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Why is mobile data in Canada so expensive?
(lemmy.ca)
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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Because profits can be leveraged. I went on holiday to India. I got a local 4G Sim card there and it worked everywhere. It cost less than £6 per month for 4Gb data per day allowance and unlimited calls. The infrastructure and hardware costs will be fixed and not much different to Canada, Europe etc.
I'm not sure that is a great comparison. I'm no capitalist, but you make people pay as much as they will. More importantly for this example, everything including the hardware will be cheaper in India, especially the entire labor force of the telecom company. A better comparison would be the US or EU.
Even the EU is a lot better. Hardware and staff costs are higher here, but there's no reason for it to be the highest in the world.
It's an oligopoly with laws that prevent any new competition or effective change
EU is better for a particular reason tho, we can all thank Xavier Niel, (ex ?) CEO of Free. It's a provider that emerged after the others, and started slashing the prices for internet at home, and then mobile.
The slashing was so big and the others providers lost so much, they had to align even tho at first they were providing a much better service. (Although Free also had a very good customer service at first)
This kind of thing barely happen anymore nowadays, if at all, Terminal capitalism and all that
30gb a month, 5G, 20 bucks.