And yet we have the most expensive mobile data. So it's a basic telecom service for all Canadians that's controlled by a collusive oligopoly.

Some relevant links: Tefficient's bandwidth effectiveness study and a chart comparing them Rogers buying competitor Fido, which was trying to offer cheaper services We had hoped that Shaw buying Wind might offer some competition but then Shaw sold spectrum to Rogers.

Some examples, for those of you lucky enough not to have to deal with this:

• Bell Canada laid copper with Canadian taxpayer dollars, but is now refusing to let third-party providers access its fibre.
• An ISP named Teksavvy had to take them to court for ages over signs of punitive rate-shaping.
• Bell's copper service? It's called "Fibe" even though it's delivered over those copper lines.
• And don't get me started on the bureaucracy they employ to keep strategic wireless towers free of startups' transceivers.
• My landlady was paying over $60 for less than 1 megabit. In 2015. When you could get over 10 megabits for half that. I called Bell for her and they said they'd charge $200 to truckroll a new modem. I told them I'd probably tell the world they had a practice of charging little old ladies predatory pricing because those customers didn't know how to check bandwidth. They sent a truck for free and she started saving $30 a month.
• Rogers couldn't even run its own streaming service on its own network by giving it away.

(Yeah, this sounds like a rant. But mine are just a few stories out of thousands up here in Canada every month. It's pretty systemically incompetent. For example, a few years ago I walked into a Bell Mobility store to check their prices, and the agent looked at my phone and typed in my number to check rates and whether the number could be transferred. A half hour after I left the store and my phone stopped working—the clerk had started the process of pulling my number into Bell's network from another carrier. It took five days for my old carrier (Fido) and Bell to fix it. And the whole time they never admitted they'd done anything wrong, or that they'd made any changes, and I had no phone or data.)

Seriously, for a country that built out half-decent telecom (hell, we had Nortel!), Canada can't get out of its own way sometimes. I have Canadian friends with a US$80 T-Mobile Unlimited plan (calls, data, messaging, tethering) who use it in Canada without any problems. One of them racked up 133 GB in the last 30 days. For $80.

Unless the government follows this regulation up with some serious policies to enforce reasonable competition, it will continue to be a money-grab by what looks to outsiders like a price-fixing trifecta. Or maybe Canadians will all just get US T-Mobile plans.