Canada’s wireless industry turns 30

First phone cost $2,700

Victor Surerus says the $2,700 he paid for his first cellphone 30 years ago was worth every penny.

It was July 1985, and Surerus says he needed the phone to help run his business as a travelling funeral director out of Peterborough. The phone attached to an aerial in his car and came with its own carrying bag.

He says his contract with Bell made him the first cellphone customer in Canada, and that honour didn’t come cheap. In those early years, his annual bills amounted to roughly $10,000.

“The price was high to pay for it, but it was worth it,” he says now from his home in Roseneath, Ont.

Cellphones debuted in Canada on July 1, 1985, with a call between the mayors of Toronto and Montreal.

The regional monopolies that dominated the telephone industry in the early 1980s were concerned that mobile phones would disrupt their grip on nearly every aspect of the market.

Francis Fox, then the federal minister of communication, says the phone companies would defend their turf by saying their industry was heavily regulated and the CRTC was there to protect the consumer.

“Their great line was always, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,”’ he says.

Shrugging off pressure from the Reagan administration to choose a bid from a U.S. company, Fox and his team awarded the rights to the first private cellphone network to an upstart company: Rogers.

Rogers Wireless executive vice-president Raj Doshi joined the company in 1989, when it was still Cantel AT&T and mobile telephones were still a luxury item.

Doshi has the Cantel ad from January 1985 announcing “the end of the line for the telephone” framed in his office.

“When you talk about competitive intensity, it was very much around getting people aware of the proposition versus the pure competitive intensity between the two of us,” he said.

Wade Oosterman, now president of Bell Mobility, remembers it differently. In the mid-1980s he worked with George Cope, now Bell’s CEO, getting Clearnet Communications Inc. off the ground, which was later bought by Telus.

“It was competitive right from the get-go,” he said. “The cost of building out Canada is extraordinarily high: big land mass, relatively few people. When you’re spending that kind of money on deploying your network, every single subscriber really, really counts.”