Using your own phone rather than buying one offered by your provider, a trend that escaped North America, is now a well-established reflex in Canada. And while consumer complaints are down, 15% have still filed one within the year and 21% have changed provider in the past two years, finds a survey commissioned by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
The document that La Presse obtained from the federal agency also paints a very precise portrait of consumers, based on a survey of 1,671 Canadian adults conducted in December 2022. The CRTC is conducting this exercise, commissioned this year from the Phoenix firm for $113,466, since 2014, which makes it possible to identify trends.
The first, persistent trend: very few Canadians are aware of the three consumer protection codes that apply to wireless services, internet services and from television providers. As many as 80% of respondents simply have “no recollection” of these codes, while only 5% claim to remember them clearly. Last year, the proportions were 76% and 4% respectively.
Yet these codes are notable wins for consumers. Established in 2013, the Wireless Code prohibits carriers from charging customers more than $50 for excessive data usage. In 2017, another code came to regulate television service providers: they must inform their customers of the existence of a basic package. Finally, since 2020, the Internet Services Code prohibits the imposition of a limit on so-called “unlimited” residential internet plans and makes it mandatory to clearly display prices.
For the first time since this survey was conducted, there are also almost as many wireless service subscribers arriving with their own phone, known as “BYOD” in English, as those buying a phone offered by their supplier. Note that 11% of consumers, in addition, choose to rent their phone, a question that the CRTC only added in 2022; 9% of respondents had then indicated that they had chosen to rent.
Overall, 88% of respondents have a wireless plan with data. Interestingly, the growing popularity of “unlimited data plans”, which actually offer reduced speeds after a certain number of gigabytes, seems to be waning. “The growing trend towards plans with unlimited data that we saw in 2022 stopped at 18%,” it notes.
The two most popular categories of data plans are those offering between 1 and 5 GB, as well as 6 and 10 GB. They attract 16% of consumers each. The vast majority of respondents, 75%, have not had to pay data overage charges in the past 12 months; 17% said they had to do it “once or twice”.
Relations between Canadian consumers and their wireless providers have certainly improved since 2014, as CRTC surveys show. While 26% of them had filed a complaint in 2014, only 15% did so in the report for 2023. In Quebec, satisfaction is even greater: 95% of respondents did not complained in the most recent survey.
There are, however, differences within consumer groups across Canada. Members of what the CRTC calls “racialized communities”, for example, complained at 21%, compared to 12% of “non-racialized”.
The most common reason for complaint was inadequate quality of service, with 43% of respondents; 36% also complained about wrongly billed fees. In the overwhelming majority of cases, 92%, complaints were made directly to the supplier. Barely 6% of consumers have done so with their provider and the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS). No one filed a complaint only with the CCTS.
Finally, 21% of respondents have decided to change supplier in the last two years, a slightly increasing trend. 16% reported this change in 2018. The main reason, cited in 69% of cases: “Another supplier presented a better offer. In 26% of cases, the consumer was dissatisfied with the services. Overall, 83% found it easy to switch providers.
