Canadian Telecom Market Becoming More Competitive

Always seems to be local news of note when I go away.

So, two quick items to mention in absentia. Yesterday, Canada's Minister of Industry, Maxime Bernier, announced the latest decision on competition, and basically the news is that the incumbents will be better able now to compete on a level playing field with the competition. This is certainly good news for Bell and Telus, and consumers should start to see more aggressive marketing and pricing from them for VoIP plans in the near term. There's more to the story than this, and will steer you to Mark Goldberg's blog, where he has a couple of posts on this.

For a synopsis of the news, the Globe & Mail had their writeup yesterday. I'm posting it not so much for the article, which is ok, but all the reader comments, which I really enjoy. The overall sentiment is definitely pro-competition, and a few of them point out what I've long been saying - the "competition" the CRTC is protecting aren't little startups - it's the big cablecos, who are in no danger of going broke if the telcos dropped their prices tomorrow. There's a fair bit of cycnicism in the reader comments as well, that the telcos will never lower their prices, so there are a few layers of emotion to this issue.

Secondly, Bell Canada had their annual Business Review Conference today. I attended last year, and quite enjoyed it. Unfortunately, it comes during the Cisco conference, and many Canadian analysts are down here! Mark was there, and filed a short, but punchy post about it, and I suspect the analyst ranks were a bit thin there today. Sorry I missed it - thanks for being there, Mark!


Technorati tags: Mark Goldberg, Jon Arnold