Canadians pay more for higher advertised mobile Internet speeds: report

Mobile broadband services tend to be more costly in Canada than in other countries and advertise significantly higher average download speeds, a new report released by the CRTC said. “Canadian mobile Internet service rates tend to fall on the high-side of the middle of the group of surveyed countries,” Wall Communications Inc. said in a fifth annual study that compares Canadian prices for wireline, wireless and Internet services internationally. “At the same time, however, the advertized download speeds of the services in Canada are considerably faster than those in the other surveyed countries (largely due to the recent launch of LTE services in Canada)," the report said. The report uses advertised service offerings to compare Canadian services to those in the U.S., the U.K., France, Australia and Japan. For the first time, the report broke down mobile broadband offerings into two “baskets": one for services that offer roughly 2 GB of data each month and another for 5 GB. In 2012, Canadian companies charge an average of $53 per month for the 2 GB service, placing Canadian prices slightly cheaper than those in Japan, where the average comparable service costs about $55 monthly when prices are adjusted for purchase powering parity, the report said. At $52 per month, U.S. prices are lower than Canada's but more than France ($39), Australia ($31) and the U.K. ($27). For higher-end service packages, Canada ranks third most-expensive at $65 per month, less than France ($100) and the U.S. ($70), though the report indicates that the French figure was based on a single plan offered by France Telecom S.A., the only French provider to offer a plan with at least 5 GB of monthly usage. Comparable packages in Japan cost consumers an average of $57 per month, followed by Australia ($45) and the U.K. ($39). With advertised download service speeds of approximately 64 Mbps, Canadian mobile Internet services are “considerably” faster than the advertised speeds in each of the other countries, the report said. “For instance, the average advertized download speeds is roughly 7 Mbps for the U.K., 11 Mbps for the U.S., 21 Mbps for Australia, 29 Mbps for France, and 37 Mbps for Japan,” the report said. The report cautioned that it is difficult to compare mobile broadband speeds across countries because advertised speeds "do not necessarily reflect actual average speeds.” It said Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. in the U.S., which both offer fourth-generation LTE services, do not advertise maximum theoretical download speeds for LTE, whereas Rogers Communications Inc. does in Canada. None of the other countries surveyed has LTE services, the Wall report said. Wall also found that Canadian prices rank around the middle of the pack internationally for wireline, mobile wireless and bundled services. The firm said Canadian broadband Internet prices are the cheapest among the three countries that offer low-end packages but are higher than the U.S. for high-end packages. Average advertised Canadian speeds in the top-tier, which includes packages of at least 40 Mbps and 75 GB per month of data, were about 66 Mbps, the report said. The average advertised speed was 50 Mbps in the U.S. and at least 100 Mbps in each of the other countries. news@thewirereport.ca

Canadians pay more for higher advertised mobile Internet speeds: report

News | July 5, 2012

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