Using your wireless abroad is too expensive, the CRTC determined in early October. He gives suppliers one month to react. They’ll likely just return to their previous rates, one expert warns.
Published at 6:55 p.m.
“That would be the simplest measure,” explains Nadir Marcos, who runs the Canadian wireless price comparison site PlanHub.ca. “They may include roaming in more basic packages,” adds the man who recently launched the eSIM card comparator for the international telephone company Simbud.
eSIM cards replace the printed SIM chip that you insert into your phone to connect to your provider’s network. eSIMs are “virtual SIMs” that can be purchased online and activated in a few clicks on most wireless devices. They allow you to connect to a local network and avoid roaming charges: their price for a week of use is on average equivalent to that of a day of roaming, calculates Nadir Marcos.
PHOTO DAVID BOILY, THE PRESS
Nadir Marcos, right in the photo, co-founder of PlanHub.ca
“eSIMs are still quite new as a solution, but they are growing,” he says. The only problem is that you can’t use your own number to make calls or receive texts. »
The emergence of eSIMs is another reason that should lead Canadian providers to lower their roaming fees, adds Nadir Marcos.
Wireless is expensive
In the meantime, there always seem to be three certainties in life: death, taxes and… very expensive wireless services in Canada.
In a comparison of the 25 countries where wireless is the most expensive, the data aggregator Statista places Canada first. Statista is based on the average revenue per user (better known by the acronym “ARPU”, for average revenue per user). This indicator is valuable for suppliers because it gives an idea of their financial health. The higher it is, the happier they are.
Between 2020 and 2022, the average ARPU in wireless in Canada would have increased from US$37 to US$38 (from CAN$50.87 to CAN$52.25). The next country where this indicator is highest is Australia, where it increased from US$22 to US$24 over the same period (from CAN$30.25 to CAN$33).
The average revenue per customer of Canadian wireless providers would therefore have been 36% higher, in 2022, than in the country which ranked second among those where wireless costs the most.
Pay more for… more
Canadian providers, together with the federal government, say for their part that the price of wireless services has fallen during the pandemic. They’re not wrong: at the start of 2020, the average cost of a gigabyte of mobile data in Canada was $12.55. At the end of 2023, it was $7.36.
Many consumers saw their wireless service bill jump over the same period. They probably changed plans. Providers have replaced monthly plans consisting of very small amounts of mobile data (6 gigabytes or less) with others that contain a few dozen times more (200 GB). They also increased incidental costs, such as… roaming.
For example, in March 2023, Bell and Telus increased their international roaming rates by an average of $1 to $2 per day. These rates are now calculated per day, from midnight to midnight, and not per 24-hour period from the moment the user activates roaming on their phone. This daily pricing has gradually replaced roaming billed per act (per call, per text message or per megabyte of data downloaded), which is cheaper most of the time.
Telus has also started charging for roaming even when its customers are not making any calls or using any data. Its customer service suggests that they put their phone in airplane mode, if not turn it off altogether, if they want to avoid these fees.
Based on this evolution of the wireless roaming market in Canada, Nadir Marcos expects providers to reintroduce fee-for-service billing. “I think we’ll see usage-based billing, because all providers seem to charge per 24-hour period,” when roaming isn’t included in the package, he says. “I remember when you used to pay after texting, that’s changed since then. »
The CRTC seems to have the same nostalgia. “Roaming fees are often inflexible for Canadian travelers, forcing consumers to pay a flat rate of $10 to $16 per day,” he said last week.
We will soon see how the industry will react: it has until November 4 to adjust, otherwise the CRTC will do it for it.
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