Is there a fair roaming package?

Apparently, not many of us are happy with Canada’s Big Three wireless phone service providers. Customers of BCE Inc.’s, Rogers Communications Inc.’s and Telus Corp.’s mobile services are upset about their costs, which independent figures show are relatively high.

The Canadian Wireless Customer Satisfaction study, conducted by J.D. Power and Associates, has found satisfaction levels with the cost of wireless service resting at 551 out of 1,000. That is partly because wireless contracts have risen to $78 per month on average from $71 two years earlier.

And the privilege of roaming – using your cellphone when outside your coverage area – is particularly expensive in Canada. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said last year that Canadian wireless carriers charge the highest roaming fees among all OECD members. Canadians travelling abroad paid an average of $24 to use one megabyte of data in a single day if they were Bell or Rogers subscribers. That’s 2.6 times the OECD average.

Why are Canadian cellphone services so expensive, and what can you do about it?

“We have three large wireless companies with upwards of 94% market share [collectively],” says Lindsay Pinto, a spokeswoman with digital rights advocacy group Openmedia.ca, which runs a campaign called Stop the Squeeze that urges government to introduce more equitable measures for Canadian wireless users. “We see an oligopoly.”

Pinto’s advice? For a start, check your bill frequently to ensure that you’re being charged correctly. Better still, she suggests, switch to an independent provider. New entrants have gained access to the market of late. Wind Mobile, Public Mobile and Mobilicity all offer competing services to the Big Three.

The Big Three have even launched their own services to compete on a city-by-city level. Rogers has Fido and Chatr; Telus offers Koodo Mobile. But which service should you choose?

Your coverage area

Much depends on your required coverage area. The independents typically offer network coverage in specific zones. Mobilicity covers the Greater Toronto Area, Ottawa (including Gatineau), Calgary, Edmonton and greater Vancouver. Wind Mobile offers some more areas and, like Mobilicity, offers unlimited calling in its call regions. But both of these networks flip over to partner networks for users making calls while outside core areas. When on a partner network, your cellphone calls will be charged on a minute-by-minute basis.

One of the biggest problems for these two networks is that they do not support the iPhone’s data functionality properly because they use a different bandwidth. That will be a sticking point for iPhone lovers. But you can use an iPad via the Wi-Fi hot spot available from Wind.

Wind’s data rates are very competitive, at $35 per month for 10 gigabytes, compared with, say, Rogers, which offers a 10-GB cellphone via a wireless hot spot for $53. To be fair, the Rogers price includes long-term evolution (LTE) capability – the latest, fastest generation of high-speed network.

Wind features international roaming rates in the U.S. that are far more competitive than those of the Big Three, as do other independent operators such as Mobilicity. Roaming is a big issue for Canadians, who collectively make roughly four million trips to the U.S. each month.

Traditionally, Canadians have been gouged on roaming fees by the incumbent providers, says Emir Aboulhosn, CEO of Roam Mobility Inc. “Carriers make about 8% of their revenue through roaming,” he says, “which is why there’s so much resistance to reducing those rates.”

Aboulhosn’s company offers roaming in the U.S. by connecting you directly to the T-Mobile network using either a dedicated SIM card or a mobile wireless hot spot. This gets you unlimited talk and text plans in both the U.S. and Canada for as low as $3 per day. Roam Mobility also offers data for as low as 6¢ per megabyte.

Do you need LTE service?

A big issue for Canadian wireless companies this year will be the auctioning off of the 700-MHz spectrum. Recently, the Canadian government announced that it would reserve only 25% of that spectrum for new entrants. Some argue that’s not enough to build their own LTE services.

The question is really whether you need LTE service at all. For basic email and Internet surfing – even for videoconferencing – a 3G network seems just fine. In the search for cheaper contracts, maybe it’s OK to have the penultimate generation of wireless network.

Before making a decision, take a look at your usage patterns, including your general location, how often you travel to the U.S., the amount of data you use and the calls you make. There are probably savings to be made somewhere. IE