At this point why not switch to a US one?
> I hate all Canadian telecommunications companies.
Seems every thread about telecom ends up with a rant about Canadian providers. Why is the country so backward? They had Nortel and Blackberry not long ago.
As a Canadian I offer two things:
1) it is a pain for people to call you and have to pay long distance every time they call. Yes, long distance to the US is still a major thing in Canada.
2) I recently moved but kept my old phone number / area code. The number of times I call people and they don’t answer but then call me back right away and say “oh I saw an Ontario number and thought it was spam” is probably 4 out of 5 calls I make. People aren’t as accepting of non-local area codes as in the US. Probably because of the ridiculous number of scam calls we get.
Edit: > Seems every thread about telecom ends up with a rant about Canadian providers. Why is the country so backward? They had Nortel and Blackberry not long ago.
Because Canadian providers are in bed with the competition bureau and other regulators that essentially allow them to twist the rules to ensure the current oligopoly is permanent and allows them to charge the highest mobile rates in the world, by far. Canadian consumers by and large hate the situation but politicians don’t listen and it isn’t a big enough issue for a complacent populace to vote on.
Seems every thread about telecom ends up with a rant about Canadian providers. Why is the country so backward? They had Nortel and Blackberry not long ago.
The lowest telco rates in the country are in the one province that has a provincially-owned provider: Saskatchewan.
Previous governments at the federal and various provincial levels essentially de-incentivized a ton of tech investment that the country used to excel at. Nortel's story is one of espionage being their undoing and I'm not sure anyone could have done anything about that. Blackberry I think just represented a business unable to pivot fast enough when the tides shifted.
Telus, Bell, Rogers all 'competing' with each other, each of them owning several 'budget/flank' brands so they can capture even more of the individual market segments.
It reminds me of tool manufacturers like Black and Decker creating (absorbing/buying out) once reputable brands that capture individual market segments (Dewalt, Craftsman, Stanley, etc.) - now it's been optimized down to cost, market capture, and quality/performance of tools.
Back to cell phones - I understand there's only so much spectrum to go around which limits what companies can afford to license/purchase from the government, along with how much throughput you can throw from those frequencies - but still!
I don't understand why Canadians pay so much for basic features in $/GB for example - they have some of the highest cost cellphone plans in the world!
I haven't seen a plan at the less than 35$ except for public mobile at 25$ with 1gb. I come from Italy and at 5 you get 50 gb.
The pricing is just insane
I've been a customer since they were originally called "Wind" (at the time it was the only company that my N900 would work with). The only thing that they had going for them over the competition was good prices. That's barely accurate anymore. I hate all Canadian telecommunications companies.