Wireless carriers claims are a lot like accountants – you know the old saying – “figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” The numbers released for carriers can be manipulated in many ways, and the truth is sometimes hard to determine, and this is particularly true when another company is trying to make themselves sound better or the rival company sound worse. The latest claims are from Bell in the form of a pepperoni pizza video – yes, you read that correctly. For their marketing tool, a brief video quickly explains why they have the most coverage – comparing the coverage of pepperoni (that represents the cell towers) on a pizza (that represents Canada). Throughout the video the narrator says, “Cell towers are like pepperoni on a pizza. On some networks, there is hardly any pepperoni. Some slices get lucky with pepperoni and other slices barely have a pepperoni to share. How could they even call this a pepperoni pizza? You mobile network should have the most cell towers, just like your pizza should be covered in pepperoni. The right network makes all the difference.”
Bell is the third-largest carrier by subscribers, and their recent Q4 results show a customer base of 8,245,831 – up 1.6-percent over the Q4 in 2014. Another truth is that it was ranked the fastest mobile network in Canada by PCMag and an OpenSignal study. Bell also claims they offer access to Canada’s largest LTE network by covering over 32 million people from coast-to-coast. Now it may mean the largest coverage because they measured the distance between the towers furthest to the east to the one furthest to the west – it is hard to tell. Bell also claims to have the largest WiFi network across Canada with over 4000 hotspots, and they are also tied in with participating McDonalds, Chapters Indigo, and Tim Hortons.
In the gallery below, you can see the Bell, Telus and Rogers networks and just how many cell towers the each has and their distribution across the nation. If Bell is bold enough to equate a cell tower with a piece of pepperoni on a pizza, then we can be bold enough to say that the Rogers’ network offers more pepperoni and more even distribution.
https://youtu.be/hnzfOT8QuA8
