OTTAWA — Not that this will come as too much of a surprise for Canadian wireless subscribers, but a new study commissioned by the CRTC and prepared by Nordicity Group, has found mobile phone and wireless Internet prices tend to be higher in Canada than in the other seven countries studied in the report. Canada also ranks more expensive generally speaking in the category of bundled services pricing.
On the upside, fixed telephony prices in Canada are among the least expensive when compared to the other countries. In the fixed broadband Internet category, Canadians tend to pay prices that are somewhere in the middle of what subscribers pay in other countries.
Nordicity prepared the study on behalf of the CRTC, using price data collected through a survey conducted in January and February 2016. The 2016 Price Comparison Study of Telecommunications Services in Canada and Select Foreign Jurisdictions provides a detailed comparative price analysis of telecom services in Canada, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany and Japan.
In addition to studying the five main telecom categories — fixed telephony, wireless, fixed broadband, wireless Internet and bundled services — Nordicity also defined different service baskets for each category, based on increasing levels of service usage, availability of feature offerings, as well as their associated prices. Nordicity measured pricing for different pre-defined service baskets under each category, based on a survey of known service providers in principal cities of the eight country jurisdictions.
For example, in the fixed telephony category, Canada ranks among the least expensive (sixth out of eight) in pricing in the Level 1 service basket (defined as 400 incoming and outgoing minutes per month with 10% of outgoing minutes treated as long distance). Australia ranks first, with the most expensive price of $51.43 per month in the Level 1 service basket. Canada’s average price of $39.52 is 23.2% lower than Australia’s price in the same Level 1 service basket. Similarly, in the Level 2 (1,000 minutes with 20% long distance) and Level 3 (1,600 minutes with 30% long distance) service baskets, Canada also ranks among the least expensive (fifth from the highest in both service levels) and its prices — $55.78 for Level 2 and $60.32 for Level 3 — are 17.5% lower than those of Australia and 29.2% below those of Japan, the two most-expensive countries in Level 2 and Level 3, respectively.
However, when it comes to the mobile wireless telephony category, Canadian pricing is substantially higher compared to the other countries studied. Canada ranks the highest in pricing in the Level 1 service basket, with an average price of $41.08 for 150 wireless minutes per month. This is 139.6% higher than lowest-ranking Germany’s average price of $17.15 in the Level 1 service basket. Even compared to the fifth-ranked United States, Canada’s Level 1 service basket pricing is 52.1% higher. Canadian pricing is a little less expensive compared to other countries in the Level 2 service basket (450 minutes with 300 text messages), where Canada’s price of $48.77 ranks third most expensive. In the Level 3, 4, 5 and 6 service baskets for wireless telephone services, Canada ranks second highest across the board.
For wireless Internet, Canada ranks third most expensive in all three service baskets defined. For Level 1 (2GB to 5GB data usage per month), Canadians pay $46.47 on average, which is 223.8% more than what Italians pay for the same service level, but is actually 8.3% and 10.3% less than what Americans and Japanese users pay, respectively.
In terms of fixed broadband Internet, Canada ranks third highest in pricing in the Level 1 and Level 3 service baskets, fourth in the Level 2 service basket, and second in the Level 4 and Level 5 service baskets. For the Level 1 service basket (defined as basic service with download speeds between 3 to 9 Mbps and 10GB of data usage), Canadians pay $41.94 per month, or 48.3% more than lowest-ranking Germany’s average price for the same service level.
In the fifth category, bundled services, Canada ranks most expensive in the Level 1 service basket (wireline, wireless and fixed broadband) and third in both the Level 2 (wireline, fixed broadband and TV) and Level 3 (wireline, wireless, fixed broadband and TV) bundled service baskets. For example, the Canadian price of $161.63 for a Level 1 service bundle is 140.5% higher than the $67.19 average price that a comparable bundle would cost in the United Kingdom. However, the same Level 1 pricing in Canada is only 4.9% and 14.3% higher than prices for similar bundled services in Japan and the U.S., respectively.
The full 107-page Nordicity Group report can be downloaded from the CRTC’s website by visiting here.
