Canadian cable, phone, and satellite providers have done a better job stymieing would-be “cord-cutters” than their counterparts further south in the United States.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC) annual report on the country’s telecom companies shows all of them remain exceptionally profitable, keeping pay TV customers far more effectively than American providers. Total revenues climbed from $12.5 billion to $13.5 billion in just one year, as price hikes, Internet Overcharging schemes like usage-based billing, and lack of competition continue to takes its toll on Canadian wallets.

The biggest winners were the biggest telecom companies in Canada — Rogers Communications, Bell Canada (BCE), and Shaw Communications, which all saw profits soar 8.2% to $11 billion.  Costs increased about 10.7% in 2011, fueled by network upgrades and rampant hikes in programming costs — an interesting state of affairs considering Rogers and Bell own or control a substantial number of the programmers demanding higher payments.  Most of those increases were passed on to customers in the form of rate hikes.

Although Canadians are increasingly interested in streaming online video, virtually every major Internet Service Provider in the country has effectively prevented customers from dropping cable television service in favor of broadband-only access.  They manage it with usage caps and usage billing on their broadband products.  With streamed video accounting for a substantial drain on customers’ monthly usage allowances, Canadians are unlikely to cancel cable TV in favor of watching all of their favorite shows online.

In fact, the number of Canadian households that subscribed to a cable company’s basic television service actually increased by 2.8% in 2011 to reach 8.5 million.  Experts say the country’s transition to digital over the air television may account for some of that increase, but a few high broadband bills with overlimit fees for “excessive Internet use” can effectively drive online video fans back to traditional cable TV as well.

Satellite television in Canada remained flat,  with a virtually unchanged 2.9 million Canadians relying on Bell and Shaw satellite service for television entertainment.

But everyone is paying more to watch.

In 2011, cable companies paid $2.1 billion in wholesale fees to the pay and specialty services they distribute, an increase of 10.2% over the $1.9 billion paid the previous year. The fees paid by satellite companies rose by 2.8% in one year, going from $894.4 million to $919 million.

That leaves vertically and horizontally-integrated conglomerates like Bell in the perfect position to extract higher programming payments.  Those costs are passed down to Canadian consumers and blamed on “greedy programmers,” despite the fact those programmers are owned in part or outright by Bell.

A Rogers retail rental store

Rogers is also well-suited to remain a part of the Canadian entertainment experience.  The company owns cable systems, wireless phone networks, programmers, and even home video stores. However Stop the Cap! reader Alex notes Rogers has been closing a number of those video stores over the past few months.

“This gives customers one less choice for renting movies, basically forcing them to use Rogers On Demand instead,” writes Alex.

Rogers On Demand comes with a higher price, too.  In-store rentals from Rogers are priced at 2 for $9 or 3 for $15.  A recent look at Rogers’ video on demand website, Rogers Anyplace TV, shows most movie titles priced at $4.99 each.  With Rogers closing 40 percent of their retail rental outlets, movie fans have had fewer competitive choices for movie rentals.

One potential new contender coming to Canada – kiosk video rentals.  Although services like Redbox are now commonplace in the States, they are virtually unknown in the north.  Jim Gormley, former owner of Jumbo Video is back with Planet DVD.  With just 2% of Canadians renting movies from kiosks, Gormley believes there is plenty of room to grow, especially as Rogers scales back its video rental business.

Planet DVD has a pilot project running with supermarket chain Sobeys to place kiosks in front of nine store locations.  The first kiosk was erected in early March in front of a Sobeys store in Mississauga, Ont.

A new release at a Planet DVD kiosk is priced at $3 for a one-day rental.  That’s less than what most video stores charge, but more than double what Americans pay at a Redbox kiosk.

If you want better Canadian broadband with fewer tricks and traps and live in Ontario or Quebec: put the house up for sale, pack up your things, and head west.

Canada’s heavily metered and capped broadband is ubiquitous in the country’s two most-populated provinces where a convenient duopoly of Bell and Rogers in Ontario and Bell and Videotron in Quebec control the vast majority of the broadband market.  But cross west into Saskatchewan and things start to look a lot better.

