Comment by afreak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by afreak | Hacker News Reader

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France and Austria, unlike Canada are very much dense so the infrastructure required to setup an LTE/UMTS/etc network is less costly.

To travel from Vancouver to the next principal Canadian city (Calgary), it requires 900 KM of driving and there's only really one metropolitan area of sorts between the two, meaning that you're going to be setting up cell towers that handle only so much traffic in a day.

As a result, to get service where you end up with just traffic shaping once you go beyond 6 GB (beyond that there is no real limit really), you need to go with a carrier that only services the larger cities. So in my case, my carrier services just Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, and Ottawa, which are fairly dense areas with a combined population of 18 million or so, or just about half of the country's population. Once I leave the city, I have to piggyback on to other carriers however.

Hence why mobile carriers suck in Canada because the bigger carriers do not want to eat into their fairly large profit margins. They can afford to offer such plans, but they simply don't want to.

For the record, I pay $40 CAD/month ($30 USD or 27 EUR) for unlimited North American calling and text plus the "unlimited" data use.

> France and Austria, unlike Canada are very much dense so the infrastructure required to setup an LTE/UMTS/etc network is less costly

You are wrong.

Both countries have parts of the country covered by the Alps, high mountains that make cell coverage expensive and several areas still have very spotty coverage with often very old GPRS/Edge-only cell towers.

Also there is a competition going on with more than four telecom companies competing that lowers consumers monthly costs (cell phone data plans).

Additionally the former state based telecom copper cables infastructure aged badly and hasn't been touched for 15 years and the fiber network infrastructure connects just big cities, bit not small towns in the Alps. In many areas cell connection is the only option to get 1+Mbit data connection, as the copper cable infrastructure hasn't been upgraded since the mid nineties.

For the joke, I studied mobile networking in Canada, and we studied how actually, the dense areas are what cost the most money to the mobile operator.

The "we are a big country" is just a marketing stunt.

Agreed. This is a sad excuse used by mediocre gov't and corporate entities to offer poor service and value for money.

For example, when I visit relatives in the Frankfurt region (Mainz), I am always amazed by how similar geographically and demographically it is to the greater Toronto area in Ontario. Population and industry wise Toronto and Frankfurt are very similar -- similar financial sector jobs, similar population densities.

And yet their infrastructure is _far_ superior. I take the train from Frankfurt to Mainz in like 20 minutes. From the Mainz train station there is integrated light rail and bus to a whole network of suburbs and villages, right out into the countryside. If I want to go for a hike in a forest preserve, I don't even need a car necessarily, I can take a streetcar and a bus to many very nice places.

Accessibility of food -- groceries, farmer's markets, restaurants. All better.

And yes, the telecoms infrastructure is far superior value for the money.

North America has let itself fall behind for several decades.

Sweden is not dense at all and we have a lot more data for a lesser cost. I don't think density of cities are the only explanation.

Sweden is roughly the size of California, and roughly 1/25th the size of Canada.

As for population density, Sweden is about 6x more dense than Canada (23 people / sq km vs 4, respectively).

It's comparatively a dense country.

> Sweden is about 6x more dense than Canada

Canada quite a high effective density -- something like 80 or 90% of the population live within 100 miles of the US border. Those statistics are not terribly convincing.

Better, I think, to note that Sweden has a high proportion of urban residents at 87%, compared to around 83% for Canada and the US.

http://www.geohive.com/earth/pop_urban.aspx

I'm not sure you can compare densities just like that, since there are large parts of Canada nobody is expecting them to cover

Which carrier/plan?

WIND Mobile. The plan isn't offered any longer but there are similar ones available.

But it's 3G only. No LTE on WIND (they keep promising it will come).

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