Federal budget plans to increase telecom competition

Several pages of the new federal budget contain section detailing the government's plan to increase competition in telecommunications. This is music to our ears, so let's break our promises.

First on the list is a new “dig once” strategy that aims to get existing telecom companies to work together and share more of their fiber networks. As we know, the CRTC is already working on this, and Bell recently finally gave up fighting the idea and took action. to Telus territory in Western Canada. However, Bell was very frank about limiting some of the previously promised infrastructure construction because it does not want to share.

One way the government hopes to encourage telecom companies to build is by easing regulatory burdens, such as existing rules for informing governments about tower construction.

There are also plans to free up more spectrum and modernize the spectrum licensing and transfer system. This should help new players like Freedom grab more spectrum, but it's likely that the big three players will still take a huge chunk of that spectrum.

The new Budget will also implement a rule announced in Budget 2024 that will make it easier for people to cancel their phone/internet plans themselves. The rule also mentions that telecom companies will need to inform people when their contract is about to expire. The final version of the telecommunications section of the budget for 2024 also planned to prohibit certain fees, but which ones were not specified.

There are a lot of promises here, and as someone who watches the telecommunications industry, I'm not sure that these promises, beyond the first ruling to try to create more infrastructure, will go far enough to actually help Canadians. The biggest development for Canadian telecoms so far is that Freedom was mandated to keep plans lower than competitors for two years when it was sold to Videotron. When this regulation expires, I would not be surprised if these prices rise to the levels of Bell, Rogers and Telus, eliminating one of the best forms of competition in the country.

At the same time, no matter how much telecommunications companies fight this, if laws are eventually passed, companies will have to start operating within their framework. However, I don't expect anything in the budget today to solve the problems. These will be long-term solutions, if they exist at all.

We hope the government will be wary of using false figures regarding the cost of data. Telecom operators like to talk about how the price per gigabyte has dropped over the years, but this does little to solve the problem. that most people have been paying between $60 and $80 per month for data plans for the past ten years.regardless of the data. And most people probably don't even use all the data they pay for. Let's hope the current government can see through the trees and actually influence the real price Canadians will have to pay.

Source: Budget 2025