Telecom investors may have dialed wrong number

A day of reckoning may await those investors who have bid up the share prices of Canada's established telecoms on attractive dividend growth while pushing competition concerns to the back of their minds.

The dominant players, BCE Inc's Bell companies and Telus plus cable-cum-telco Rogers, control some 95 percent of the Canadian wireless market and should gain from an explosion in smartphone use and attached rise in data, even as their landline offerings struggle. But a combination of unkind regulatory rulings and a federal government keen on increasing competition threatens to devalue billion-dollar-plus investments in upgraded networks.