OTTAWA – Canadians who live in areas without a strong regional wireless competitor pay more for their mobile plans, according to the Competition Bureau.
In its comments for the CRTC’s mobile wireless services review, the Bureau said that 10GB plans, for example, can be priced as low as $60-$75 per month in Quebec, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan (i.e where Bell, Rogers and Telus compete with regional players Videotron, Bell MTS and SaskTel). By comparison, the same 10GB plans in other provinces and territories can be as much as 80% higher, priced at $105-$110 per month.
Factors such as network quality, coverage,…
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GATINEAU – Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck, or 100 duck-sized horses?
That was the unusual, if creative, way SaskTel chose to demonstrate how, if the CRTC is going to mandate third party wireless resellers, we can expect a much worse competitive market that causes serious damage to regional independent mobile wireless operators.
“Mandated MVNOs will harm 4th carriers more than the National Wireless Carriers. In any market, there is a portion of the customer base which is most likely to move to a new competitor, a portion which is quite unlikely to change, and a portion somewhere between these…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC needs to be “split up in terms of the kinds of people making broadcasting decisions and the kinds of personnel making telecom decisions,” said Tim Denton, chairman of the Internet Society Canada Chapter (ISCC) at the two-day Policy 3.0 Communications Law conference organized by the Forum for Research and Policy in Communications last week.
Denton, a former CRTC commissioner who now works as a consultant on Internet and telecom policy, also called for the creation of a chief technology officer within the Commission to provide advice on current technology-related issues. He said the CRTC needs to…
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TORONTO – Friday was Maria Hale’s last day at Corus Entertainment.
The long-time senior TV executive had been named senior vice-president of strategic partnerships in February after a corporate leadership shuffle which saw her moved out of direct oversight of the company’s television properties (she had been VP, television and head of digital, content distribution and pay TV).
Prior to Corus, Hale (pictured) spent two years with GameTV as managing director and before that, two with Telus as VP television. She also spent more than eight years with CHUM Television
Hale told Cartt.ca in a short email when…
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Telus Mobility tops for network quality across Canada
TORONTO – While Canadian wireless carriers’ investments in their infrastructure have largely translated into improved customer satisfaction with network quality, carriers’ data-hungry younger customers report experiencing a significantly higher rate of connectivity problems, according to a new J.D. Power report.
The 2019 Canada Wireless Network Quality Study measured satisfaction based on recent customer usage activities in three areas that impact network performance: calling, messaging, and data connections. The study, which measured problems per 100 connections (PP100), includes seven wireless carriers in the East region; seven wireless carriers in Ontario; and nine wireless…
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OTTAWA–GATINEAU – The CRTC is once again seeking volunteers to help it measure the performance of home wireline broadband Internet services provided by the country’s major Internet service providers.
Under the Measuring Broadband Canada program, the Commission will work in collaboration with ISPs and broadband testing firm SamKnows to measure broadband performance and test parameters associated with the broadband Internet connection, including download and upload speeds.
While some providers offer advertised speeds of 1Gbps or faster, services above 940Mbps cannot be measured with a conventional speed test, meaning that speed tiers of 1Gbps or faster are excluded from the 2019 Measuring…
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VANCOUVER – Higher wireless and wireline data services revenue helped to power first quarter profits and revenues at Telus, the company said Thursday.
Consolidated operating revenue of $3.5 billion was up 3.8% from the same period a year ago.
Earnings before interest, income taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) increased by 8.7% to $1.4 billion due to higher revenue growth and wireless equipment margins, growth in wireline data service margins, the implementation of accounting standard IFRS 16 on certain expenses, as well as EBITDA contribution from its customer care and business services (CCBS) and Telus Health businesses. This growth was partly offset by…
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VANCOUVER – Telus will trial mobile edge computing after teaming up with San Francisco-based MobiledgeX Inc.
Third parties like mobile apps developers, consumer device makers and IoT hardware manufacturers will be able to test new innovations that take advantage of end-to-end low latency.
Ecosystem players with use cases that bring demanding performance and data governance requirements, like Industry 4.0, immersive augmented reality and multiplayer mobile gaming, may start working with MobiledgeX now to begin planning for trial participation and future use of the edge, enabled by MobiledgeX’s global network of participating operators.
Telus will pilot MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0, which aggregates processors…
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Needs local data for a proper analysis
OTTAWA – It’s rare for a bureaucratic back-and-forth to be quite so public, but with so much at stake, the Commissioner for Competition doesn’t want to take no for an answer when it comes to the granular market data he wants from Canadian wireless companies.
As part of its submission to the CRTC’s review of mobile wireless services, the Competition Bureau wants to do a detailed study on what happened in regions and cities (not just in provinces and nationally) when new wireless competitors to the Big Three (Rogers, Bell and Telus) were introduced….
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MONTREAL — An announcement of new jobs that won't even fill a school bus isn't usually enough to warrant a visit from the federal industry minister, but 30 new jobs in artificial intelligence at a global high-tech company working on the latest wireless technology prompted excitement from the man who has science and innovation literally in his title, so Navdeep Bains paid a visit to Ericsson's new Montreal home on Thursday.
The wireless giant announced it is building what it calls a "Global Artificial Intelligence Accelerator innovation hub" based out of Montreal, which will work with similar teams around the…
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