Fifteen million dollars is about six hours of Rogers’ revenue.
Canada’s Competition Tribunal ordered Rogers Communications on October 28 to pay a $15 million penalty over how it marketed its Infinite wireless plans, which were sold as unlimited data even though speeds fall hard after a set amount of use. The coverage so far reports the number and stops. Nobody has put it next to Rogers’ books, and when you do, the penalty is a rounding error.
Rogers’ third-quarter filing shows total revenue of C$5,443 million and wireless service revenue of C$2,033 million for the 92 days from July 1 to September 30. We divided it out: about C$59 million a day in total, about C$22 million a day from wireless service. The penalty is 0.28 percent of one quarter’s revenue. It equals roughly six hours of everything Rogers sells, or about 16 hours of wireless service alone. The filing prints neither of those figures; they are our arithmetic from its totals.
What the Order Contains, and What It Leaves Out
- A $15 million penalty.
- A corrective notice that Rogers must publish.
- The Bureau’s legal costs.
- No mention of refunds. The Bureau’s 2024 application asked for restitution to Infinite customers, and the Bureau’s statement on the ruling lists none. The Tribunal’s full reasons are due within ten business days, so silence is not yet a verdict.
The Bureau filed on December 23, 2024, saying speeds on these plans drop by more than 99 percent once the cap is reached. The Tribunal heard the case from March 30 to May 1 this year.
Rogers said “We stand behind our advertising and are considering next steps,” and that it introduced unlimited plans in 2019 to give customers value, MobileSyrup reported. The same report notes that Bell, Telus and Freedom Mobile also sell unlimited plans that slow down, so the ruling’s reach across the industry is unclear.
We think the weak part is the remedy. A penalty a company recovers before lunch does not deter anything, and the people who paid for “unlimited” appear to be getting a notice instead of money. If the corrective notice is the only part with teeth, it will only bite if the written reasons set a plain standard for what “unlimited” can mean in a Canadian ad.
That is what to watch when the reasons land: whether the Tribunal wrote a rule for every carrier or a verdict on one campaign.