Cheaper phone plans for Canadians could be closer than we think.

On Monday, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced that it’s reached a significant milestone in increasing phone services competition in Canada.

  • Pasta Dental@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    They keep saying it’s because of the size of the country here, but they fail to mention that Australia which has lower population density than we have has way lower prices. They also fail to mention that that the federal government pays them billions to install the equipment in remote areas… Yeah

    Why don’t we just have a state owned telecommunications provider? It works so well in Quebec with the electricity, some of the lowest prices in the world!

    • neverfindausername@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Fuck, I just got back from NZ and it was $88 for a SIM, 60 days unlimited calling, 100GB data, and 250 minutes to a big list of countries (incl Canada).And they’re working on using Starlink to improve the network in the South Island so they have less impact from towers in the mountains

      Canadian telcos have the highest ARPU in the world, it’s ridiculous. The telephone/internet/cell towers should be run by a crown corp and the telcos pay into it. We fucked up privatizing, but that seems to be the status quo

    • matlag@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Exactly! And if you don’t like the idea of having a state-owned telco, we could leave the infrastructure only to the state-owned company, and open access to all incumbents, same rate for everyone. While we’re there, we should just have the same with broadband: a state owned company deploys fiber. All ISP access it at the same rate.

      No more complaining they need to make hundreds of % of margin otherwise they can’t invest, and even then they can’t invest if the government doesn’t heavily subsidize the network.