Recently, if you were one of over eleven million Canadians who depends on Rogers for telephone communications, internet, or a myriad of other digital services, you were left without access to service. Many Canadians woke up on Friday and realized they could not text, make phone calls, access their banking information, internet, or streaming services. Worse, phones could not even call 911 in an emergency. This is despite the fact that, by law, Canadian telecom providers are supposed to enable their devices to reach 911 at all times.
How did a third of the Canadian population suddenly find themselves without service? Well, no one actually knows yet.
While the exact problem which brought down over a third of the telecommunications industry is currently not known, why this is such a problem is not a mystery.
In Canada, over 90% of the telecoms market is owned by the Big Three providers, Rogers Wireless, Bell Mobility and Telus Mobility, with these big three controlling nearly twenty-nine million subscribers. The only other network that comes close is Freedom Mobile with another two million subscribers. The smaller networks are not national, and none even come close to providing the coverage that would be reliable or desirable outside large cities, which makes them untenable for Canadians who live in rural areas. Furthermore, this will be Rogers second major outage in the last few years. Not a good look for Canada's largest telecoms provider.
This oligopoly, essentially, sets prices for Canadians on a whim. The government did, in the last few years, force the major telecoms companies to reduce prices by 25%. However, with recent inflation and the attempted merger of Rogers and Shaw, this is not quite the boon we had hoped for. And in truth, there is nothing stopping the Big Three from raising prices in the future to 'cover costs' as they see fit. Canadians already pay some of the highest costs in the world for communications, and we're very much aware of this.
While I can't give you an easy answer on the outage, I can give you an easy answer on how to fix bad service and high prices.
Most would argue that the best way to fix the telecoms problem is the regular capitalistic slogan of 'increase competition' which would, probably, lower prices initially as the market was flooded by foreign competition. However, that would not last forever and might end up seeing much of Canada dominated by the US's own version of the Big Three in corporate mergers we're unable to stop.
However, we already have a home grown solution to this. Crown Corporations provided much of the regional and provincial communications for nearly a century across much of Canada. In fact Sasktel in Saskatchewan still does for that province. It used to be the same in Alberta and Manitoba until those were privatized or bought out with regulator permission. The only private communications distributor who still can compete on a regional level with the Big Three is Québecor which provides much of the French language services and entertainment. For further reading on the power and innovation of Crown Corporations, I'd heartily recommend The Sport and Prey of Capitalists by Linda McQuaig.
These regional exceptions and crown corporations are important because they show that the Big Three are not remotely necessary to provide us with communications. In a supreme irony the Big Three also cease to apply 'exchange rates' in regions where regional operators supply real competition and require pricing adjustments to keep people with their services. The ability of Canada to create a national telecommunications Crown Corporation is not seriously in doubt, and it could be run quite easily off government revenues, if Canadians paid even a fraction of their annual phone bills in tax revenues to run a national telecoms service we could have some of the cheapest telecommunications in the world. The average Canadian spends over 2,000$ on phone bills a year, almost 10% of what the median income earner pays in taxes!
While I can see the objections to a national telecoms provider, I would point out that treating telecommunications like a basic service such as road maintenance, sewage maintenance, and healthcare, can only benefit Canadians. All attempts to privatize the former mentioned services anywhere in the world have only led to suffering, higher costs, and lower standards of care. Should we treat something as necessary to 21st century living as cell phones and the internet any different? This outage has shown just how much of a disaster allowing a third of any industry to be dominated by an ultimately unaccountable corporation can be; putting it back in the hands of the public is only right.
