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“Consumers would benefit from a number of alternative creative services that do not exist today,” he said. “It’s been an uphill battle.”

Next week, the CRTC will hold a hearing to investigate the state of competition in the wireless market. If the commission decides it’s not competitive enough, it will consider what actions it should take to change that.

Cogeco’s proposal sits at the extreme end of the CRTC’s options for increasing wireless competition. Desjardins Securities analyst Maher Yaghi said the upside of forcing the big telecom companies to let upstarts use their networks and infrastructure at a discount would be more consumer choice and lower prices, but the downside could be lower profits and worse network quality.

“It’s like a pendulum… if you swing it towards the consumer side and you lose all the profitability of the private companies, eventually over a few years, they’ll stop investing and the quality of the network will degrade,” Mr. Yaghi said. “The consumer will not be served as well because the service will not be good enough.”

A CRTC report on the state of the telecommunications industry released Thursday shows the growing importance of mobile wireless communication in Canada. According to the report, about two-thirds of Canadians now own a smartphone or a tablet, a major increase from 2012 when only half of Canadians owned a mobile device.