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Canada is, and for a little while has been, being sold out from under the feet of Canadians. Just recently the head of the CRTC (Canada's broadcast regulatory b

Canada is, and for a little while has been, being sold out from under the feet of Canadians. Just recently the head of the CRTC (Canada's broadcast regulatory body) came under fire for having drinks at a pub with executives from some Canadian telecom companies, just weeks before some regulations that heavily favored them were released. The major reason for the prices is the federally enforced monopoly that Canadian telecom companies have in Canada. It's effectively illegal for foreign telecom companies to do business in Canada, which results in a market where prices are high, and rather similar across the board. In other-words: we're seeing classic monopoly economics happen thanks to regulation specifically designed to enable monopolies. The CRTC is frequently criticized as being an unelected and unaccountable agency. What's making things more difficult for Canadians too is the current administration's approach to the CRTC, which has been to vastly expand their power as an agency. That, and frequent back-tracking on regulatory decisions which are unpopular with the telecom companies, but popular with the Canadian people.

bcrl 5y ago
Some slight errors in your comment: the current chair of the CRTC (Ian Scott) met with the current CEO of Bell (Mirko Bibic) shortly after the wholesale rate implementation for DSL and cable internet services proceeding began back in 2019. The CRTC's ruling on that proceeding in May basically set rates to the interim rates less a 10% temporary markup, rather than the >50% lower wholesale rates that were set back in 2019. Bell had appealed to cabinet and taken the CRTC to the supreme court to fight the lower wholesale rates. After Bell lost all of those appeals, the CRTC gave up on the lower rates. The amount of pressure on the CRTC to avoid setting lower rates was significant. Major wholesale based ISPs stood to get hundreds of millions of dollars in refunds since the interim rates would have been adjusted to the lower rates retroactively. This made the incumbents highly motivated to fight the issue. The sad part is that these GAS wholesale rates are basically irrelevant to Bell at this point. Bell only has to provide wholesale access to DSL under the GAS tariffs in question, which basically limits wholesale ISPs to DSL speeds less than 50 Mbps at the current rate of $23.79/month per access. Bell has already made significant deployment of FTTH/FTTP, but those services are only available under the disaggregated tariffs at interim rates of $121.79/month per access. Bell sells their own FTTH services at retail rates of $90/month for 1.5 Gbps, less for lower speeds. I've participated in a few CRTC proceedings, and having seen what just happened, I have no faith that the Ian Scott will make any pro-consumer decisions. One of the excuses used to justify the backpeddling is that they incorrectly calculated the cost of umbilical fibres, by using filings made by Bell whinging that they have to run entirely new fibre all the way to the remotes. Any reasonable carrier in the developed world would make use of CWDM or DWDM hardware to add capacity in full umbilical fibres feeding DSL remotes. If you have a GPON segment that is out of umbilical fibres, you can deploy 10G EPON or XGSPON instead and use a 1x64 splitter instead of a 1x32 splitter while having oodles of spare capacity. There are 2 proceedings of interest to me that are active at the moment. One is to try to figure what to do with the disaggregated regime which has basically seen 0 deployment as the cost per CO is in the $50k-250k on top of the $121.79 per premises monthly access. For reference GAS (aka aggregated wholesale access) has a total setup cost in the ballpark of $10,000 to access all of Bell's network across Ontario and Quebec. The other relates to access to poles owned by the incumbents. Both of these are critical to competitive ISPs (like the facilities based FTTH provider I founded) and could help make things for competitors easier. But we're only 8 months into a proceeding that's likely to last 2+ years. As a facilities based provider I've had to eat losses on 3 large projects where the incumbent came in an decided to roll out service across 15 kilometer markets they had ignored for decades prior to my company showing up. They use tricks like delaying and denying permits for reasons as simple as "the pole owner isn't right on the CAD drawing" adding 30 day delays. The CRTC should be the one fixing these issues, but it's almost always too little too late. I could go on. My telecom in Canada rant generally takes more than 2 hours to get through...
sudosysgen 5y ago
Yes. Beyond that, even local attempts at breaking the oligopoly, either by regional players or provincial governments, are politicked out of existence. I'm however not so confident that allowing foreign telecoms would fix everything. Likely they'd just add a fourth partner to the price fixing, as happens in Québec with Videotron.
- trutannus 5y ago
  > even local attempts at breaking the oligopoly, either by regional players or provincial governments, are politicked out of existence Not even that, but there's a lower limit of how cheap those providers can be since, in the majority of cases, they're actually just using the Big Three's telecom infrastructure anyway. While I have no proof of this, I strongly suspect that the Big Three throttle connections over these too, given how unreliable the third-party vendor's connections are.
  - perardi 5y ago
    This may be on the particular ISP I had (Distributel…it’s what the landlord had…sigh…), but it seems like Bell and Rogers don’t really provide much transparency into network status to those third-party providers. If there was a network glitch, Distributel’s customer service defaulted to “I dunno, must be upstream somewhere”.
    - bcrl 5y ago
      Distributel is a primarily wholesale based ISP. DSL from Bell is basically useless at this point as the last major construction work of twisted pair copper phone lines took place in the 1980s. 30-40 year old copper wires are not a reliable foundation on top of which to build internet access, as the cables have aged poorly and suffer from water infiltration and ground faults.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Yes I'm not counting those, they're operating just fine. I'm talking about others like SaskTel, MTS and Freedom Mobile that had/have independent networks.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
I agree with what you are saying. In addition though (not instead), I wonder how much our unique geography plays a part. I don't see an external competitor building out infrastructure over our entire territory. So if they build infra in say Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver, is it actually easy/fair for them to compete with a national carrier that builds out infra across the entire country and spreads those costs out? Or if external competitor is more like TekSavvy, and just plops as a reseller on top of existing infra, is that a real solution / does it move the needle forward / remove the dependency? I find most things are complex in their implementation, so I'm not sure how to make this one better :-/
- perardi 5y ago
  Would they have to? I mean, politically, not economically. The vast majority of Canada lives in a major metro area…namely the hyper-sprawl that is the GTA. You’d serve most of your possible user base by plopping towers around Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton. But I suspect you would rapidly hear screaming about inequality of access for rural areas. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_census_metropolitan_areas_and_agglomerations_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_census_metropolitan_ar...)
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    It's not even a real concern. Canada is far from the country with the most real coverage yet prices are an order of magnitude higher than Russia for example, ddespite similar population density for the area actually covered.
  - trutannus 5y ago
    Rural areas can have up to 300% more expensive internet connections. Even 40 KM out of a city, in highly developed towns, internet connections can be prohibitively expensive. The cost isn't up front either. The insane price inflation comes from how little services is available, and how almost no provider will give unlimited plans, and tend instead to cap the usage at very low levels.
- betaby 5y ago
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
For a little while? It's been sold out like this since at least the free trade agreement was signed in 84. If not before. In reality even our hallowed resource industries have never even been domestically managed or owned. Survey the companies in the towers in downtown Calgary, and they're mostly American operations. We're guests on our "own" land.
martincmartin 5y ago
Wasn't Verizon saying they were planning to offer service in Canada a few years ago? But they backed down?

