Annie Mozzity wrote: > Leslie wrote: > > >> To whom can we forward your email so that others in the government know what >> is the norm outside of Rigers and ting-a-ling? >> > > Probably best to do some actual rigorous research into the prices available > else where and not just forward a rant. I can tell you the main providers > over in Germany are O2, e-plus, vodafone, amongst others and e-plus seemed to > be the cheapest pay as you go. (The 5 EUR SIM with more than 5 EUR of credit). > > A.M. > > _______________________________________________ > mlug mailing list > [email protected] > https://listes.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlug-listserv.mlug.ca > This is, sadly, not news. There is no real competition in the cellphone market because of the high initial infrastructure cost. You can't really start a new cellphone business without cell towers and these cost a lot (so much in fact, that Roger, Bell and Telus actually rent space on the competition's towers because it's cheaper.) And you need a LOT of antennas for all the special cases. (There's somewhere around 70 antenna just for Montreal, mostly downtown.)
But once your costs are covered, the rest is pure profit: having one or more customers in any link is the same price (as long as the link is not saturated) Micheal Geist talked about this in 2007, saying that the rates for data plans in Canada were actually twice the rate of Mozambique or Tanzania or 14 times the rate of places like Italy: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2117/135/ Unfortunately, there's isn't much we can do short of starting our own cellphone provider or lobby the government to put limits on pricing. This issue is similar to the bandwith caps, throlling and filtering that is being pushed by ISP: we are all upset, but there isn't anything we can do because there is no other real alternative. David Montminy _______________________________________________ mlug mailing list [email protected] https://listes.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlug-listserv.mlug.ca
