TORONTO – A recent survey of Canadians (done prior to the spasm of news surrounding Verizon’s potential entry into the wireless market here) shows most Canadians do not believe it’s very important to make sure their telephone company is Canadian owned.
A question in in May’s Digital Life Canada report (a quarterly syndicated survey of over 1,000 Canadians produced by Toronto’s Solutions Research Group) laid bare what Canadians are really concerned about when it comes to wireless services.
When asked “Thinking of wireless companies in Canada, how important is it to you that,” the survey offered five choices and asked respondents to rate it very important, somewhat important, not very important, or not at all important.
* They offer the best rates possible to consumers: 82% very important, 15% somewhat important.
* They provide good customer service: 75% very important, 22% somewhat important.
* They provide customer with the highest quality network service with minimal dropped calls or outages: 74% very important, 22% somewhat important.
* They provide the best mobile and handset technologies to customers: 48% very important, 40% somewhat important.
* They are majority owned by Canadians: 31% very important, 38% somewhat important.
If the federal government is seeing similar feedback in its own polling (which is pretty likely), we sure don’t expect the Prime Minister’s Office or Industry Canada to make any further changes to its spectrum policies prior to the September 17th deadline for companies to make their intentions known to bid in the January 2014 auction of 700 MHz wireless spectrum.
A big foreign entrant like Verizon (along with the hope, false or not, of lower mobile rates) coming to Canada would be a political win for the Conservative government, so despite what Canada’s wireless CEOs told Industry Minister James Moore when they met with him individually during the day on Monday, few are expecting any further policy change to happen.
– Greg O’Brien
