Canada’s two largest CDMA carriers Bell Canada and Telus are in talks to possibly merge to allow for Bell Canada to continue to be Canadian owned and operated. In the last few months, Bell Canada has received takeover offers by American investors, however Bell has refused all offers as of presently.

If Bell Canada and Telus were to merge, the company would have 60 percent of the wireless market share in Canada.  At the moment, the only two other national carriers in Canada are GSM carriers Rogers Wireless and Fido, which are both owned by Rogers Communications.

Bell Canada and Telus also have a huge market share in landline phone, television and internet services. Bell currently operates 13 million landlines in Canada, which is just under half of the Canadian population, while Telus has just over 1 million landline subscribers.  Bell Canada also operates one of the largest portfolios of TV stations in Canada with operating The Comedy Network (Canadian equivalent of Comedy Central), CTV (ABC/NBC), TSN (ESPN) and MuchMusic (VH1).

If the merger is approved by the Canadian government, the newly merged company will have a combined total wireless customer base of 10.6 million people on CDMA and iDEN in Canada.

This could possibly be good news for regional based CDMA carrier MTS-Allstream since they are possibly in the works to become the newest nation-wide wireless carrier. They are currently a regional carrier that is made up from a merger between western Canadian based carrier MTS and the former AT&T Canada (Allstream). The carrier currently has over 300,000 subscribers in the Canadian province of Manitoba alone.

Monopoly

It is.

Also, Foreign businesses currently aren’t allowed to own Canadian communication companies, they can set up shop as MVNO (MNVO?)s if a Canadian company helps set up operations, ie Virgin Mobile was set up in Canada by Bell, ampd by Telus

They should allow for any company to own a telecomunications company here in Canda, just look at t-mobile in the US.