One of the least dense provinces, Saskatchewan, has some of the best pricing in the country because the government has yet to selloff the provincial telecom to private investors. Manitoba too before they decided to privatize and sell off to an incumbent.
And high-density is no panacea for cost. Tall concrete buildings everywhere can mean more infrastructure costs. Especially if regulations require you to fit infrastructure into the facade. Medium-density is the least engineering: Just put up a tower and call it a day. And in Canada, antenna permits are federal. Once issued, local govs can't stop you from putting up your monstrosity of white panels on a midrise or a big metal antenna.
But you don't have to just compare Canada against the USA. Australia or Iceland have rates that Canadians can only dream of, with similarly geo-population situations.
Some of us are excited to see how systems such as StarLink develop, maybe bringing decent rural access to the network is in the cards.
Next time you make a page that requires 10Mb of assets before loading, please remember there are people dealing with terrible connections. I know my first 100mbps connection was a godsend.
More imporatanly, as someone in AB I am jealous of their cheap phone plans...
> Australia or Iceland have rates that Canadians can only dream of, with similarly geo-population situations
I worked on the NBN in Australia -- they've got their fair share of ISP-related issues down under.
Streaming games on my Mac from Google Stadia in perfect lag-free 1080p!
Which works for me because I am mostly on wifi or (current situation notwithstanding) on a very short commute.
(7GB data would be no good at all for me - I'd burn through that in about 30 minutes!)
We also tried to implement more carriers several years ago, with a wireless spectrum auction that reserved spectrum for new entrants. These startups tried to focus solely on urban areas with their build outs, and then could roam on the big 3, but struggled immensely. IIRC, one of the big complaints was we don't allow foreign ownership, which made it difficult to raise the immense capital needed for a proper build out. How much that plays into it I don't know, but unless Canadians want to put together a massive amount of capital it seems unlikely to force stronger competition.
In rural areas, using 1.7Ghz vs 600Mhz or 700Mhz spectrum means building 4x the amount of towers to cover the same square miles.
That's opex, capex *4. It's really expensive, with no benefits at all as you're not capacity constrained at all on radios/spectrum in rural areas.
The solution is to share infrastructure in sparsely populated areas where it would be uneconomic for each operator to build it's own.
The UK, despite being vastly smaller and denser than Canada, has long had poor mobile coverage in rural areas.
The UK government is now requiring (and contributing funding towards) geographical 95% coverage by 2026. Operators will use shared rural infrastructure to achieve this.
This isn't a case of looking at a map and population count whatsoever. It's an incredibly moot point when you look at where 95% of people live in both countries.