{"id":13261,"date":"2020-01-20T06:04:18","date_gmt":"2020-01-20T11:04:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/?p=13261"},"modified":"2020-01-20T05:54:06","modified_gmt":"2020-01-20T10:54:06","slug":"youre-paying-for-spectrum-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/?p=13261","title":{"rendered":"Paying for spectrum policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an article in the Financial Post<\/a> this past Friday, an economist calculates that Canadians’ mobile bills include a hidden tax of 12-16% to cover the fees paid by carriers to the government for spectrum. <\/p>\n

Robert Crandall calculates the spectrum fees paid by Canadian carriers to be 4 times what European carriers are paying, adding more than $4 billion per year to Canadians’ mobile services bills. According to Crandall<\/a>, “If spectrum costs were as low as those paid by European wireless carriers, Canadian wireless rates could be as much as 12 percent lower.”<\/p>\n

Crandall is a Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute<\/a> and he has authored or co-authored 8 books and more than 40 articles on communications policy. He is currently a consultant to TELUS and has served as a consultant to Canada’s Competition Bureau, the FCC, the FTC, and the Department of Justice in the US. <\/p>\n

So, we have an interesting tension: We want carriers to invest in state-of-the-art networks and offer leading edge services to all Canadians throughout this country, which requires capital for hard assets and for acquisition of spectrum. The government is calling for more competition and lower prices, but has handed the Minister a mandate<\/a> that could continue to inflate spectrum prices through scarcity caused by new-entrant set-asides.<\/p>\n

Over the past few months, I have written a number of pieces looking at Canadian spectrum policy, including: <\/p>\n