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So long story short: after decades of mergers and acquisitions, the only 2 options to get home Internet in Canada is through TV cable (owned by one monopoly) or

So long story short: after decades of mergers and acquisitions, the only 2 options to get home Internet in Canada is through TV cable (owned by one monopoly) or the phone cable (owned by another monopoly). Monopolies being monopolies are charging the consumers exorbitant prices, making Canada one of the countries with the most expensive Internet. To create some semblance of competition, the 2 companies owning the infrastructure are required to rent it to smaller service providers (although at arbitrary prices effectively pricing them out). The arbitrary pricing was contested by the smaller providers and the regulator attempted to mandate fixed prices for infrastructure access. That was in turn contested by the monopolies, arguing that they were forced to subsidize the smaller providers. That said, I think it would be a much better idea if our government had balls to actually separate infrastructure owners from the service providers, and block further mergers. So multiple end user facing companies would compete for access to the same infrastructure, and the infrastructure owners would compete for servicing the providers, not being able to directly own either of them. Both layers would be have the incentives to offer good service at reasonable prices, while the current incentive for the infrastructure owners is to hamper the small players as much as they can.

totetsu 4y ago
That's what happened in New Zealand with copper and fiber. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3563927/fibre-network-unbundling-the-new-zealand-way.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3563927/fibre-network-...
- Gareth321 4y ago
  The "conservative" government of the time really hit a home run with that one. No bullshit. Just fiber to most of the country. It's one of the best success stories in this space that I know of.
t-3 4y ago
So, the exact same situation as the US? Are municipal ISPs legal? Do they pull the same trick of begging for government money to build rural infrastructure and then never build anything?
- thayne 4y ago
  Not exactly the same. In the US, there are multiple Cable and Phone companies, but they basically carve up the country into regions, so they don't compete with each other in the same region. And in the US the cable/phone companies typically sell directly to consumers rather than having an intermediate ISPs that rent the infrastructure. But there are some similarities, and from the original article it sounds like the infrastructure ISPs want to be more like the US.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    DSL service in the US can be provided by independent ISPs. The telcos killed them off by letting their copper wires rot so useful broadband isn't achievable.
    - zekica 4y ago
      DLS on loops longer than 1000ft/300m is not competitive at all today. 1000ft can give you 70/20Mbps with VDSL2 (dedicated bandwidth of 17MHz) or 120/40Mbps with VDSL2 vectoring (dedicated bandwidth of 34MHz). The second option requires and uses much more electricity in the street cabinet. Neither option compares to DOCSIS 3.0 (no requirement to update splitters), DOCSIS 3.1 (requires updated splitters in the networks) (shared bandwidth up to 2GHz) and those won't be able to compete with Fiber's shared or dedicated 1THz+ bandwidth.
- rstat1 4y ago
  >Are municipal ISPs legal? Depends on the state. In mine (NC), they aren't not unless you had one before the telcos bribed the General Assembly to pass their build outlawing it. They're legal in a fair few of the states out west. There's one in Utah called Utopia which is a grouping of 11 cities that even provides a 10gbps service.
- randomdata 4y ago
  > Are municipal ISPs legal? Most certainly. Tbaytel, Bruce Telecom, and CityWest are municipally owned. Sasktel, provincially. There are also a number of cooperatives, which has proven to be a nice model as well. My family farm in Canada is connected with fibre, offering gigabit service, by one of those co-ops. Canada's rural internet landscape is half decent as the big players never established themselves there. > Do they pull the same trick of begging for government money to build rural infrastructure and then never build anything? Yes, there are some known instances of that.
Gigachad 4y ago
Australia had a much better plan to just make the infrastructure government owned like water pipes or power lines. Then each ISP pays the government for capacity. And it would have worked incredibly well but during the rollout, the conservative party got in and caused the countries biggest infrastructure fuckup.
- skissane 4y ago
  Now they are rolling out FTTN-to-FTTP upgrades, the fuckup is finally starting to get fixed. I think, given some more years, we’ll end up in roughly the same place as we would have been if they’d stuck to the original plan - we’ll just have wasted 15+ years and untold billions on the FTTN detour.
  - weq 4y ago
    Murdoch bought the government to screw the NBN / stop TTN -- so his cable network would profit for longer. its that simple. Australia is NOT the example to follow, its worse then Canada they sold the public network to a private entity who then sold it back to them 10yrs later. EXACTLY the same situation. BUT WORSE!
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      I really doubt that’s the reason. Under the ruined nbn, video streaming was still perfectly usable. And slow internet hardly impacted the streaming companies. It was really gamers trying to grab 100gb updates and workers transferring large files who were hit hardest.
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      History will remember the name Rupert Murdoch long after certain other famous names have been forgotten. The harm he has done will take generations to set right.
