Windows Phone Thoughts: Bell Canada and Telus to Work Together

"Bell Canada (BCE) has just published one to communicate of press which announces that Telus Corporation began from the discussions to discuss a future fusion the 2 giant’s telecommunications in Canada. ECBS and Telus signed a mutual agreement of not-disclosure of the offers suggested. A fusion of the 2 groups would be nevertheless surprising since Telus had already announced that a fusion would be not very probable since Telus should probably demolish its cellular division, which was not possible a few months ago. It should however be said that a fusion would be also possible since Bell cannot pass to more than 50% in the hands of a foreign company and Telus was founded in Quebec."

Parsing through the broken English above, it seems that Canada's two biggest CDMA carriers (Bell and Telus) are going to work together...somehow. No real specifics are given, but I can't help but think this is nothing but bad news for Canadians. Why? Because when companies cozy up to each other there tends to be more cooperation and less competition, and Canada's wireless market is in dire need of competition. When the two big GSM providers in Western Canada (Fido and Rogers) merged, it was nothing but ugly for customers: Fido stopped offering the flat-rate GPRS plan, and prices went up until both companies were essentially offering the same plans. I heard it said that Rogers bought Fido because it was cheaper to buy them than to compete with them. That disgusts me. We're held hostage by a lack of competition in the wireless industry in Canada, and things look to be getting worse.