PARIS – Canadians pay some of the highest prices in the world for their cell phones, says a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). But do we really?
According to OECD calculations, rates charged by Canadian mobile providers rank behind only the United States and Spain as the highest in the developed world, while Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden have the cheapest rates.
But Canadian telecom consultant Mark Goldberg says that “the OECD service definitions should cause serious researchers to laugh”.
The survey, called the OECD Communications Outlook, compared domestic prices across countries for low, medium and high-use mobile phone users using what it calls a standard “basket” of monthly consumption. It then compared how much it would cost to purchase this basket in each of the 30 OECD countries.
The baskets define light users as consumers who use 360 minutes of voice calls, 396 text messages and eight multimedia or video messages per year (an average of 30 voice minutes per month), while heavy users are those who use 1680 minutes of voice calls, 660 text messages and 12 multimedia or video messages per year (an average of 140 voice minutes per month).
Goldberg said in a blog post that the average Canadian mobile user actually uses more than double the OECD model of heavy users.
“According to Rogers’ recent financials, their average monthly minutes of use was 604 – more than four times the OECD heavy user”, Goldberg writes. “Bell and Telus’ average customers weren’t as high but were still well off the charts by OECD standards (316 and 402, respectively)".
Goldberg says that the biggest flaw in the OECD figures is that the survey compared phone costs rather than user costs.
“And since so many European users have more than one phone, the average European user is paying more than one bill”, Goldberg continues. “When you normalize the data to consider those supernormal penetration rates, suddenly you start to understand what is really going on. If you have penetration rates of more than 150%, who do you think is paying the bill for the extra phones?”
The OECD report also found that Canada has the lowest rates for residential fixed-line telephones, when the rankings of low, medium and high-use baskets were averaged across a range of usage patterns.
– Lesley Hunter
