The CRTC announced today it has ordered a small upstart cellphone provider to cease operations within 50 days.
Sugar Mobile found itself in hot water for allowing its customers to constantly piggy-back on the Rogers Network.
It offered plans as cheap as $19/month.
The feds have spent the past couple of years talking about bringing down costs but we still pay some of the highest wireless rates in the world.
If this company can do it, can't the Big 3?
"Actually they can but they choose not to. It's any excuse to increase the rates. For example, when the foreign exchange got weaker with the Canadian/Us dollar all three of them bumped up their prices by $5/month and there was no reason for that," explains Sugar Mobile CEO Samer Bishay. "We are just able to leverage technology to our advantage because most consumers are sitting in a Wi-Fi hotspot 90 per cent of the time."
With a Sugar Mobile app, consumers are able to use their voice and SMS services primarily over a Wi-Fi network. When that Wi-Fi network isn't available, the consumer can fall back to a 3G or LTE network.
"The biggest problem we have here is when regulation is so far behind technology what takes precedence when this technology is helping the consumer? Do we change the regulation or do we be as innovative as possible?" asks Bishay.