If Canadian wireless prices are going down, why is my bill still so high?

A new report from Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC), commissioned by a group of Canadian telecoms, examines the Canadian market and reiterated the claim that prices have dropped by 65 per cent since 2020.

This is a claim we’ve seen argued to the CRTC before and led to the CRTC changing how it tracks wireless pricing. 

It should also be noted that this study was commissioned by the Canadian Telecommunications Association (CTA), which comprises all of Canada’s major carriers and infrastructure companies like Nokia and Ericsson. PWC independently performed the study, but some elements feel like they were purposely left out of this report to make the carriers appear in a more favourable light. For instance, there is no mention of roaming prices or recent developments by the CRTC to increase competition.

If you feel like you’ve managed to save even 50 per cent on your bill since 2020, I’d love to hear how in the comments. I paid around $50 for 10GB back then, and now I pay about $50 for 40GB and U.S. roaming. So while the price per gigabyte has gone down, the price I’m paying to the carriers has remained consistent.

Have prices really gone down?

The report says that the average monthly price for 10GB in Canada is $28, but this calculation involves some tricky math. It appears to be averaging the cost-per-gigabyte across all plans, not what most Canadians actually pay.

Looking across the three major Canadian carriers and the sub-brands they own, the cheapest 10GB plan I found was $30 at Public Mobile. However, Lucky Mobile had a 15GB plan for $29. These cheap plans are available from two carriers that most Canadians don’t know exist, and even fewer know they’re owned by Telus and Bell, respectively.

While not a super accurate representation of subscribers, Lucky Mobile’s Android app has been downloaded 500,000 times, while Bell’s has been downloaded over 10 million times. There is a lot of nuance to this, including Bell’s main app being around longer and offering TV/home internet services, but it does illustrate how much more popular the main brands are compared to their sub-brands.

The cheapest plans on Bell, Rogers and Telus’ websites usually cost around $60 for around 120GB of data. While these are favourable prices for that amount of data, the real problem is that the leading carriers don’t offer anything cheaper. Canadians outside the tech sphere don’t know how the telecoms and flanker brands work, so they often go for the big three.

All of these are technically Bell plans, but depending on the website you buy from, they offer various speeds, data, and prices.

While this is a problem with how people research and buy phone plans, it’s also a problem with how these lower-cost plans are marketed. I could be wrong, but walking around Toronto, I see lots of Bell, Rogers, and Telus ads and very few for Lucky Mobile. There is also no mention of the flanker brands on the main carriers’ websites, at least in the shopping sections.

As an example of a regular Canadian, my mom uses around 2GB of data per month, but when she got a new phone two years ago, she was only looking at Bell and Rogers for plans. I had to convince her that switching to Fido would be fine, and worth the lower cost per month since it was still using Rogers’ network. Even with the lower cost, she was hesitant to switch because she didn’t know anyone in her area using Fido. She’s been completely fine on the network since then, but she has called me twice to ask what carrier she’s on, because she forgets the name when she tells people about her good deal.

This is to say that while the price per gigabyte is dropping, most of the plans being offered are still out of touch with what the Canadian public needs, at least at the big three telecoms. The flanker brands and Freedom Mobile all offer much more approachable pricing. However, it’s annoying to check nine websites to see all the plans offered by any of the big three telecoms.

How do we fix this?

This report states that the average Canadian uses only 9GB of monthly data. So, we simply need plans that accurately reflect Canadian usage. If the cost per GB is so low, why aren’t there more 10-15GB plans for under $30 on the market?

The main number often left out of reports like these is the cost per person for their telecom bill. This is usually expressed as average revenue per user (ARPU). When you look at this number, the telecom pricing in Canada has remained a lot more consistent.

In a 2020 CRTC report, the average revenue per mobile phone user (ARPU) at a Canadian telecom was $66.70. The same 2023 CRTC report puts that number at $70.23.

Bell/Rogers/Telus’s most recent financial reports put their wireless ARPUs at around $58 for 2024, and the figure has hovered around the $60 mark for at least the last several years. The CRTC does not yet have data for 2024, but its records from 2020-23 show an increase in ARPU, not a decrease like the PWC report suggests.

It’s possible the CRTC’s ARPU calculation includes the cost of financing a device, which might explain why it’s higher than what the telecoms report, but it’s not entirely clear where the difference is coming from.

Regardless of the discrepancies, the actual average price for Canadians hasn’t dropped 65 per cent in the last five years. The price per gigabyte has changed, but the phone plans offered by the core telecom businesses in Canada are essentially the same.

Taking a step back

Taking a step back from this report, it really seems like telecoms are trying to use the current economic uncertainty, the trade war, and climate change as marketable challenges for the telecom sector to help promote fewer regulations or more investments.

There are even full sections in the middle of the report examining the E.U. (high regulations) and the U.S. (low regulations). In the end, the tone of the report seems to push for fewer regulations like the U.S. has regarding telecommunications. However, the positives of the E.U. regulations, such as lower prices, and substantial consumer benefits, are not mentioned.

Other elements strategically left out of this report include the sentiment towards increasing roaming charges, which has been a hot debate in Canada. The telecoms even needed to present a case to the CRTC in late 2024 about it, yet it’s not mentioned in the report at all.

Alongside that, more recently, the CRTC has been working to implement more competition in Canada in an effort to reduce prices naturally. One area where it’s been doing this is forcing the big telecoms to sell their network infrastructure pathways wholesale to competitors. This means Telus can run internet on Bell lines and vice versa. Since that was implemented, thousands of Canadians have had increased choices when it comes to home internet, and in retaliation, Bell has promised to reduce its infrastructure investments going forward.

For context, this PWC report claims that each of the big telecoms had, on average, $6 billion in free cash flow in 2024.

Image source: Shutterstock

Source: PWC/Canadian Telecoms