Canadian cell phone rates may go down?

[dancin Disney style]

Are you referring to the spectrum auction where a portion of spectrum was set aside for new entrants? Though, that was barely a couple of years ago. There has been no new legislation with regard to telecommunications for many, years. In fact, the last change in legislation was to actually limit foreign ownership which reduced the ability of new competition, not increase it.

There was a report to government in 2006 with recommendations to relax foreign ownership rules, but there was never any action taken upon those recommendations.

Virgin Mobile was/is a virtual network, ie they never built their own towers, but instead simply purchased/rented spectrum from Bell. No one, but perhaps an overly optimistic Richard Branson, would have speculated that their entry into the market would have any significant effect. Far less now that they are 100% owned by Bell.

Wind's entry is a whole different ball game. They are building an actual new network, with their own towers and transmitters across the nation (with the exception of PQ). They are backed by Orascom, who has more than double the number of subscribers than Rogers, TELUS and Bell combined! Don't expect something like half price rates or anything, but I think you will see (and in fact we have already seen) an impact on the market place.

Could be...like I said I really don't remember all the details. I do remember the media buzz about how our rates would be cut.