HoFo Blog

Here in the US, there's a thriving shadow-world of low-cost, experimental plans running on the Sprint and T-Mobile networks. MVNOs like Consumer Cellular, Google Fi, Republic Wireless, and Ting have all won repeated awards in our Readers' Choice survey, but the big Canadian carriers don't typically wholesale their networks in the same way. The few MVNOs they do allow—most notably 7-Eleven, PC Mobile, and Petro-Canada—tend to be very restricted in service and pricing.

The CRTC hasn't shown itself to be open to widening the MVNO market. This March, it ruled against allowing virtual operators to take advantage of lower roaming rates available to the regional carriers.

Ting's VP of sales and marketing, Michael Goldstein, lives in Toronto and only sells his service in the US, because the Canadian networks don't make it possible.

"In Canada we don't have any real competition, and the prices are the worst in the world," Goldstein said. "The problem with Canada is that the US has two clear leaders in AT&T and Verizon and a pretty big gap for Sprint and T-Mobile. So Sprint and T-Mobile can say, it makes sense for us to have wholesale partners. Nobody needed to mandate to them that they embrace wholesale. It made perfect strategic sense: they say, even if they lose a customer to us, they rightly say, better that it stay on our network than go somewhere else. Telus, Bell, and Rogers are so even that nobody cares to embrace a wholesale strategy."

Limited coverage means that Freedom's network can't provide an alternative—if Shaw wholesaled Freedom, its customers would still need to turn to the Big Three outside Freedom's coverage areas.

Something about the multi-coil design getting too hot—way too hot. There are engineers who looked at AirPower’s design and said it could never work, thermally, and now those same engineers have that “told you so” smug look on their faces.