I may have once worked for one of these companies, and they aggressively lobbied the government to prevent MVNOs from happening in Canada. An MVNO would be able to compete with the big telcos, and force them to lower prices. What kills me is that the big companies have "discount brands" that are only a tiny bit cheaper, and then they use their existence to claim that there's lots of competition in the market!

Some of the crap I saw... So glad to have gotten out!

Because 2 companies (bell, rogers) control almost the vast majority of telecomm rights in Canada - and the government is too spineless to change that. (These companies also own many media outlets that do not publish stories critical of their parent companies.) Those two companies have a duopoly and charge what they please. As Canadians, we deserve better. Why should those two companies reap huge profits that we all pay for?

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.

A lack of competition. The snag is that Canada has low population density - which means that yes, you can afford to cover most big cities in cell towers, but not outside the city limits -- because you might only serve users who are in a car or on a train as they pass through that cell -- and it's prohibitively expensive to put up a multi-million dollar cell tower to serve users who are passing through for a few minutes at a time.

This is why all of the cell infrastructure is owned by two companies -- because when mobile phone service came to Canada, the fees were high enough, and the costs low enough, that they could afford to build out sites because they were insanely profitable -- in addition to getting funding from the federal government to build out this infrastructure. That's why they're the incumbents -- they have a critical mass of cell sites, and upgrading hardware every decade or two is cheap compared to purchasing/leasing the land and building a tower from scratch (including bringing in power and fibre).

Usually this happens because people are willing to pay what they are being charged. And they are being charged maximum they are willing to pay, because of monopoly.

Most people think of how much it costs to provide a given service and compare things based on that. In reality companies charge how much the customer is willing to pay. If there is a competition the customer generally won't pay more than what the competitor will charge. That's why it is so sweet to have monopoly in the market.

I'm currently paying $34/40GB with Fido on a BYOD plan. My plans have been decreasing in price while increasing in data over the years. About 10 years ago, I was paying about $10 per GB.

Because there are only 2 phone networks in Canada. If you are in the East you are on Bell, if you are in the west you are on Telus.

If you can't tell by now Bell and Telus are the best of friends and share their network with each other, but not Rogers. Rogers only has towers in major urban areas.

So now you have a duopoly, and they can charge whatever they like to you and their partners.

Thankfully regulation is slowly catching up. Currently they can't cap your data any more. Sure they will throttle your Download speeds, but the 25gb data plan is for 4/5G speed, after which its dialup levels of network speed for unlimited data.

It's not much, but when the alternative is surprise fees it is better than nothing. /s

How much do you pay? In US I pay $220 a month for 4 people but that includes financing phones. Unlimited 5g data etc.

This is with Verizon, a major carrier…I’ve never tried a cheaper company

Corruption. All levels of government are ok with the effective monopoly that owns telecoms in Canada.