A couple recent reports highlight policy considerations to drive investment in connectivity. The Canadian Telecommunications Association has a piece, “Canada’s Connectivity Future Depends on Sustaining Investment”, and CTIA released “Wireless & AI: Driving the Future of Innovation”.
For years, I have repeated the line “Canada’s future depends on connectivity.” There may be an increasing demand for investment in connectivity, but how does it get funded? What policies can create the right environment for such investments?
Over the past four decades, the wireless industry has evolved from voice to text to mobile broadband to 5G-enabled infrastructure. But the next decade will be defined an even more consequential evolution as it fuses (and infuses) wireless networks with artificial intelligence. CTIA’s report argues that AI and wireless are more than parallel innovation tracks; they are becoming a single, interdependent system, and policy must treat them as such.
Meanwhile, Canadian data shows that even as networks become more essential, the investment environment underpinning network investment is becoming more fragile.
Taken together, the reports demonstrate that North America’s digital future hinges on more than innovation. What policy frameworks will enable and encourage long-term capital investment?
CTIA warns that AI traffic will strain existing wireless networks before the decade ends, potentially creating a drag on the economy if spectrum and infrastructure gaps aren’t addressed.
The bottleneck emerges from AI’s migration out of the data centre and into devices, sensors, vehicles, and industrial systems. What began in research labs moved into hyperscale data centres. The next wave will be found in autonomous agents embedded in smartphones, robots, drones, and industrial equipment – systems relying on wireless networks for real-time sensing, coordination, and decision-making. CTIA projects AI-related wireless traffic to grow three times faster than overall wireless traffic, reaching nearly one-third of all broadband usage by 2034.
Not only is this more traffic, it’s structurally different traffic. For the past few decades, data networks were built for downstream consumption. AI flips that model. Devices will upload massive volumes of sensor data, telemetry, and video to the network, edge, or cloud. Machine-to-machine communication is expected to increase eightfold. Traffic may be bursty, event-driven, and unpredictable. Wireless networks will need to accommodate two-way, low-latency, high-reliability traffic, evolving from a consumer broadband platform into an intelligent, bidirectional, AI-native infrastructure.
The evolution of wireless networks – 6G – will be AI-native. 6G is more than a faster version of 5G. It will be built with intelligence embedded directly into the radio layer. Networks will dynamically allocate spectrum, anticipate congestion, authenticate devices autonomously, and coordinate edge-compute workloads at machine speed. Human operators cannot manage this complexity manually. A recent article in RCRTech looked at how TELUS is using its brownfield Open RAN transformation as a foundation for such a more intelligent network.
Every wireless generation has needed more spectrum, but the AI-era demands unprecedented amounts of wide, contiguous mid-band spectrum.
Beyond spectrum, an AI–wireless future requires towers, small cells, fiber backhaul, data centers, and edge compute — billions of dollars in new investment. Wireless carriers and AI companies are already among the largest investors in infrastructure, but government policy is failing to keep pace.
As the Canadian Telecommunications Association’s PwC report highlights, Canada’s wireless price index fell more than 45% between 2020 and 2026, even as prices for shelter, food, and transportation rose sharply. Canadians are enjoying the most affordable connectivity in the country’s history, while consuming more data and relying on digital services more than ever before.
Affordability has come with a cost. TD Cowen and RBC Capital Markets have both warned that Canada may have reached a point where regulatory pressure on prices is now disincentivizing investment. Public market investors are becoming less interested in Canadian telecom stocks, raising the cost of capital and increasing hurdle rates for infrastructure deployment. RBC goes further, arguing that telecom policy can no longer be viewed solely through a consumer pricing lens — not when connectivity has become one of the most important value propositions across all household spending categories.
Yesterday, National Bank issued a report entitled “Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? Without Ottawa Resetting Regulatory Policy, Is Canada Investment A House of Cards.” Indeed, who will guard the guards themselves.
Regulation by ideology is inherently sub-optimal given a myopic perspective that is out of balance for all stakeholders and for the net good of Canada. Government policy toward telecom, which once offered a dual objective of promoting facilities-based investment and competition, has of late skewed disproportionately to the latter. Beyond Ottawa advocating for this swing of the pendulum, regulators have been over-zealous in their adversarial approach to pressuring carriers on pricing strategies, wholesale access, and administration fees. This has triggered a reaction by carriers which have accelerated headcount reduction, rethought capital allocation priorities, and reduced spending on their networks. This report isn’t about outlining Canada’s next steps. It’s about missed opportunities in broadcasting regulation, unnecessary actions by the Competition Bureau, and over-reach in telecom regulation. Without a course correction from Ottawa and its regulators, declining network investment precludes a strong foundation on which to build.
Canadian policymakers need to recalibrate the balance between quality, coverage and price: affordability gains are meaningful, but long-term consumer outcomes depend on sustained investment, not just lower prices. As National Bank writes, “Pressuring telecom pricing down further won’t turn Canada’s networks into diamonds. To the contrary, the foundational layer of Canada’s economy is naturally destined to suffer in the absence of more balanced regulation.”
The next decade of digital innovation — AI, automation, robotics, smart cities, smart farming, advanced manufacturing — will be constrained or accelerated by the health of wireless investment. Spectrum availability, regulatory certainty, infrastructure deployment, and capital investment are issues impacting national competitiveness.
Sustaining world-class connectivity requires sustaining an investment environment for the network infrastructure that makes it possible.
The policy decisions made in the next few years will determine whether investment in Canada’s telecommunications networks accelerates AI innovation — or becomes the bottleneck that holds it back.