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 im

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...