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Just for context on how bad Canadian consumers are getting screwed: when I moved here it was cheaper to pay the roaming fees for my US phone in Canada than it was to switch to a Canadian telecom.

There are quite a few Canadians who live close enough to, or travel across the border often enough that their personal phone/number is from a US carrier, usually the closest town or city to their own. Depending on how often or how you use your phone, it can be half the price of having a plan with a domestic carrier. As far as I'm aware, most of the US carriers only require that the device registers on their home network at least once every six months, and bills to a US address, meaning even just a semi-annual shopping trip to somewhere like Port Huron (where you can also purchase a PO box and therefore have a US billing address) can save you hundreds every year.

To add some more context, their excuse for high prices and mediocre service is generally something to do with the size of the country, which granted they aren't exactly wrong, until you realize that roughly 90% of the entire Canadian population lives within 160km (100 miles) of a US border. Canadian telecoms are a legal cartel, for all intents and purposes.

> To add some more context, their excuse for high prices and mediocre service is generally something to do with the size of the country, which granted they aren't exactly wrong,…

Not a problem in other sparsely populated, geographically large countries, like Australia.

or say... the US which is an even closer comparison

The US is around 10x denser than Canada (slightly smaller, 9x the population).

Not really. Candians pack more tightly together. There is far more land per person, but 90% of the canadian population, those in cities, live in a smaller area than the 90% us average. Canada is mostly dense cities separated by empty. By comparison, America is one rolling suburb from coast to coast.

Take british columbia, a vastly big place by US standards. Drop one 50-mile circle on vancouver and you have 75% of BC's population covered in one service area. If you draw a line from the ski hills north of vancouver, to alaska, you will cross only two roads. Everything to the north is empty by us standards.

My original comment was correct for mean density, but US clumps too.

In addition, Cell phone networks need to cover the area people travel, so unless Canadians only travel in an area 11% that of those in the US, the point stands.

> "unless Canadians only travel in an area 11% that of those in the US"

Honestly, that's probably not far off. Canada is enormous, but the vast majority of it is completely uninhabited or very, very sparsely populated.

I'd trade not having service in nunavut for a cheaper phone plan.

Good news. You probably already have the former!

In all honesty, 11% sounds high for land area covered by cell service.

There are large sections of the trans-canada highway that aren't covered (the only east west highway, and the main road across the country). I can't really count on having cell service on the highways between towns when I'm travelling in Canada so they aren't really providing much coverage there.

Just to drive the point home here's a map of Rogers coverage. They don't have a single tower in the three provinces that make up the northern half of the country. Canada, despite being large is really a VERY centralized country. 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border.

Exactly. And about 18 million people, half of Canada's entire population, live in the Quebec City - Windsor corridor, the narrow and densely populated strip which includes the cities of Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal.

Australia has the worst rural service I've come across in my travels so I wouldn't hold them up as a good example. There are medium sized rural towns with service only from one or maybe two telcos and even then the capacity is often rather limited (one town for instance only had a single 15 MHz LTE channel from an omnidirectional antenna serving the entire town and surrounding region). In New Zealand we pay more than the Australians do but we have service from all carriers to even small towns. In New Zealand towns the same size as the Australian town I mentioned would have a cell site (or even two or three!) from each of our three networks with multiple LTE channels providing LTE carrier aggregation of up up to 50—100 MHz and directional panel antennas. The difference in QOS especially at times of high demand is night and day. In more recent times smaller towns have all three networks cooperating to provide service from the same tower (as part of a joint venture between all three networks called Rural Connectivity Group) making it economical to service small towns with no difference in QOS between networks.I'd rather have the latter than the former IMHO.

Upgrading to just sectors would net them so much more range! Sprint and T-Mobile here in the USA used to do egregious stuff like this, or only put up 1 sector of 3 on a tower just to mostly cover a freeway or highway, ignoring the rural userbase entirely.

> when I moved here it was cheaper to pay the roaming fees for my US phone in Canada than it was to switch to a Canadian telecom.

