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Big 3 waive Activation Fee & give free 6pm evenings until March 31st
One of the reasons the Spectrum Auction was set up was to encourage more competition in the Canadian wireless market. Before the auction started then Industry Minister Jim Prentice stated “Our government’s intentions are clear: to achieve lower prices, better service and more choice for consumers and business. We believe in relying on market forces to the maximum extent feasible because competition benefits consumers, and consumers benefit most when markets are as competitive as they can be.”
Fast forward to today where we have WIND Mobile and Public Mobile already in market gaining clients. Other new entrants Mobilicity (formally DAVE Wireless) looking to launch their service in Toronto soon. Plus, Videotron is expected to shake things up when they launch their HSPA network this Summer. All these new entrants will take a piece out of the subscriber base from the Big 3.
We are already seeing a slight drop in prices, some fees being reduced or eliminated. If you’re with Rogers, Bell, TELUS or even one of their flanker brands (Virgin, Koodo, Solo, Fido) you might find sweet deals to stay. Rogers, Bell and TELUS are all currently offering the same promo by waiving the $35 Activation Fee and giving free evenings starting at 6:00pm. Bell is offering a $150 credit to WIND customers who port back to them, we are hearing that Fido is also offering a unique deal for WIND customers also.
The key here is that competition is brewing in Canada and with more new entrants launching, the prices will continue to fall. The downside it seems is that with all these fees being waived customers are still being asked to sign a 3-year contract.
What are you finding these days… prices dropping, customers service getting better?
Discussion
36 comments for “Big 3 waive Activation Fee & give free 6pm evenings until March 31st”
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I wish they would get rid of the 3-yr contract, I’m locked into one with a crappy phone (LG Dare), and it’s too expensive to upgrade.
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For now every one has to really admit WIND has already shook them 3 up!
Competition is Alive!
Go Wind GO!
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Price dropping is getting Way better dude!
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Good to see consumers benefit finally. Even if this is temporary there are still savings to be made. May the best offer win(d)!
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I’m fine with prices, fees, everything the way it is. The only problem? 3yr contracts. They shouldn’t exist and capped at 2yrs. If only for that, I’d be fine and happy.
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6pm evening change apply to current users or only people switching?
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@SHuelin.. I believe thats not going to be happening any time soon though. Thats how they trap you to begin with. If you are not trapped you are free.
You being free hurts them!
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They should be scrapping the $35 charge, not waiving it. What’s the justification for having to pay to enter into a 3 year contract anyway? (and yes, 3 year contracts should drop to 2 years)
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I find it interesting that people feel the prices are coming down. I feel the total opposite. Per-second billing is al but gone, text messaging prices are going up. Long distance fees are now at .35 cents. (On my 6 year old plan I pay .10 cents) Overage local minutes are now at .35 cents. (On my 6 year old plan I pay .10 cents) Evenings now start at 9pm unless you pay extra. The local 911 fee has gone up twice in the last two years. If I thought about it for a bit I’m sure I could find more places with rising prices. Could someone explain why everyone feels the prices are coming down? I agree the phones and technology has improved immensely, but that’s about it. What do you all think.
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@SHuelin lol, your comment makes no sense…if there were no contracts you would have to pay full price for your phone. Based on your comment “too expensive to upgrade” I am assuming your going to complain if you had to pay full price.
If you want two year contracts Fido offers them.
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I was at Loblaws the other day and was suprised to find that they sell Bell SIM cards.
I took a look at the package and it says that besides the $10 for the SIM card, there’s a $35 activation fee. So before you even receive any real product or service, you are down $45.
This silliness has to stop.
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The 6pm evenings is a decent incentive (is it true evenings and weekends, or simply 6pm evenings period?).
The $35 activation fee waiver is far less impressive. For a period of less than two weeks they’re going to waive a fee that is nothing more than profit padding to begin with? puh-lease.
Now that it appears they are starting to notice the new entrants, it’s time Canadians started waking up to how ludicrous 3 year contracts are and refusing to sign them. All it takes is for one to capitulate and max out at 2 years, and the rest will fall in line; as is clearly evident from this current promotion.
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no 3yr- 2yr contracts… like that will happen!! if it does then id like to see that everyone feels like forking out 500$-700$ for their new smartphone… i dont!!
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If Telus dropped their contract to 2 years in order to get the top discount (like every other country in the world has), then I would walk right over to a dealer and buy a MILESTONE this afternoon. But I just don’t see that happening.
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No much has happened since these new guys have come in. The only changes that have happened is the big 3 increasing some rates, and the big 3 still with expensive data. These are 2 things that I wanted lowered and nothing has happened to those.
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No there haven’t been any drop in price. Just one time offers to bait people. The worse in all of that is you lose these promo as soon as you change something, including if you move in a different area code, need to “upgrade” your phone that you lost or broke down, or readjust your plan because you use more than before.
