The CCTS publishes a spreadsheet of every complaint it accepts. When you count it by provider, two lines do something the press releases never mention: a prepaid brand sold from convenience-store counters became the sixth most-complained-about carrier in Canada, and a brand whose complaints fell 61 percent in a year did not get any better.
We built a page that ranks every provider by CCTS complaints, year over year, from the open data the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services releases with each report. Most of what it shows is expected. Rogers and Shaw, now counted together, are a third of everything. Fido is up 156 percent. Billing is the top issue everywhere. Two providers, though, moved in ways that only make sense once you know what was happening to their customers.
SpeakOut: 32 complaints a year, then 638 in six months
SpeakOut Wireless is the prepaid brand sold at 7-Eleven. It is run by Ztar Mobile, which also sells Good2Go Mobile, and neither owns a network: Ztar paid Rogers to carry its customers. For years it was a footnote in the CCTS data. The CCTS accepted 32 complaints about SpeakOut in the year to July 2024, and 37 in the year to July 2025, ranking it 31st among providers both times.
In the six months from August 2025 to January 2026 it accepted 638. That put SpeakOut sixth in the country, ahead of Freedom Mobile and Virgin Plus. Good2Go went from 12 complaints a year to 173 in the same six months. Counted together, Ztar's two brands drew 811 complaints, more than Koodo.
The month-by-month count tells the story:
| Month accepted | SpeakOut complaints |
|---|---|
| July 2025 | 7 |
| August | 55 |
| September | 64 |
| October | 146 |
| November | 119 |
| December | 125 |
| January 2026 | 129 |
What happened is on the public record, because it ended up in front of the CRTC. Rogers ended Ztar's resale agreement in December 2024, telling the Commission that Ztar owed it money and that the 3G network SpeakOut's phones ran on was being phased out. Rogers set a disconnection date of June 4, 2025. The day before it, Ztar went to the CRTC, and the two companies then agreed to push the date to December 11, 2025. Ztar says it began telling customers in July 2025 that the old service was ending. By September those customers were describing SIM swaps that failed with activation errors, balances rolled into new 30-day plans costing $19 to $47, the popular $25 plan gone, and support lines they could not reach. Rogers cut Ztar off on December 11, the day it says it shut down its 3G network, and after a further request gave Ztar access to its number-porting system until January 22, 2026.
On January 27 Ztar asked the CRTC to order that access restored, saying up to 40,000 disconnected customers had not yet moved their numbers and pointing, as evidence of the harm, to the complaints about porting that had been filed against it at the CCTS. Rogers answered that the vast majority of those numbers had shown no activity in the 90 days before disconnection. In Telecom Decision CRTC 2026-211, issued August 18, 2026, the Commission refused by majority, finding that Rogers had met its contractual obligations, given sufficient notice, and followed the porting rules. It directed Ztar to tell its disconnected customers, across all its brands, about other ways to get service and that the CCTS is available for individual complaints. It also warned that numbers disconnected in December may already have been reassigned. One commissioner dissented, agreeing Ztar had no case against Rogers but writing that some customers "emerged from the process lacking a workable means to recover numbers."
The complaints in the data are those customers. And they look different from other providers' complaints in a way the counts alone do not show. Most CCTS complaints are resolved at the first step, when the CCTS refers the file back to the provider and the provider fixes it: 79 percent of all complaints in the period never went past that stage. For SpeakOut, only 33 percent stopped there. More than half went to conciliation, where CCTS staff have to broker a resolution, and 11 percent to full investigation, nearly three times the overall rate. At the data cut-off, 37 percent of SpeakOut's complaints were still waiting on the CCTS, against 13 percent overall. When the provider itself is being cut off its network, "refer it back to the provider" does not work.
Public Mobile: down 61 percent, and no better
Public Mobile, the Telus-owned prepaid brand, is the one large provider whose complaints fell sharply: 793 in the year to July 2024, then 312 in the year to July 2025. On its own that reads like a turnaround. The monthly count says otherwise:
| Month accepted | Public Mobile complaints |
|---|---|
| February 2024 | 28 |
| March | 177 |
| April | 246 |
| May | 100 |
| June | 49 |
| July | 45 |
| August | 18 |
Public Mobile normally draws 20 to 35 complaints a month. In March, April and May 2024 it drew 523. That is the whole year's difference. Strip those three months out and the "61 percent improvement" disappears; the brand ran at the same rate before the spike and after it, and in January 2026 posted 53, its highest month since the spike ended.
The spring of 2024 was when Public Mobile ended its legacy rewards program and moved every customer to its newer Public Points, effective May 1. Under the old program a long-tenured customer could earn up to $5 in credit every 30 days; the new one paid 10 points a year. Customers who say they were promised the old program would last as long as they stayed filed CCTS complaints in volume. Public Mobile objected to the complaints on one ground: a rewards program is a loyalty initiative, not a telecom service, and outside the CCTS's mandate. The CCTS rejected the objection and accepted the complaints. It also told MobileSyrup something worth keeping: it "cannot direct a service provider to change its policy or practices."
That is exactly what the data shows. The complaints were accepted, handled one at a time, and the program change stood. What did not change was what Public Mobile customers complain about. In the year of the spike, the two issues raised most often were a credit or refund not received (27 percent of issues) and changes to the contract (26.5 percent). In the year after, they were changes to the contract (26.7 percent) and a credit or refund not received (25.2 percent). No other provider in our table comes close to that concentration. The spike was the rewards program; the baseline is the same two complaints, month after month.
What both lines say about the numbers
Annual complaint totals get reported as if they measured customer service. These two show they mostly measure decisions. SpeakOut's number is a wholesale contract ending and a network being switched off under its customers, up to 40,000 of whom Ztar said had not yet moved their numbers. Public Mobile's is one loyalty program being replaced with a worse one. In both cases the complaints arrived in a burst, a few weeks after the decision, and in both cases the CCTS could resolve the individual files but not undo the decision that caused them.
That is the honest version of what a CCTS complaint does. It is free, the provider has to answer it, and it can get you a refund, a credit, a contract released or a charge removed, up to $5,000. It cannot make a provider keep a rewards program or stay on a network. If your problem is the first kind, file; the numbers above are thousands of people who did. If it is the second kind, the complaint still counts, because it becomes part of the record the CRTC reads when it decides what the rules should be. It just will not fix it for you.
If you are a SpeakOut or Good2Go customer still sorting out a number or a balance, the CRTC's decision says you can bring it to the CCTS, and that Rogers, which holds the numbers, is best placed to say whether yours can still be recovered. Our SpeakOut and Good2Go guide has the numbers each brand publishes, a template for a lost number or balance, and the deadline that matters most: the one-year CCTS window for the December disconnection closes in December 2026. Public Mobile customers have their own guide, which starts with the fact that the brand has no phone support, so the written record is the whole record.
Sources
- Complaint counts: CCTS open data published with the 2023-24 and 2024-25 annual reports and the 2025-26 mid-year report, counted by the date the CCTS accepted each complaint. Contains information licensed by CCTS under its data licence.
- Ztar and Rogers: Telecom Decision CRTC 2026-211 (August 18, 2026), including the dissent of Commissioner Bram Abramson; MobileSyrup, August 12, 2025; customer accounts in iPhone in Canada, September 18, 2025.
- Public Mobile rewards change: MobileSyrup, April 1, 2024 (including the CCTS statement) and iPhone in Canada, June 11, 2024 (Public Mobile's objection).
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