Canadian Telecom Lobbyists Influence Swedish Firm to Stop Including Canada in Worldwide Price Report ⇥ thewirereport.ca

Anja Karadeglija, the Wire Report:

Tefficient, a Swedish consulting company that has released a number of telecom price reports highlighting Canada as one of the highest-priced jurisdictions for such services, will no longer be including the country in at least one future research report, The Wire Report has learned.

The “fact that the data is reported so late for Canada (and since none of the carriers report data traffic or usage) we aren’t too interested in incorporating Canada in our analyses going forward,” Fredrik Jungermann, founder of Tefficient, said in an email when asked about the company’s information on Canadian telecom pricing. He noted that was “primarily” the driver of that decision.

He said that “another reason is the workload created when lobbyists try to shoot down the credibility of the whole report because they don’t like to see Canada presented as an outlier. We have no business in Canada and have, unlike lobbyists, no agenda.”

Canadian cellular plans are among the highest in the world by an obscene margin. We pay more than those who live in any other developed country; this is something that multiple studies have confirmed for years. Everyone knows it, and the lobbyists for our major telecom providers want us to forget it.