      - bpye 4y ago
        He certainly won't be forgotten in the UK any time soon [0] [0] - https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/anthony-hilton-stay-or-go-the-lack-of-solid-facts-means-it-s-all-a-leap-of-faith-a3189151.html https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/anthony-hilton-st...
andrewstuart 4y ago
Expect a big tough fight from the existing companies. They'll throw everything they have at it.
glowingly 4y ago
> So multiple end user facing companies would compete for access to the same infrastructure, and the infrastructure owners would compete for servicing the providers, not being able to directly own either of them. Both layers would be have the incentives to offer good service at reasonable prices, while the current incentive for the infrastructure owners is to hamper the small players as much as they can. afaik, Utopia Fiber out in Utah operates like this. They only do infrastructure and coordinate the last mile connections. A dozen or so companies actually sell the service to customers (and interface with customers). https://www.utopiafiber.com/ https://www.utopiafiber.com/ Sort of like a power coop, I suppose.
toast0 4y ago
Is Canada allowed to look to England for inspiration? I know the US is prohibited from doing so, but OpenReach is a not terrible model to go with. You've always got to be careful to provide continuity of service, but if you can force the incumbents to operate the infrastructure separately, so that all providers, including the incumbent retail product, must go through the wholesale department, and make those rates FRAND, and prevent cross-subsidization, you can get at least some competition; if you can work towards making that wholesale department independent, even better. In the US, when we had mandatory line sharing, incumbent retail would regularly charge below the wholesale cost, which made it impossible to compete on price, which makes customer acquisition for competitors really hard; then our regulators neutered the law until it barely applied to anything.
- bpye 4y ago
  > I know the US is prohibited from doing so I'm assuming this is just a joke, or is there something I've actually missed?
- sgt101 4y ago
  The Openreach model does work in the UK, for now at least. There are scenarios that will bring this down but so long as the government is wise to them all will be ok. Essentially all the government need to make sure of is that the pension liabilities are well managed and no deal that loads it with vast debt or pushes it overseas goes through. Still we will see. Canada is an interesting one though; the geography is wildly different both in terms of scale (~40x?) and population (60%). Most important : Canada does not have a megacity (London, Paris, New York, LA, etc) London is a pain in the arse to wire up (due to being compact and medieval) but it is very very profitable if you do manage it. This pays for wiring up the tail of the distribution of settlements. Now in the UK we have a tiny fraction of places that are ~10k from exchanges/local offices (places where the backhaul terminates and you have power and space to put kit in). My feeling is that this proportion in Canada will be much much greater. This really screws the economics. Repair overhead is exponential on line length (because you have to mount expiditions to get out and fix the thing). Optics is pretty resilliant (it's not bothered by water) but I think those burdens are going to stretch a neutral pipe provider to the limit. The answer is really that this is a matter for the government and not for private enterprise. Profit motives have limits, the Canadian people need to figure out how much they are willing to pay for rural Canada to have fast internet (> than LEO).
xzez 4y ago
To add to this. I believe the copper and coax infrastructure was subsidized by the gov't and so regulations were created to require granting independent ISPs wholesale access to the (last-mile) infra. AFAIK there are no similar regulations for the fibre networks as those were not subsidized. The telecoms which own this infra have been lobbying hard to erode those regulations, and, they've been rather sucessful because the CRTC - the telecom regulatory body - has been composed largely of ex-executives of said telecoms. Oh and if you think the internet situation is bad up here in Canada, then wait 'till you hear about our mobile phone rates.
- dmt0 4y ago
  Oh look! This year Canada slides again on the Corruption Perception Index! https://transparencycanada.ca/news/canada-slides-again-on-corruption-perceptions-index https://transparencycanada.ca/news/canada-slides-again-on-co...
- donmcronald 4y ago
  > I believe the copper and coax infrastructure was subsidized by the gov't and so regulations were created to require granting independent ISPs wholesale access to the (last-mile) infra. AFAIK there are no similar regulations for the fibre networks as those were not subsidized. That’s why they cut out the copper when they light up the fiber.
  - dleslie 4y ago
    The crtc ruled that wholesale rules shouldn't apply to fiber, so prices are even worse. Apparently Canadians don't need fast internet.
- Teever 4y ago
  > AFAIK there are no similar regulations for the fibre networks as those were not subsidized. Which irks me because these companies were able to build out these fibre networks because of the advantage that they received from being practically gifted publicly owned utilities.
ars 4y ago
Your post is almost the exact opposite of what the article says. Although I had some questions about the article, especially when they said "The bottom line is that Canadians have something that is relatively novel to Americans: Many people have options to pick a home internet provider that they don’t hate." While simultaneously saying that all service is through the same companies - only the billing name is different.