Was it data quantity that made that feasible? My Canadian plan is $45/month and has unlimited phone time and 6 gigs of data (which is great for my usage) and is on one of the big three carriers so coverage is great. Freedom mobile offers 20gb for $50, but their coverage is weaker (i.e. you're roaming outside of major cities). These convert to $33/$36 in USD. Both of these options look significantly cheaper than any plans I quickly see on the big US carriers, before even accounting for the roaming charges (albeit with more limited data)

If you go back to when T-mobile was incredibly competitive, plans were often $20-30. If I want a month, I can get a SIM prepaid for $30 or less with all the data in the US, and sometimes as little as $3 in Europe.

Plus there was a time, albeit almost a decade ago now when the dollar was on par. Even about a year ago the dollar was still aiming for 0.8 rather than the 0.74 it’s flirting with right now.

Lastly, if you want an Apple Watch with cellular, you end up needing a more expensive plan from the big three rather than their sub-brands. And the Canadian government is threatening regulation to encourage carriers to offer more data for less. There was a time within the decade when $60 at Fido would get you 2GB and that was during a “double data” promo. This was 2018. https://forums.redflagdeals.com/fido-60-unlimited-canada-wid...

The landscape has changed since I came in 2018 (after some parliamentary rumblings, the big telcos rolled out "unlimited plans"), but for context, a 5gb plan was considered a large data plan, and generally was in the $80+ range when I arrived, starter plans were generally 2gb in the $60 region. Extra data wasn't throttled, it was charged for at a high rate.

The plan I was referring to is an older tmobile plan with 3 lines on it. They come out to just under $50 cad per line including taxes/fees and that includes 5gb of Canadian/Mexican LTE/5g, unlimited 3g after that, as well as unlimited everything in the US, and no extra charge to call anywhere in NA.

I can roam on Bell, Telus or Rogers, so tend to get better coverage than my Canadian friends. I also get unlimited worldwide texting and 2g data when I travel for no additional charge.

If I switched to one of the new t-mobile plans, I would be paying $59/line, but that includes a free Netflix subscription, and 10gb of Canadian data.

I just priced out a roughly comparable rogers plan for the features I actually use (5gb, unlimited US calls, data in the US) and it comes to $65 CAD + $12 per day I'm in the US, or go for the unlimited US plan which is $105 CAD on a promotional offer right now. Add on another 12% for tax and a bunch of fees I'm sure I'd learn about after the fact, and keeping my US service is very competitive. Rogers new plans, are pretty new (I believe unlimited data only started in 2019 or 2020, and their definition of unlimited is 20gb).

The takeaway for me is that if I was just a single line, and I didn't leave Canada much, I would probably pay slightly less. Since I call and text the US daily, and travel there for at least a month a year, I save several hundred dollars a year on tmobile, and don't have to worry about getting billed hundreds or thousands because I forgot to buy a data pass for a trip across the border.

During the NAFTA 2.0 negotiations, Trudeau allow Rogers and Bell to claim they are Canadian Media companies and not telcos giving them protection against American telcos and made sure that Canadians will never enjoy the same rates US Consumers enjoy by offering this protection. It's the same for many Canadian industries that can operate without any competition from the US.

I don't think anyone in the US can even fathom the prices Canadians are charged for the service they get. My $80 Googlefi plan (4 lines) would cost around $500 plus a month in Canada.

When I travelled to Canada for a week for work, it was cheaper to get a random American roaming card off Amazon with a week worth of roaming data than it was to get any local prepaid SIM. It's crazy.

The Starlink LTE has a bandwidth of 5 Mbps per cell. It is only usable for text messaging and voice calls. It can't replace Starlink internet service or regular mobile service. It competes with satellite phones and satellite messengers.

Its funny how a little more than a decade ago that speed would at least be decent enough for web browsing.

This is per cell speed, so it can be shared by many users.

The average web page load with ads is larger than an SNES game.

5M is still perfectly adequate but it's per cell, not per user. If you were the only person in the cell then you could browse the web just fine. But the cells are huge - 15 mile diameter.

It still is, just not for Facebook and other social media. HN would work absolutely fine on it.

