MONTREAL – Quebecor is patting itself on the back as Statistics Canada’s latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) report, released Tuesday, indicates cellular phone service prices have fallen considerably since this time last year.
In a press release distributed Tuesday afternoon, Quebecor claims “the decisive factor in the decline of Canadian wireless service prices shown this morning in Statistics Canada’s monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) report is increased competition from Videotron, Fizz and Freedom Mobile.”
Quebecor notes in its release the overall CPI rose 3.8 per cent on a year-over-year basis between September 2022 and September 2023, “but the wireless component of the index fell 12.9%,” according to Quebecor.
In actual fact, StatCan lumps all telephone services into one category, which did indeed decrease by 12.9 per cent over the last 12 months, according to the Consumer Price Index, September 2023 report.
The better news — which Quebecor will be delighted to hear, we imagine — is cellular service prices fell 17.2 per cent year-over-year in September, according to data available using StatCan’s “latest snapshot of the CPI” data visualization tool on its website.
In the one-month period from August to September 2023, cellular service prices dropped 3.2 per cent, according to the data snapshot.
Previous CPI reports in 2023 have indicated cellular service prices fell 14.7 per cent year-over-year in June, following an 8.2-per-cent year-over-year decline in May. StatCan’s June 2023 report said the declines were “a result of both lower prices for cellular data plans and promotional pricing.”
In its press release, Quebecor attributes subsidiary Videotron’s acquisition of Freedom Mobile earlier this year as a contributing factor to the drop in wireless prices in Canada.
“Since April 2023, when Videotron acquired Freedom Mobile, wireless prices have declined by almost 20%,” Quebecor claims.
“New data from Statistics Canada confirms what we have promised: Since its acquisition by Videotron, Freedom Mobile has been driving change and competitors are following suit,” Pierre Karl Péladeau, president and CEO of Quebecor, said in the release. “Even as consumer prices are going up across the board, wireless prices are falling, leaving more money in the pockets of Canadian families and benefiting the entire economy.”
Earlier this month, Canada’s telecom regulator the CRTC tipped its hat to Quebecor for what it saw as a downward trend in wireless data plan prices, following Videotron’s acquisition of Freedom Mobile and subsequent introduction of several lower-priced large data plans in May, which put pressure on competitors to introduce comparably priced plans.
Rogers, for example, has reduced by half its price-per-gigabyte on its most popular 5G plan, lowered the price of mobile wireless plans when bundled, and has committed to lowering the price of 5G wireless data by 30 per cent over the next three years.