- katbyte 4y ago
  *had The small independent isps were almost universally loved. Now they are being killed off. That all said I will say the big ones we have left, while awfully overpriced, still provide waaay better (not great) service then what I heard from across the border with Comcast etc
IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
Separating the layers doesn’t help because there will never be competing infrastructure at the last mile, or, if it happens, it is inefficient almost by definition. There is nothing wrong with infrastructure owners also offering the other layer, as long as you mandate that they charge the same prices internally as they do externally, run separate books, and don’t cross-subsidize. Running the lines is a natural monopoly. Since digging ditches isn’t too complicated, there are a number of countries that have seen success with leaving this business in the hand of governments. As an alternative, you should be able to compare costs across time or geography, both domestic and international, and get a fairly good idea what it should cost, then set wholesale prices accordingly.
- stormbrew 4y ago
  > There is nothing wrong with infrastructure owners also offering the other layer, as long as you mandate that they charge the same prices internally as they do externally, run separate books, and don’t cross-subsidize. It seems a lot easier to require them to be separate companies than to invasively regulate them like this. If the infra side of it can’t be profitable then run it as a crown corp, or subsidize it, but asking companies to play games with their books is practically begging them to come up with the most creative way to bypass the intent. Accountants love puzzles. And i think this is borne out in history as well. Whether the Paramount Consent Decree or the breaking up of Bell, breaking up vertical integration works well until either new technology created new opportunities for integration (streaming) or they promise to be nice if they could have just a little integration, as a treat, and then shoved that wedge open as hard as they could (telecom).
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > Separating the layers doesn’t help because there will never be competing infrastructure at the last mile, or, if it happens, it is inefficient almost by definition. OSI Layers 1 and 2 should be either an independent non-profit corporation providing equal access to all Layer 3 plays, or a government-owned utility. Take the profit motive out of fibre infrastructure.
kkfx 4y ago
Let me add a small correction: private monopolies led to high prices, because when our (EU) TLCs where just a single public company quality of service where far superior and prices were FAR lower than now. So to say: ANY national critical infra like: - transportation means (roads, rails networks for instance) - energy production and distribution - TLCs - health, pharma included - weapons productions MUST be ONLY and ONLY public shows for the sake of the State and Democracy itself. We in the west have lost our global position for the sake of few legal thief profits. Do remember that VERY well.
- concordDance 4y ago
  You seem to imply those were provided by the government at the hight of European power (well, "position"), but that doesn't ring true to me. When was drug invention and making done by governments in Europe? Was weapon making done by governments rather than companies other than in the world wars? When did they do energy production?
  - kkfx 4y ago
    > When was drug invention and making done by governments in Europe? Always for war/research, as in the USA with the NIH before the infamous Bayh-Dole Act, all "private" research in EU was done mostly by individuals paied by the public. Electricity? The same: all EU countries, well at least all major countries (not sure for some non-major) have had ONE unique State/public electricity operator. TLCs? The very same. Water supply? The very same. Rails? Equally. When "privatizations" start they were prepared to DEMOLISH, slowly, the public parts to justify a passage and then they made hyper-expensive and hyper-bad services also reducing much their coverage. Back than for instance in my home country (Italy) TeTi (national phone operator) was obliged by law to connect any home anywhere, after privatization, renamed SIP, law change they are "obliged only if possible". Rails? I do not have a map for Italy, but was roughly the same, here is for France: http://carfree.fr/img/2015/06/sncf.jpg http://carfree.fr/img/2015/06/sncf.jpg of course the left side was when rails were public. About health: when my mother was young (she's a surgeon) at she's hospital there was a mess, in the sense that there was far less "style" and "property" in hoteliers terms, but ANYONE were admitted in the shortest possible time, witch means roughly short and no special "triage/color bureaucracy", now good luck if you need emergency services they are cut and bureaucratized so badly that just for a broken finger you might need HOURS of waiting time. Long story short ANYTHING has degraded except of some private profits. > Was weapon making done by governments rather than companies other than in the world wars? Only in the far past, not in the last century UNFORTUNATELY. > When did they do energy production? Until around the '60s all "big national player" like ENEL (Italy), EDF (France), Endesa (Spain) etc was 100% public, oh and at that time 90% of nuclear reactor was built and put in service. They are still there. All new ones after privatizations IF there is ONLY one in service is a record. And a very expensive and late record.
rkagerer 4y ago
This comment is spot-on, although there are some non-traditional options emerging. I've been on Starlink for months now and it's not bad in my semi-rural area (and the fastest option available here). In Toronto a client has used Terago for over a decade (they have their own radio network), which is expensive but has also been great (and managed to stay up when both Rogers and Bell were knocked offline by a major fiber backbone break some years back). Personally I think reducing barriers and finding ways to make it cheap to install new infrastructure (eg. piggyback off hydro facilities?) would also help a lot to stimulate new startups.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
michaelmior 4y ago
This does not consider wireless options, which for some are the only choice. My parents live in a rural area and cannot access the Internet through either of the options you mentioned. (Excluding dial up, which for obvious reasons, is not really an option.) They have tried various satellite and fixed wireless options and finally settled on 4G service from one of the national telecoms. (This was unfortunately after erecting a 40ft tower that now serves no purpose.)
erfgh 4y ago
How is it a monopoly if there are two companies selling something?