bcrl 5y ago

Some slight errors in your comment: the current chair of the CRTC (Ian Scott) met with the current CEO of Bell (Mirko Bibic) shortly after the wholesale rate implementation for DSL and cable internet services proceeding began back in 2019. The CRTC's ruling on that proceeding in May basically set rates to the interim rates less a 10% temporary markup, rather than the >50% lower wholesale rates that were set back in 2019. Bell had appealed to cabinet and taken the CRTC to the supreme court to fight the lower wholesale rates. After Bell lost all of those appeals, the CRTC gave up on the lower rates. The amount of pressure on the CRTC to avoid setting lower rates was significant. Major wholesale based ISPs stood to get hundreds of millions of dollars in refunds since the interim rates would have been adjusted to the lower rates retroactively. This made the incumbents highly motivated to fight the issue. The sad part is that these GAS wholesale rates are basically irrelevant to Bell at this point. Bell only has to provide wholesale access to DSL under the GAS tariffs in question, which basically limits wholesale ISPs to DSL speeds less than 50 Mbps at the current rate of $23.79/month per access. Bell has already made significant deployment of FTTH/FTTP, but those services are only available under the disaggregated tariffs at interim rates of $121.79/month per access. Bell sells their own FTTH services at retail rates of $90/month for 1.5 Gbps, less for lower speeds. I've participated in a few CRTC proceedings, and having seen what just happened, I have no faith that the Ian Scott will make any pro-consumer decisions. One of the excuses used to justify the backpeddling is that they incorrectly calculated the cost of umbilical fibres, by using filings made by Bell whinging that they have to run entirely new fibre all the way to the remotes. Any reasonable carrier in the developed world would make use of CWDM or DWDM hardware to add capacity in full umbilical fibres feeding DSL remotes. If you have a GPON segment that is out of umbilical fibres, you can deploy 10G EPON or XGSPON instead and use a 1x64 splitter instead of a 1x32 splitter while having oodles of spare capacity. There are 2 proceedings of interest to me that are active at the moment. One is to try to figure what to do with the disaggregated regime which has basically seen 0 deployment as the cost per CO is in the $50k-250k on top of the $121.79 per premises monthly access. For reference GAS (aka aggregated wholesale access) has a total setup cost in the ballpark of $10,000 to access all of Bell's network across Ontario and Quebec. The other relates to access to poles owned by the incumbents. Both of these are critical to competitive ISPs (like the facilities based FTTH provider I founded) and could help make things for competitors easier. But we're only 8 months into a proceeding that's likely to last 2+ years. As a facilities based provider I've had to eat losses on 3 large projects where the incumbent came in an decided to roll out service across 15 kilometer markets they had ignored for decades prior to my company showing up. They use tricks like delaying and denying permits for reasons as simple as "the pole owner isn't right on the CAD drawing" adding 30 day delays. The CRTC should be the one fixing these issues, but it's almost always too little too late. I could go on. My telecom in Canada rant generally takes more than 2 hours to get through...

