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France and Austria, unlike Canada are very much dense so the infrastructure required to setup an LTE/UMTS/etc network is less costly. To travel from Vancouver to the next principal Canadian city (Calgary), it requires 900 KM of driving and there's only really one metropolitan area of sorts between the two, meaning that you're going to be setting up cell towers that handle only so much traffic in a day. As a result, to get service where you end up with just traffic shaping once you go beyond 6 GB (beyond that there is no real limit really), you need to go with a carrier that only services the larger cities. So in my case, my carrier services just Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, and Ottawa, which are fairly dense areas with a combined population of 18 million or so, or just about half of the country's population. Once I leave the city, I have to piggyback on to other carriers however. Hence why mobile carriers suck in Canada because the bigger carriers do not want to eat into their fairly large profit margins. They can afford to offer such plans, but they simply don't want to. For the record, I pay $40 CAD/month ($30 USD or 27 EUR) for unlimited North American calling and text plus the "unlimited" data use. |
You are wrong.
Both countries have parts of the country covered by the Alps, high mountains that make cell coverage expensive and several areas still have very spotty coverage with often very old GPRS/Edge-only cell towers.
Also there is a competition going on with more than four telecom companies competing that lowers consumers monthly costs (cell phone data plans).
Additionally the former state based telecom copper cables infastructure aged badly and hasn't been touched for 15 years and the fiber network infrastructure connects just big cities, bit not small towns in the Alps. In many areas cell connection is the only option to get 1+Mbit data connection, as the copper cable infrastructure hasn't been upgraded since the mid nineties.