> The US is HUGE. For a company to have nationwide coverage
> they need to invest a TON in infrastructure.
Canada is bigger and we've had several new entrants to mobile phone business who've set up their own networks to cover the largest cities in Canada. I think the key is that they're not covering everything (they roam on other networks). Wind Mobile (my provider) regularly offers $40/mo for unlimited nationwide talk/text and 5GB/mo (throttled after the cap an no overage charge). Mobilicity has something similar, but with a $22.50 promo price.
The catch is that "unlimited" means within the parts of their network: regions around the major cities in Canada.
Another company could come along and do a similar scale rollout along the east or west US coasts. I think the difference is that these new operators got to buy up some spectrum back in 2008 because Industry Canada set aside 40 MHz of AWS spectrum for new entrants in an effort to bring more wireless competition to Canada (back then, our three monopoly operators had 94% of the market) [ http://www.dwpv.com/en/Resources/Publications/2009/Flash-Dec... ]. I recall Google bidding on some US spectrum back in 2008. Did anything ever come of that? Did anyone aside from the big networks get any spectrum?
Edit: You might also be talking about home internet. I have 25 Mbps for $33/mo (it can actually go up to 300 Mbps for $103/mo). Unlike in mobile, my provider Novus is (I believe) reselling service from one of the big networks. (The only other one I know by name is TekSavvy, but I believe there's several of them in different parts of Canada.) I'm not sure if there are similar resellers in the US. Our resellers had some legal battles to allow them to offer this service [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_Based_Billing_(UBB)#Usage... ], so maybe the legal requirements on the network holders is also a contributing factor for increased US prices.
Canada is bigger and we've had several new entrants to mobile phone business who've set up their own networks to cover the largest cities in Canada. I think the key is that they're not covering everything (they roam on other networks). Wind Mobile (my provider) regularly offers $40/mo for unlimited nationwide talk/text and 5GB/mo (throttled after the cap an no overage charge). Mobilicity has something similar, but with a $22.50 promo price.
The catch is that "unlimited" means within the parts of their network: regions around the major cities in Canada.
Another company could come along and do a similar scale rollout along the east or west US coasts. I think the difference is that these new operators got to buy up some spectrum back in 2008 because Industry Canada set aside 40 MHz of AWS spectrum for new entrants in an effort to bring more wireless competition to Canada (back then, our three monopoly operators had 94% of the market) [ http://www.dwpv.com/en/Resources/Publications/2009/Flash-Dec... ]. I recall Google bidding on some US spectrum back in 2008. Did anything ever come of that? Did anyone aside from the big networks get any spectrum?
Edit: Looks like Google didn't win any spectrum. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_2008_wireless_spe... ] I'm not familiar enough with the US market to know if any of the winners are upstarts.
Edit: You might also be talking about home internet. I have 25 Mbps for $33/mo (it can actually go up to 300 Mbps for $103/mo). Unlike in mobile, my provider Novus is (I believe) reselling service from one of the big networks. (The only other one I know by name is TekSavvy, but I believe there's several of them in different parts of Canada.) I'm not sure if there are similar resellers in the US. Our resellers had some legal battles to allow them to offer this service [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_Based_Billing_(UBB)#Usage... ], so maybe the legal requirements on the network holders is also a contributing factor for increased US prices.