It’s Canada Day. This year, Canadians who want to give themselves the gift of a little financial relief have a great option: call their telecommunications service provider. Prices are plummeting for home Internet as well as wireless.
“For the Internet, it’s like Black Friday. The consumer can reduce their bill without changing supplier. A few hundred dollars saved in less than an hour is worth it,” says the CEO of the online price comparison site Planhub, Nadir Marcos Mechaiekh Simon.
Internet on sale
There is an explanation for this excitement. For several months, the CRTC has been forcing network owners to let their rivals use them where their own networks do not go. This opens up new markets for just about everyone.
In the medium term, this practice benefits consumers, who have more choice. It could harm them in the longer term, because it benefits services that are already more popular. Intermediate suppliers present in the region lose out. More of their competitors’ customers use their networks than the other way around. It pays less.
Another factor behind the price drop: 5G networks are powerful enough to serve the residential internet market. Rogers and Telus, in particular, offer such Internet services in certain regional markets.
In Quebec, the rivalry between Bell and Quebecor is still fierce and increasingly involves their low-cost banners. Fizz is a godsend for Videotron, with its self-service approach that is more affordable than the one in Videotron’s colours. Bell is using the Ebox banner to take on Fizz and is currently offering fibre optic offers that its rival’s cable is struggling to match.
We don’t know anyone who lives in a house that actually needs an Internet connection beyond a gigabit. In the niche of Internet services of 100 to 500 megabits per second, a speed sufficient to watch at least three 4K films at the same time from the streaming platforms of your choice, you can come across special offers cheaper than what the cost just a year ago, flow rates were ten times lower.
A long-term trend in the telecom market is making self-service Internet providers more attractive: the shift away from home telephony is accelerating. We are talking about the telephone that plugs into a wall socket. Fewer and fewer people feel obliged to pay to “keep” a residential number, which they have often had for decades.
Younger consumers are also less attached to traditional television and are less attracted by service packages. Very popular since the turn of the millennium, cable television subscriptions have stagnated in Canada for two years.
Meanwhile, streaming video services have seen their subscriber numbers jump. These services are not limited by a legal framework as strict as that of traditional television and can attempt more fierce promotional offers.
The most recent example is Rogers, which has started offering its TV customers a subscription to the American service Disney + at no additional cost. Ask your provider: they all include access to at least one online video platform in their more traditional packages.
Wireless is exploding
Anyone who has looked through their provider’s catalog of wireless plans since early 2024 must have been startled: It’s now possible to increase your monthly mobile data allowance tenfold without paying more than you were paying before.
Barely a year ago, it was difficult to find an affordable plan that included 10 gigabytes of mobile data. Today we find them at 75, even 200 GB, which won’t break anyone’s bank. Canada is not yet France, the owners of a French wireless phone continue to annoy us with this, but it remains clear progress.
“It’s never been easier to switch providers, and never have so many Canadians done it,” says Nadir Marcos Mechaiekh Simon, who sees a Quebecor effect in the West of the country, where the Montreal provider is expanding. In addition, the emergence of travel eSIMs, compatible with newer phones, is significantly lowering the price of data abroad.
Repairability and durability
The downside is that the handsets themselves are very expensive. At least they are more durable. Google is making efforts to extend the useful life of Android devices.
Apple, for its part, will launch next year in Canada the repair shop that allows you to obtain tools and replacement parts for its iPhones, Macs, and other products. Apple calculates that repairing your iPhone can cost up to 60% less than replacing it, and that its most recent iPhones have a useful life of at least six years. We are not yet at the repairability index found in France, but, again, we are getting there.
In twenty-five years of observing the telecom services market, we have only seen such an alignment of the planets to the advantage of the consumer once: when residential telephony made the shift to the Internet.
In other words: it doesn’t happen often. You might as well take advantage of it.
