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According to Woodhead, the new plans “far exceed” the original purpose of the proceeding, which was to fill the gap for WiFi-first users.

“I think it’s a pretty good solution,” he said.

In their submissions, carriers argued against the imposition of a price ceiling or mandatory requirement for low-cost plans. They contend the market is already extremely competitive.

As part of the revised submissions, Rogers and Bell also proposed additional lower-end plans, with Rogers offering 250 MB for $15 per month and Bell proposing 500 MB of slower 3G data for $15 per month under its brand Lucky Mobile.

Rogers believes its new plans will help low-income households by cutting their wireless spending. Bell noted that its low-cost brand, Lucky, has expanded to all 10 provinces since its launch in December 2017.

“The geographic expansion of Lucky Mobile is a testament to the competitiveness of the retail wireless market in Canada — if the market was not competitive, we would have no reason to invest in Lucky Mobile’s expansion across the country,” Bell submitted.

Rather than getting into an argument about it, we went back and said, ‘What can we do here?’ Ted Woodhead, Telus

Yet the carriers did not heed calls to match lower prices overseas.

Rogers argued that international comparisons undertaken by the Forum for Research and Policy in Communications and the Competition Bureau were “superficial” since they weren’t adjusted for currency exchange rates and did not consider network quality or coverage.

“Not only have Canadian mobile wireless service providers made enormous investments in building LTE networks that cover almost the entirety of Canada’s sparse population, but they invest far more in network upgrades and improvements than their peers in other countries,” Rogers stated.

Telus’ submission also defended not making the lowest-cost plans available on its flagship brand, something that none of the Big Three has proposed to do under their names.

“There are no differences in network coverage, throughput, quality, etc. as a result of a customer being on one Telus brand versus another,” it stated.

The cheapest plans currently available on the Big Three’s flagship websites start at $80 for unlimited local calling and 3 GB of data.