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MONTREAL ― For years, Sweden-based tefficient’s annual reports on global wireless prices have been a headache for Canadian telcos, showing that our wireless providers make more money per user than telcos anywhere else. Well, Big Telecom can breathe a sigh of relief, because Canada will no longer be appearing in tefficient’s rankings. The principal reason? Delayed data from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the regulator tasked with enforcing telecom rules. Watch: Here’s why Canadians’ cellphone bills are so insanely high. Story continues below.

“There are only two countries (of our covered 42) for which there’s not even full year 2018 data and that’s Canada and Switzerland,” tefficient founder Fredrik Jungermann said in an email to HuffPost Canada. But Jungermann also suggested another reason: The big Canadian telecom providers’ aggressive campaign to throw shade on the results of studies like these. “Another reason is the workload created when lobbyists try to shoot down the credibility of the whole report because they don’t like to see Canada presented as an outlier,” Jungermann told The Wire Report earlier this month. “We have no business in Canada and have, unlike lobbyists, no agenda.” His comments sparked accusations from consumer activists that telecom “bullying” was behind the decision to drop Canada from the rankings, with OpenMedia executive director Laura Tribe calling it a sign of how “toxic” and “powerful” telco lobbying is.

If anyone's ever wondered just how powerful (and toxic) Big Telecom's lobbying is... they've bullied impartial international analysts so much, that now **they won't even include us in the report** https://t.co/IMqeAXMV7c — Laura Tribe (@ltribe) October 4, 2019

That’s an assertion Jungermann says is exaggerated. He said he can see Canada being included again in the rankings, if the CRTC can deliver data on wireless speeds and prices in a more timely manner. Tefficient’s decision to drop Canada from its rankings comes as the country was potentially poised to improve its performance. The big telcos’ introduction of unlimited data plans this year seems to be having an impact on usage and telcos’ bottom lines. Rogers Communications warned Wednesday that its revenue growth will be much smaller than expected ― or even negative ― as a result of the popularity of its Rogers Infinite plan, which has seen one million sign-ups since the plan launched this summer. Data usage on Rogers’ network is up 50 per cent since the change, the company said.