Major Rogers network outage affects millions of Canadians – IT Pro – News

I am Canadian and have lived in BC (British Columbia) for almost 20 years. Maybe a little bit off topic but it’s a sad state of affairs with the mobile competition. Here you have The Big Three (Rogers, Telus and Bell) who match their prices so well that most here popularly refer to them as Robelus. Provinces such as Quebec and Saskatchewan still have some competence, mainly because they still have a real independent competitor (Videotron and Saskatel), but otherwise it is a mess.

There is a CRTC that should regulate this and supposedly acts on behalf of the customer, but I think it says enough that its head is also the head of one of the three telecom companies. Any attempt to break through this impasse is doomed to failure, such as Freedom Mobile (formerly Wind). They were bought by Shaw (cable company) and Shaw is now being bought by Rogers.

As for the smaller names like Public Mobile, Lucky, and Chatr, those are just subsidiaries, Telus, Bell, and Rogers respectively. The MVNOs are independent in name only – on paper you can always trace them back to the Big Three.

The prices here go up regularly and there’s nothing that can be done – it’s normal to pay $60 or more for your mobile plan, or $100+ for Internet at home. My mother in the Netherlands has a mobile subscription for 7 euros and pays about 60 in total for TV/internet/telephones, prices that we in Canada only dare to dream about.

To keep it a bit on topic: Rogers is more popular in the eastern part of Canada so it didn’t bother us here in the Rockies – most of the communication is in the hands of Telus here.

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