This seems to be about direct low-bandwidth cell coverage, similar to the deal SpaceX and T-mobile have.

This is for allowing phones in remote areas to send SMS and eventually voice calls without needing a Starlink antenna.

It’s not really in the same ballpark as Starlink’s home/RV broadband services.

I think Starlink is going around making deals with mobile providers in different countries. T-Mobile is the one for US, Rogers is for Canada, and I remember seeing one recently for Australia.

In New Zealand they've partnered with One NZ (Vodafone) for mobile starlink.

They are on the front foot and going for it before the service is really ready for prime time. 3gpp has working groups that is working on defining standards for direct to device satcom/5G NTN (non-terrestrial network). Chip makers are implementing it in their silicone etc. The rest of the industry is a bit on the back foot. It has not been a very competitive market the last decade, but it's burning under the other players foot now and they need to consolidate and turn them selves around before SpaceX eats all of their lunch. D2D could be a valuable revenue stream, but not if SpaceX gets there first. Interesting times.

> For non-Canadians, Rogers is the largest but also the absolute worst mobile/internet/tv provider in Canada. They routinely use grey area tactics to both bully competitors, and even bully customers.

To be fair, everyone in the industry is completely awful. It is splitting hairs to say Rogers is the “worst” when they are all so completely terrible and lacking any redeeming characteristics.

Not sure about Canadian law, but here a little bit south, door to door salesmen frequently skirt "no solicitation" laws by "merely" providing information to the homeowner, instead of directly trying to get them to sign something on the spot.

Sort of the same law hack as Tesla does with their "showrooms", where you aren't in a dealership - you ultimately just order a car online from California even if you're a few states away.

> For non-Canadians, Rogers is the largest but also the absolute worst mobile/internet/tv provider in Canada. They routinely use grey area tactics to both bully competitors, and even bully customers.

I mean they're expensive, and anti-competitive, but their products and services are very good.

Think of them like Canada's Verizon.

At least on the days when their entire national network hasn't gone offline.

Their products are not good. Bell has had real fibre to the home for a lot longer than Rogers for example. Their tv service is a joke while Bell even offers crave to non bell customers for a reasonable price over the internet.

The there is the nationwide outage that even got the federal government involved. Super ironic as high quality service was part of their justification for extremely high prices. Turns out they didn’t have basic redundancy down. I’ve never seen that kind of failure in any other company that size.

> As long as they don't stop offering Starlink direct to home owners and RV users as a result of this. Unfortunately, given how aggressive and monopolistic Rogers is I could see this being an outcome. I'm sure Rogers has at least pushed for it.

SpaceX/Starlink has a nationwide license/permission from the Canadian federal government for direct to consumer LEO satellite services so it's very unlikely they would remove this as a service option.

Starlink has been revolutionary for people in some very remote part of Canada whose previous ONLY option was consumer grade geostationary Ku/Ka-band VSAT terminals at oversubscriptions ratios of 32:1 or worse. Xplornet, etc. Same tech as viasat/wildblue/hughesnet consumer stuff in USA.

And they recently just gobbled up Shaw Comm. making them even bigger

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rogers-shaw-merger-official...

and then this

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/former-industry-minister-jo...

Not sure this is an issue, I'm Canadian. This seems like Rogers customers will have access to reception via SpaceX satellites in remote areas, which is a good thing. If anything, this means a) Rogers has a slightly richer offering than the 2? other cell providers in Canada, b) Rogers is paying SpaceX for this OR Rogers is agreeing to play nice and in fact SpaceX is eating the bill.

It is likely that Rogers agrees to pay Starlink a fee when Starlink acts as a roaming provider for one of their customers, where Starlink has slow and limited speeds but universal coverage. The industry has similar arrangements with roaming networks when you leave your country; some cell providers don't operate any towers at all. Starlink gets the fees, plus the right to transmit the LTE signals in a spectrum owned by Rogers, similar to the T-Mobile deal in the US, and Rogers gets to market that they have universal coverage.

Direct to cell and full starlink internet are basically unrelated services.