Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay Random
Population density of Canada: 8.3 per square mile, including over a million square miles in the Yukon, NWT, and Nunavut where you can bet your bottom dollar Rogers isn't even *thinking* of providing service. In the areas where Rogers does have service, the density is a great deal higher than that.
Population density of Iceland: 7.5 per square mile.
Furthermore, the population of Canada, and therefore the potential number of cellular customers, is 100 times that of Iceland. The Canadian market is big enough to allow economies of scale that Iceland just can't match.
So let's try again. If Iceland can have profitable cell providers offering cheap and flexible plans, including data, without the nuisances, never-never plans, and vendor lock-ins that plague our market, why can't we? We've ruled out population density; we've ruled out the total size of the market. What's left?
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This is a coverage map of the largest company in Iceland, Siminn:
Now that we know Iceland is a bit smaller than Kentuky we can see from this map just how much they actually have to cover compared to Canada.
Basically their coverage would have to go on the outsides of the KY border.
Futuremore Iceland has the laregest mobile phone users per capita in the world. As of 2005 103.4% of the population of Iceland were using mobile phones, while Canada was sitting below 60% of their population.
So in having to cover a coast line of about 4,970km, which is about equal to covering Highway 1 from Vancouver to Toronto, would be very cheap to maintain compared to the infustructer that a Canadian company would have to maintain regardless of having more actual customers. Not to mention Canada has one of the lowest population densities in the world.
I also took a look at the Siminn website. They have one mobile plan "Unsurpassable" which includes 300 minutes, 180 TXT, 3MB Data for the price of 4,990 ISK (~$65 CND).
Doesn't sound like that great of a deal to me!