It may have taken a long time but the cell phone landscape in Canada is going to start looking a bit different. The Canadian government is $4.2 billion richer with the close of the cell phone spectrum auction on Monday, while customers stand to win as five new companies are now well positioned to launch services over the next few years.

The most serious new bidder has turned out to be Globalive, which runs the Yak brand and made off with licenses pretty much everywhere except Quebec, the big three giants took the opportunity to take up some extra spectrum.

The new providers are helped out by new regulations that require existing networks to lease space on towers for new transceivers and offer roaming rates that aren’t excessively high. This is great news.