Canadians telecommunications consultancy The Seaboard Group praised SaskTel, the provincial phone company, for refusing to slap usage caps on its customers.  SaskTel does not deliver the cheapest Internet access by any means, but the company is investing heavily in fiber optic upgrades to turn the page on aging copper wire infrastructure.  Stringing fiber through Regina, Saskatoon and beyond may seem counterintuitive to other providers.  Saskatchewan, one of Canada’s “prairie provinces,” is hardly packed with people.  With more than 20 million Canadians living in Ontario and Quebec, Saskatchewan gives its 1 million residents a lot of open space.  Sparser populations usually translate into higher costs per customer for upgrades, but SaskTel persists.

SaskTel has historically relied on traditional DSL and has competition in larger communities from Shaw Cable, western Canada’s largest cable operator.  Although SaskTel’s DSL delivers lower speeds than Shaw can provide, it does so with no usage limits.

Shaw’s decision to provide considerably more generous usage allowances has kept the pressure on SaskTel to upgrade its infrastructure to compete.

SaskTel CEO Ron Styles told the Leader-Post its fiber optic network will give cable a run for its money, and until then, it is satisfied undercutting cable pricing for broadband, delivering a far better experience than either Rogers or Bell provides eastern Canadians, Styles says.

Seaboard president Iain Grant found that what customers are willing to pay for service can also influence what prices providers charge.

“The price is more based on what you’re prepared to pay,” Grant said.

People in western Canada evidently are not willing to hand over as much money as their friends in Ontario and Quebec.

West of Saskatchewan lies Alberta and British Columbia — Telus territory.  Telus is western Canada’s largest phone company and also principally competes with Shaw Cable.

Shaw has forced Telus to back down on fueling enhanced revenue with usage caps of its own, and has been aggressively upgrading its network with additional fiber optics and DOCSIS 3 technology, forcing Telus to embark on its own upgrade effort.

Macleans reports western Canada’s more-competitive broadband market has been good for consumers, but has also exposed a difference in priorities for providers.

With Shaw breathing down its neck, Telus has committed to a $3 billion fiber optic network expansion in B.C., improved wireless coverage, and more IPTV service.  Macleans notes Telus is the only major telecom or cable company in Canada that hasn’t purchased a television asset, focusing instead on its core businesses of connecting customers.

In eastern Canada, Bell faces Rogers and Videotron.  Critics contend Bell sees no imminent threats there, and the phone giant is spending its money elsewhere, announcing a $3.4 billion acquisition of Astral Media — an entertainment company owning 24 specialty cable channels and pay-TV networks, including the Movie Network and HBO Canada.

Bell’s latest “investment” follows its 2010 $1.3 billion buyout of CTV and last year’s $1.32 billion co-purchase of Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment (the other buyer was their ‘arch-competitor’ Rogers Communications).

While Telus spends money on upgrading its broadband and video services to customers, Bell is positioning itself to control 34% of Canada’s TV universe.  Bell is also the same company that advocated slapping nationwide usage-based pricing on Canadian broadband consumers to pay for the “network upgrades” it contends were needed to handle increasing demand.

Ever wonder why cell phone companies are upset about new regulations that would warn customers when they are about to face mobile usage overlimit or roaming fees?  Rogers Communications explains why in their latest quarterly results:

Nadir Mohamed, CEO:

There was, however, a sequential slowing in the wireless data revenue growth rate, and that’s primarily attributable to new outbound data roaming plans that we put in place. With these new plans, we put in place automated customer notification mechanisms that had a net effect of slowing usage versus stimulating it to the degree that we expected it to. We’re in the process of modifying how these plans and notifications work, which I expect will have a more stimulative effect and help restore the trajectory we had for wireless data growth.

In simpler terms, Rogers began notifying their customers through text messaging when they were about to start data roaming — the most expensive data usage around, incurred when you leave Rogers’ service area and roam on another provider’s network.  With Canadians visiting the United States and elsewhere, using a cell phone while traveling can get expensive fast.  Rogers created new roaming data plans for customers likely to need the service while abroad.  But their roaming data plans come at steep prices:

Unintended consequences: When subscribers know they are about to pay more, they stop using.