In short it is sugar coating.
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@rob, people are not asking for no 2 year contracts, just no 3 year contracts.
The rest of the developed world can offer most, if not all their smartphones for $200 or less, many FREE, on 2 year contracts. There’s no reason the same can’t be done here except greed.
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In order for 3 year contracts to stop being offered, the cell phone manufacturers (Samsung, Blackberry,LG, etc…) need to lower their device pricing. As there is almost no mark up on devices, carriers are forced to offer 3 year plans to offer low device pricing. Such is the case with the auto industry offering 8 year financing…
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Also, keep in mind that Canada has about 63% market penetration of only about 35million people vs about 91% of 330million in the US and an even higher percentage in some europena countries. Multiply that by our expansive size and the expense of building such a huge network = higher pricing.
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I think anyone expecting canadian prices to ever be comparable to Europe to American prices are living in a daydream…
There will always be inherently higher costs to operating a wireless network in Canada (due to size and population density). We have to pay for that somewhere… Used to be we were paying everything higher. Now, some things are going down a bit. Data plans have gone down significantly, being ALMOST (not quite, but almost) comparable to the rest of the world… If the price of that is keeping 3 year contracts instead of 2, it’s not too bad (not saying I like it, but we’ll have to sacrifice somewhere).
So either we have carriers with no coverage outside of big cities, we fork out more per month or have longer contracts or just buy our phones without subsidies… Easy choice.
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Are we really so unique that we are the only country on earth that requires 3 year contracts in order to recover phone subsidies? Why then, if I bring my own phone, do I not get a break on a monthly plan price?
Why do we have one of the lowest cellular penetration rates in the world, yet our telecoms have one of, if not the, highest revenue per user in the world?
Wind sells the Blackberry 9700 for $450 without a contract; TELUS sells it for $650. No markup?
Why do all big 3 firms back load their subsidies? Virtually nothing off a 1 or 2 year contract price, but huge savings if you lock in for 3 years. If it’s just about recovering their subsidy, why not spread the subsidy out evenly? If it was all about subsidy recovery and not trapping people into long-term contracts with often huge termination fees, wouldn’t it make sense to take whatever subsidy they are willing to give, divide it by 3, and give an equal discount for each year of your contract?
Canada is not as unique in terms of population density/network costs as the telecoms would have us believe. One area we are unique, is that we not only accept unreasonable costs, 3 year contracts and monstrous profits from our telecoms, but we actually defend them.
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Bell is stuck in the old world of refusing to compete. They require 3-year terms for all hardware purchases. Nobody in their right mind should agree to that.
Telus and Virgin are selling phones on month-to-month plans now. They seem willing to compete.
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You think the 6pm deal (with a 3 year commitment) is a sign of competition?
Please compare Canada’s wireless prices (and the resulting profits for the big 3) to the prices in comparable countries. Then tell me if they are competing.
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Does anyone know the implications of moving my/our mobile business to a US carrier and using it here? I have heard bits of discussion both ways.
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This is in reply to Randy.
You are 100% spot on.
I am with telus (has become the worst carrier in last 12 months).
If you bring your own equipment, they create barriers to use your SIM unlocked phone.
If you purchase a Telus phone outright, they refuse to provide unlock code.
How can the rest of the world offer 2 year contracts…the technology changes too quickly.
I do not see any change…long distance is a joke…costs the same for any carrier to connect a call from Toronto to Vancouver as it does to connect a call from downtown Toronto to Mississuaga…
As far as costs more..I would agree if the coverage was complete…coverage is cheery picked and in populated areas or traveled areas…what about Australia.. they may have same coverage model…prices are lower..they have true high speed 3G+
I think the issues are clear to me…carriers are too cozy with the government…collusion on pricing…no oversight from government…no FCC in Canada to protect consumers…no competition, the new entrants are regional, as soon as you roam..they become expensive
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Also think about this when you look at investment….Telus and bell are sooooo proud of their combined 1 billion investment in new 3G+ new work.
ATT is planning to spend 22 B this year on network upgrades.
I am guessing they will spend more than 1 b on new york and san fran
Does this not speak volumes to everyone, the Canadian network rollout is not as extensive as US regions…as soon as you start getting some data rolling through the new network…we will see if/when the Telus/Bell network starts to puke.
Relative to their size, Canadian carrier make more profit than their counterparts in other parts of the world
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Why do people always come up with the ridiculous excuse of the country being too large to support several carriers?
If there was real competition here, you’d see a lot of it in urban centers since any sane company would focus on these areas first and then expand as far as doing so is profitable. Yet none of that was happening until recently.
It could thus only have been a government policy issue that there was no competition and not an issue of the size of the market, since no one is forcing companies to cover the entire country. And if someone were to force them, then it would again be a policy issue.
