Tiny SaskTel tops our Canadian cell-phone service Ratings

Consumer Reports News: December 07, 2010 04:08 PM

Canadian cell-phone customers have an entirely different choice in carriers than do Americans. But our new reader-satisfaction Ratings for Canadian carriers shares a key feature with our U.S rankings: A smaller regional provider outscores the bigger national carriers in customer satisfaction.

As in last year's survey of Canadian providers, the top scores went to SaskTel, which provides service to Saskatchewanians, and prepaid specialist Virgin Mobile. And this year, Telus Mobility and Fido are more satisfying to their customers than Rogers and Bell Mobility among national carriers. The survey of over 12,000 readers in September 2010 also yielded enough data to rate MTS Communications, which serves consumers in Manitoba.

Subscribers can access the full Ratings of Canadian providers for details on how the carriers stack up both overall and on specific attributes, including value; voice, texting, and data satisfaction; and how well and courteously they handle customer service issues and problems.

We're not able to provide a list of phones from our Ratings of smart phones and cell phones that are available in Canada. But you'll find quite a number of the phones we've tested are offered by Canadian carriers. Prices may, of course, differ from those in the U.S.

Consumer Reports provides Canada Extra information for our hundreds of thousands of subscribers north of the border, both in print and online. The content includes, for many product categories (within and beyond electronics), identifying models we've tested in the U.S that are available in Canada, with their Canadian prices and model numbers. We also provide contact information for manufacturers, consumer agencies, and others in Canada. A Canadian myself (I'm from Ottawa), I oversee the section, albeit from my New York-area office.

—Paul Reynolds