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> even local attempts at breaking the oligopoly, either by regional players or provincial governments, are politicked out of existence Not even that, but ther
by 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 agoThis 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 agoDistributel 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 agoYes 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.
- AwaAwa 5y agoMTS is owned by Bell
- sudosysgen 5y agoIndeed, and Freedom Mobile might get bought out soon. It's why I'm so pessimistic.
- somerandomqaguy 5y agoFreedom Mobile and it's owned spectrum is likely to be acquired by Rogers as part of the Shaw Rogers merger. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rogers-shaw-1.5968419 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rogers-shaw-1.5968419