Comment by FractalParadigm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FractalParadigm | Hacker News Reader

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FractalParadigm

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.

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