Public Works recently commissioned a study to look at households that have cut the umbilical to become ‘mobile-only.’ There were a number of news reports [eg. here].
There were some interesting numbers in the reports. For now, I’ll focus on the geographic variability: the trend is more noticeable in British Columbia – TELUS territory – with 10.2 percent of all households now relying exclusively on mobile telephony. Alberta had 7.7%, while in Bell Canada’s home base, Ontario (5.3%) and Quebec (6.3%) fared significantly better.
Despite the possibility that an ILEC’s wireless operations might retain the customers, about half of all wireless customers go to one of the ‘other companies’ in any given ILEC territory.