sudosysgen 5y ago

Yes. Beyond that, even local attempts at breaking the oligopoly, either by regional players or provincial governments, are politicked out of existence. I'm however not so confident that allowing foreign telecoms would fix everything. Likely they'd just add a fourth partner to the price fixing, as happens in Québec with Videotron.

trutannus 5y ago
> even local attempts at breaking the oligopoly, either by regional players or provincial governments, are politicked out of existence Not even that, but there's a lower limit of how cheap those providers can be since, in the majority of cases, they're actually just using the Big Three's telecom infrastructure anyway. While I have no proof of this, I strongly suspect that the Big Three throttle connections over these too, given how unreliable the third-party vendor's connections are.
- perardi 5y ago
  This may be on the particular ISP I had (Distributel…it’s what the landlord had…sigh…), but it seems like Bell and Rogers don’t really provide much transparency into network status to those third-party providers. If there was a network glitch, Distributel’s customer service defaulted to “I dunno, must be upstream somewhere”.
  - bcrl 5y ago
    Distributel is a primarily wholesale based ISP. DSL from Bell is basically useless at this point as the last major construction work of twisted pair copper phone lines took place in the 1980s. 30-40 year old copper wires are not a reliable foundation on top of which to build internet access, as the cables have aged poorly and suffer from water infiltration and ground faults.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Yes I'm not counting those, they're operating just fine. I'm talking about others like SaskTel, MTS and Freedom Mobile that had/have independent networks.

NikolaNovak 5y ago

I agree with what you are saying. In addition though (not instead), I wonder how much our unique geography plays a part. I don't see an external competitor building out infrastructure over our entire territory. So if they build infra in say Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver, is it actually easy/fair for them to compete with a national carrier that builds out infra across the entire country and spreads those costs out? Or if external competitor is more like TekSavvy, and just plops as a reseller on top of existing infra, is that a real solution / does it move the needle forward / remove the dependency? I find most things are complex in their implementation, so I'm not sure how to make this one better :-/

perardi 5y ago
Would they have to? I mean, politically, not economically. The vast majority of Canada lives in a major metro area…namely the hyper-sprawl that is the GTA. You’d serve most of your possible user base by plopping towers around Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton. But I suspect you would rapidly hear screaming about inequality of access for rural areas. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_census_metropolitan_areas_and_agglomerations_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_census_metropolitan_ar...)
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  It's not even a real concern. Canada is far from the country with the most real coverage yet prices are an order of magnitude higher than Russia for example, ddespite similar population density for the area actually covered.
- trutannus 5y ago
  Rural areas can have up to 300% more expensive internet connections. Even 40 KM out of a city, in highly developed towns, internet connections can be prohibitively expensive. The cost isn't up front either. The insane price inflation comes from how little services is available, and how almost no provider will give unlimited plans, and tend instead to cap the usage at very low levels.
betaby 5y ago

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

For a little while? It's been sold out like this since at least the free trade agreement was signed in 84. If not before. In reality even our hallowed resource industries have never even been domestically managed or owned. Survey the companies in the towers in downtown Calgary, and they're mostly American operations. We're guests on our "own" land.

martincmartin 5y ago

Wasn't Verizon saying they were planning to offer service in Canada a few years ago? But they backed down?