Current trends - methodology

Definitions

Brands

• Flanker brands are brands introduced into the wireless market by an entity that already has a well-established main brand. In the Canadian market, these include brands such as Virgin Mobile and Lucky Mobile (Bell), Fido and Chatr (Rogers), Koodo and Public Mobile (TELUS), and Fizz (Vidéotron).
• Main brands are flagship brands that are most recognizable by consumers and are directly associated to the parent companies that own and operate the facilities to provide services. Such brands include Bell Mobility, Rogers, TELUS, and Vidéotron.

Reported prices

Reported price refers to the monthly prices that are publicly available to consumers as of December 31 for the collection year (2021). Entities report these prices to the CRTC via the CRTC’s Data Collection System. Entities must submit the lowest price that meets the minimum service requirements as defined in the Annual Pricing Survey. These requirements are outlined in the Communications services section below.

• Minimum service requirements: Service providers identify and report the price of the service, including those of their flanker brands that best matches the minimum service requirements identified in the survey.
• Exclusions: Extra charges are excluded. These can include charges such as activation fees, device subsidies and roaming charges. Discounts are also excluded, such as customer retention discounts and bundling discounts.

Highest and lowest prices include the highest and lowest reported prices by primary brand (including their respective flankers) by urban centre and rural community.

Communication services

Mobile service refers to “bring-your-own-device” (BYOD) 3G, LTE, LTE-A or 5G wireless service plans that are publicly available to residential consumers. Both main and flanker brands are used to determine the available prices that meet the minimum of the following baskets:

Internet service refers to fixed Internet available to residential consumers. The publicly available prices must meet the minimum requirements of the following baskets:

Process for calculating averages

We calculate averages by service, basket, and entity (regardless of flanker) using the minimum reported prices. Each entity must report the lowest non-promotional price meeting the minimum requirements for the basket.

1. To begin, we calculate an average for each province and territory by summing the prices reported in each rural community in the respective province/territory, and dividing this sum by the number of communities reported in that province/territory (communities with no prices are excluded).

   ${\displaystyle \mathrm{Provincial\; Rural\; Average}=\frac{\sum _{i=1}^n\mathrm{price\; for\; each\; rural\; community\; in\; the\; province}}{n}}$

2. We calculate the rural average for the North by dividing the sum of the territorial averages by three (the number of territories):

   ${\displaystyle \mathrm{Northern\; Rural\; Average}=\frac{\sum \mathrm{Territorial\; Rural\; Averages}}{3}}$

3. We then add this value to the sum of the provincial rural averages and divide by 11 (10 provinces and the northern rural average) to generate the national rural average:

   ${\displaystyle \mathrm{National\; Rural\; Average}=\frac{\sum \mathrm{Provincial\; Rural\; Averages}+\mathrm{Northern\; Rural\; Average}}{\mathrm{11}}}$

4. We repeat the above three calculations for urban centres.

5. Finally, we calculate the national average by dividing the sum of the urban and rural averages by two:

   ${\displaystyle \mathrm{Average}=\frac{\mathrm{Urban\; Average}+\mathrm{Rural\; Average}}{2}}$

We repeat the above process for every service, basket and year of reported prices. In previous years, if the rural average was not available, the urban average was used in its place – this is no longer part of the calculation.

List of national regions

• The North: Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut
• Prairies: British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba
• Central Canada: Ontario and Quebec
• Atlantic Provinces: Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia

List of rural communities and urban centres

The CRTC selected 55 rural communities and 24 urban centres to represent the provinces and territories.

We selected rural communities based on the following criteria:

• The community was not part of one of the census metropolitan areas of the 24 urban centres listed below.
• The community had a population density of fewer than 400 people per square kilometre, or its population centres had fewer than 1,000 people per centre.
• The number of communities selected in each province or territory reflected that province’s or territory’s proportion of the total population of Canada.
• The communities were not geographically clustered.