So stop finding excuses for the incompetence of those at the top making the lives of everyone else more expensive through a lack of competition in the telecommunication industry.
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What it comes down to is that 3 years is too long. PERIOD. And why should a blackberry cost more than a netbook and the same as entry level notebooks or even an hd lcd.
Contracts… whatever! The devices are where we really get groined! Wind has shown that the cost of these devices to a company with (arguably) less buying power and marketshare is significantly lower than dealers show!
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What surprizes me is that the big three always have promos that reflect one another all the time, and that they “seem” to know what each other is doing to have this happen.
Why oh why haven’t they been investigated for price fixing yet?
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Randy wrote: “Why do all big 3 firms back load their subsidies? Virtually nothing off a 1 or 2 year contract price, but huge savings if you lock in for 3 years. If it’s just about recovering their subsidy, why not spread the subsidy out evenly? If it was all about subsidy recovery and not trapping people into long-term contracts with often huge termination fees, wouldn’t it make sense to take whatever subsidy they are willing to give, divide it by 3, and give an equal discount for each year of your contract?”
Randy, you hit the nail right on he head. The big 3 are still in bed together, refusing to rock the boat. The 3-year contracts should be made illegal, period. Ditto with billing by the minute.
Also, prices are not coming down at all. Please don’t be fooled by smoke and mirrors. Look for Unlimited Incoming on any of the big 3′s (mediocre) web sites: it is nowhere to be found. You have to beg for it and then it’s $15 (when I last checked) plus the full load of taxes. This is an extra $20 a month for us while Unlimited incoming text and voice are universal in most of the world.
We still have total collusion between the big 3.
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This site really needs to fix the reply option, it’s been broken for months.
Anyways to reply to Hugo B. and his comment about data prices coming down? Are you high? Our data prices are ridiculous in Canada! Besides WIND (whose data prices are surprisingly cheaper then our southern neighbors) every other carrier charges exorbitant fees to access data.
Anyone who has been watching the wireless industry in Canada will have noticed that prices have been on an incline, ESPECIALLY since WIND started to get things rolling i.e. June-ish of last year.
The fact that the author of this article has been lead to believe that we are seeing prices drop is beyond me. Read the fine print, these are all temporary measures therefore nothing permanent. Until the BIG 3 actually decrease their prices and/or contract lengths Canadians are still being bent over.
The fact of the matter (as others have said) is that wireless companies in Canada make huge profits and the mercy of their customers. They have no loyalty to Canadians (as seen in the thousands of jobs shipped over seas) because they know there is nothing we will do. It’s reasons like this that Canadians are so frustrated with the wireless industry.
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In general, the big 3 have much higher margins than their US counterparts, and of course there will be pressure to maintain profitability. The only way that they can do this is to cut costs, including costs like subsidies. If the big 3 could get rid of subsidies and contracts, in the same way as asia, they would. These are costs on their books. But north americans are cheap and subsidies are the only effective way telcos have found to get people to buy smartphones to get customers started ringing up lucrative data charges. So what’s a telco to do? Outsource the call centre? Drive people to online billing and online ordering? Multi-level marketing of cell phone plans and do away with retail stores? No easy answer for them. It’s hard to eke much more cost recovery out of $65 of ARPU while keeping 8-16% profit margins – they already subsidize handsets to the tune of $10-15/month over 3 years for your average smartphone.
Propose a decent alternative for the company to recover $400 from you over 2 years instead of 3 without eroding margins, and the industry will love you, maybe even make you an executive with an office at 333 Bloor right beside Nadir’s. Until someone does that, the big 3 will fight tooth and nail to keep their margins.
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And cost recovery/margin calculations aren’t as simple as contract term X subsidy amount. They also figure in probability of churn. And a 2 year contract is more likely to churn than a 3 year contract, decreasing the lifetime value of the customer. The 3 year term gets offered things like hardware upgrades, fido dollars, and the like, and by the time you hit the 3 year mark, you’re dying for an upgrade and are much more likely to renew simply to get to the next phone. It’s all economics and the psychology of the churn…
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“Probability of churn”… in other words, lock ‘em in for 3 years so they can’t go anywhere. Isn’t that exactly what we’ve all been saying?
@Insider, you pretty much make our case for us. It’s all about greed and trapping customers, not about necessity. “dying for an upgrade and much more likely to renew” says it all.
All the Telco supporters talk about comparing us with the U.S. but U.S. aside, why are we virtually the only country in the world where 3 year terms are the norm? Again, no matter what Telco’s (or those who work for them and post on internet message boards) want us to believe, Canada is not such an incredible anomaly in the world, that we should be the only place where this happens.
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I sooo feel like copy/pasting this whole discussion into an e-mail to the CRTC… but obviously nothing is going to change anyways… people who actually realize that we are being screwed on a daily basis are a minority at this time
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Extended Upto May 2nd
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