Canada coverage

What the Canada numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 58 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 13 Mbps, is the one that matters. It is the speed in the worst tenth of the day, when the cell above the station is full and everybody around you is on it too. A country with a high median and a low floor is a country that works beautifully right up until the moment you actually need it.

If the trip depends on video calls or tethering, plan around the busy figure rather than the typical one.

What happens in Canada when the network is busy

Congestion is not a fault, it is a Tuesday evening. The question is what your eSIM can do about it, and for most travel eSIMs the answer is nothing: one wholesale agreement per country, one network, and no way out except buying a second eSIM from somebody else while standing in the street.

Here, Orbislo traffic runs over Rogers and Bell. When the network you are on degrades we move you to another one, mid trip, without you asking, and tell you afterwards rather than interrupting you at the time.

Mobile operators in Canada

• Rogers: Rogers was the biggest buyer in Canada's 2021 3500 MHz auction, winning 325 licences for 3,325,600,269 dollars and covering about 34.96 million people.
• Bell: Bell Mobility won 271 licences in the 2021 3500 MHz auction for 2,074,088,697 dollars, and TELUS won 142 licences for 1,947,488,091 dollars, against 325 licences for Rogers.
• Vidéotron: Vidéotron won 294 licences in the 2021 3500 MHz auction for 829,966,483 dollars, with those licences covering about 30 million people, more than the 24.9 million covered by TELUS's 3500 MHz licences.
• TELUS: In the 2023 3800 MHz auction TELUS took the most licences, 1,430 for 619,644,666 dollars. Bell won 939 for 518,066,254 dollars, Rogers 860 for 474,766,132 dollars and Vidéotron 305 for 298,901,400 dollars.
• Rogers: Rogers took 52 licences in the 2019 600 MHz low-band auction for 1,725,006,000 dollars, covering 35.15 million people. TELUS won 12 licences, Freedom 11 and Vidéotron 10, while Bell won none.

Older networks in Canada

• Bell's 3G/HSPA network stopped being available in Manitoba from 31 December 2025, and the national discontinuation date is 1 March 2027. From then, calls on Bell need a phone that supports VoLTE on its 4G or 5G network.
• Rogers is retiring its 2G network on 30 November 2027. A phone without VoLTE makes its voice calls over 2G even when it shows 4G or 5G, so after that date such a phone loses service completely on Rogers, including 911.

5G in Canada

• Rogers started Canada's first 5G rollout on 15 January 2020 in downtown Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, first on 2.5 GHz spectrum, with 600 MHz and later 3.5 GHz to follow.
• Canada's 3500 MHz auction ran from 15 June to 23 July 2021 and raised 8.91 billion dollars. It awarded 1,495 of 1,504 licences to 15 companies, 757 of them to small and regional providers, with up to 50 MHz set aside for smaller carriers where available.
• Canada auctioned 3800 MHz spectrum for 5G in an auction whose final results were published on 30 November 2023, with Bell, Rogers, TELUS and Vidéotron each taking hundreds of licences across the country.

Network notes for Canada

• On 8 July 2022 a failure in Rogers' core network cut wireless and wireline service across Canada from 4:58 EDT until 7:00 EDT the next day, affecting more than 12 million customers, including payment services such as Interac e-Transfer.
• During the July 2022 Rogers outage, a large share of Rogers customers could not reach 9-1-1, and emergency public alerts were also affected, because the failed core network also connected customers to emergency services.
• On 1 June 2017 the telecom regulator directed all Canadian telephone companies to upgrade their networks so they are ready to carry next-generation 9-1-1, covering both voice calls and text messages to emergency centres.
• Since September 2022, Canada's main carriers have been bound by a memorandum that lets a customer of a failed network roam onto another carrier for voice, text and data where technically feasible, with 9-1-1 voice traffic given priority over all other wireless traffic as far as feasible.