Wirelessnorth.ca

That’s what I want to know. Maybe the general populace is not so bad off as your hapless editor who manages to break, lose, drop, step on, have the dog eat, leave in a taxi cab or under an airplane seat a mobile device on a seemingly by-weekly basis. Nonetheless, three years for the average cell phone? You’ve got to be kidding. Cell phones break, batteries wear out, and especially now, technology is evolving at a whiplash pace.

In the coming years, mobile technology will play an increasingly important role in Canada’s knowledge economy. Yet Canada’s wireless market is awash in old crappy handsets and outdated data-free or outrageously expensive old data plans. Just recently in Canada there has been a great breakthrough in the availability of top-end phones and much improved data plans in Canada. Unfortunately, our installed base is still lagging far behind many other parts of the world, and not likely to catch up on a three year upgrade cycle. This gap is a problem for any Canadian businesses or entrepreneurs trying to be innovative or competitive on a global scale when it comes to developing any kind of industry around mobile-driven content, services or applications.

From a consumer public policy perspective, number portability and new entrants are all good things for spurring competition in Canada’s mobile industry. However, both measures are significantly hampered by the high switching costs of the great number of consumers locked in to extended contracts.

Don’t get me wrong, we here at WirelessNorth.ca are quite in favour of the idea of contracts. Particularly because handset subsidies are a great way of making the technology more accessible to a much larger market. And because carriers should have a free hand to make money and compete as creatively as they can withing reasonable bounds.

Nonetheless, it’s time we caught up with many countries in the rest of the world and mandated a limit on contracts, or a limit on cancellation penalties to not more than 18 months. We think a year and half is a good compromise.

If you look around, you’ll notice that carriers that offer 18month contracts in many countries (such as France, the UK or South Africa) still manage to offer subsidies as great or greater than those offered by the big three here in Canada on identical devices.