all expensed, so it’s not real money. If they offered a reasonable price to other people, they’d risk a backlash for raised rates to these lucrative clients, and what if that wasn’t offset by all the new clients coming on?
Could you imagine if the same backwards logic was used with any other technological innovation – radio, television, microwave ovens, etc. McDonald’s can have microwaves, but the rest of us, forget it!
For a better comparison, how about the always-on DSL/Cable internet. Suppose you could use it all you wanted, but as soon as you go over 6 gigabytes in a month, they start quietly charging you some ridiculous rate per kilobyte then slap you with a big fat bill a couple weeks after the end of the month!
Unlimited data plans (and, frankly, voice plans, too) are not the future – they are the “present”, at least everywhere else in the world.
This is ritual idiocy. We shouldn’t be arguing about this, time to join the 21st century!
Comments
-
Paul Holmes
-
Harry
-
Mississauga Tom
Network
