layout: post title: Can the CRTC help? created: 1176216090 categories:

• CRTC
• Canada
• Wireless, Cellular, and Mobile

So, I think we've got agreement on the ridiculous costs of mobile data in Canada. But is it the "fault" of the CRTC?

I did a follow up comment on Thomas Purves' image post on Flickr:

I skipped over any mention of the CRTC: the focus here really is the short sightedness of the companies involved, that 100,000 customers at a lower cost is more money than 1,000 customers at a high cost (never mind the network effects of lots of people doing interesting things with mobile data, which intuitively would lead to even more revenue). I may do another post today that explores this a bit: can the CRTC help? I think government support / intervention is the only likely option, given the cost of infrastructure buildout here in Canada.

What if the CRTC had blocked the sale of Fido to Rogers?

Something to think about....(and maybe change the inflammatory title).

Living in Canada, I'm not against regulation in all its forms. I honestly don't know enough about the ins and outs of all the issues, or what twiddling the levers of intervention / regulation do to economies and businesses.

But it's likely that the right people to lobby are the mobile carriers themselves. The comments on Digg (surprisingly!) have some other useful points. Martin Cleaver in particular points to what we can do (lobby your carrier!) and describes in more detail the issues that the CRTC faces.