U.S. Data Passes

Day Pass: $5 for 2MB
Day Pass: $10 for 10MB
Day Pass: $20 for 40MB
Week Pass: $25 for 15MB
Week Pass: $50 for 60MB
Week Pass: $100 for 250MB

The warnings that customers were about to incur even higher a-la-carte roaming fees or start to consume their day or weekly data pass had the unintended, but highly predictable effect of getting people to think carefully about using data while roaming.

Bruce

While good for consumers, that is bad for Rogers’ bottom line, so the company’s formerly frank warnings to customers are “being modified” to help the company “stimulate” revenue and restore the predicted revenue growth from the high-priced roaming plans.

“We tried to create real transparency about when people and how people could get on data packages as they went overseas,” admits Robert Bruce, president of Rogers Communications Division. “We put in a fair number of reminders to let people know that they were on à la carte pricing, and we think that these dissuaded significantly customers from using it and possibly created some confusion along the way.”

Rogers Cable customers are also finding some of the company’s newest innovations a challenge to their monthly broadband usage allowances, among the lowest in Canada:

• Rogers Remote TV Manager: Enables cable subscribers to search programming and manage PVR recordings anytime on any device;
• Rogers Live TV. This service lets cable customers stream live TV channels on their tablets and watch shows anywhere they are in the home;
• Rogers On Demand TV app on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 LIVE platform, bringing Rogers On Demand TV to the gaming console;
• A refresh of the digital cable user interface, improving ease of use for the Whole Home PVR and a better program guide and search function.

In the long term, Rogers is moving towards an IP-based delivery system for its video programming, allowing the company to deliver video across different platforms more efficiently.  As Rogers converts the rest of its cable systems to digital cable, it is opening up new broadband capacity — a critical part of the company’s revenues.

Rogers admits it uses data caps to drive revenue.  By moving customers into higher usage, more expensive tiers, Rogers is able to drive revenue upwards as well.

“As customers continue every quarter, in and out, to consume more and more and spend more and more time on the Internet, we think it’s both a great opportunity for us and a welcome addition to the product offering from a customer perspective,” Bruce said.

Just a few weeks after announcing $2 rate increases on most tiers of the company’s broadband service, Rogers Communications has announced speed upgrades and tiny increases in usage allowances for certain customers:

• Express: download speeds will increase from up to 12Mbps to up to 18Mbps and data allowance will increase from 60GB to 70GB.
• Extreme: download speeds will increase from up to 24Mbps to up to 28Mbps and data allowance will increase from 100GB to 120GB.

These enhancements apply to customers utilizing Rogers DOCSIS 3.0 capabilities. Rogers will start rolling out the faster speeds to existing Express tier customers currently receiving download speeds of up to 12 Mbps starting January 26^th and will continue over the following weeks. New customers will experience faster speeds beginning February 21^st. All new and existing customers will benefit from higher data allowances starting March 8^th.

Rogers has played repeatedly with their usage allowances, particularly for its Extreme tier, which has seen increases and decreases over the past few years:

Rogers Extreme Tier Usage Cap History

• 2009: 95GB per month
• 2010: Reduced to 80GB per month (-15GB)
• 2011: Increased to 100GB per month (+20GB)
• 2012: Increased to 120GB per month (+20GB)

Rogers’ Express service gets just a 10GB monthly bump, making the speed upgrade less valuable because customers are restrained from using the service.

Rogers says the incremental upgrades are a result of Canadians using the Internet more than ever.

“Rogers customers are increasingly watching movies on Rogers on Demand Online, working from home and using multiple devices like tablets and laptops connected by Wi-Fi to the internet,” said John Boynton, executive vice-president and chief marketing officer at Rogers Communications. “The ways Canadians are using the internet are changing dramatically and we are constantly reviewing our plans and policies to ensure they deliver the best possible customer experience that lines up with evolving needs and usage patterns.”

Apparently those living in western Canada use the Internet even more, because Shaw Communications’ comparable broadband tiers are much more generous:

Shaw Communications Usage Allowances

• High Speed 10Mbps: 125GB per month
• High Speed 20Mbps: 200GB per month
• Broadband 50Mbps: 400GB per month