Videotron, Freedom Sign Merger in Canada: We Have Maps
Canada may have a bigger, fourth national wireless carrier soon. Rogers, Shaw, and Quebecor have agreed(Opens in a new window) to merge Freedom Mobile with Quebecor's Videotron carrier, combining two of the nation's major regional carriers into a potential national player.
The real impetus for this is that it breaks a logjam in Rogers' tortured attempt to acquire Shaw. Rogers really wants Shaw's cable business, but regulators have been hostile to the acquisition because Rogers also runs the nation's largest wireless provider, and they didn't want more consolidation there.
The whole do-si-do would form another chapter in a saga stretching back to 2008. Canada is dominated by three wireless providers with, essentially, two radio networks: Rogers, the biggest, and Bell and Telus, which share some network elements. Canadians frequently complain that prices are high(Opens in a new window) and that the country was late to come to options like unlimited data.
Since 2008, the government has been trying to nurture a fourth competitive provider by offering startups and regional players preferential deals on wireless spectrum. Results have been uneven.
As of earlier this year, Videotron had 1.6 million mobile-phone subscribers(Opens in a new window) in Quebec. That's a healthy 22% share of the Quebec population over age 14. But Freedom's 2.2 million subscribers—stretched over Ontario, Alberta, and BC—is a mere 10.6% share of the population over age 14 in those three provinces.
We are on the road at this very moment testing the Freedom and Videotron networks in Ontario and Quebec for our Canada's Best Mobile Network feature, coming out in September. We've been testing both for years.
In our tests, Freedom and Videotron haven't had
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