- katbyte 4y ago
  Might as well be when they basically match each other’s prices. We have three telecom companies for mobile so “competition” - but they don’t compete abs our mobile prices are the worst
- newsclues 4y ago
  Most markets in Canada are a duopoly between Bell (phone/fibre) and the local cable provider.
redmen 4y ago
It's cheaper to roam permanently in Canada with an American cell plan than to buy from these Canadian crooks. Canada, especially Vancouver is one of the most corrupt places in the first world I have ever been.
- nhooyr 4y ago
  Can you expand on the corruption you've seen in Vancouver?
  - redmen 4y ago
    Go to Richmond where there is an underground economy and you can buy a drivers license. Go to ubc where there is massive cheating and you can pay to have others write your exam for you. Look at the monopolies everywhere. Look at how long the taxi industry kept out uber and lyft.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    I agree with the sentiment, but not sure if "corruption" is the right word. It's generally the form of legal "captured industries." Regulatory agencies, government, associations, etc. work together to put a fence around some industry for their own benefit. In Canada, right now, I'd say the worst offender is real estate and while I don't live in Vancouver, it seems from the outside like it in particular seems to suffer the most from this. Toronto as well, obviously. Any time any gov't makes any tepid moves to try to deal with these types of situations they're put in their place. Already the mumbling is starting about the Bank of Canada and interest rates and the property market. And all the gov'ts measures around regulating real estate practices are completely de-fanged. When the Trudeau gov't made moves some years ago to close loopholes in tax code re: the use of corporate taxation by "consultants" and "small businesses" (who really aren't, and are often just individuals) to shelter assets, the pitchforks came out and they had to back down. So middle class wage earners are taxed like crazy while a whole cabal of fake-businesses pay some of the lowest corporate taxes in the western world while really just being effectively employees. But I digress. Everything in this country -- from telecoms to commodity/resource sectors to wine (dear god, VQA Ontario, don't get me started), to the tech sector, etc. -- falls prey to this. It goes back to colonial times and has a lot to do with being a resource rich colony with a small(ish) population cordoned off from our more powerful neighbour to the south. Historically that neighbour tolerates our local bourgeoisie as long as the commodities keep exporting for cheap and we stay compliant. So a little caste of bullies runs things up here, profiting off us and off of their exclusive access to this world. Because the alternative would seamingly mean the disintegration of the country.
Ensorceled 4y ago
Adding to this, if a company does rent it to smaller service providers, they provide terrible support when there are cable issues. I had to leave one of those smaller providers, Teksavvy, not because I disliked Teksavvy, but I had a cable issue and Rogers (the cable monopoly mentioned above) just would not fix it. For months. At the start of the pandemic when we were all working from home.
- mewse-hn 4y ago
  I also had a bad experience with Teksavvy renting the last mile from Shaw. Bought the service at 75mbit and quickly requested an upgrade to 150mbit, they said the work was completed when it clearly wasn't. Had to send them multiple emails, speak with them on the phone, have them send me a replacement modem, etc etc etc until I straight up begged them via email to put in a ticket with Shaw to fix the bandwidth cap. The problem was finally fixed, they asked me to send the replacement modem back, I did, then they called me asking where it was. They had the tracking number that showed they received it. I desperately wish there was actual competition in broadband.
frankfrankfrank 4y ago
“…to actually separate infrastructure owners from the service providers…” is the crux of it, but what could also be done on the opposite end, rather than constantly screaming at the castle walls, is for the tech sector to once again emphasize efficient code and data. I do not know the exact nature, but from my years of experience and living the growth of tech and the internet, all I have witnessed to this day is ever increasing sloppiness and waste of resources, bandwidth, and computation. There should be a framework for, at the very least, to build websites and services that are bandwidth efficient. Here’s the challenge … How do we get to a place where the evaluation and value determination is incentivized to be efficient computation and bandwidth? The rather obvious start may be the inherent connection to “climate change”; all this waste of resources, computation, and bandwidth is immensely energy intensive. There have been posts on YN about low data or bandwidth sites, how do we get that initiative to the the primary measure of success, not, e.g., wasteful and sloppy design and “experiences”?
- jamincan 4y ago
  > I do not know the exact nature, but from my years of experience and living the growth of tech and the internet, all I have witnessed to this day is ever increasing sloppiness and waste of resources, bandwidth, and computation. As an example, I was checking bandwidth usage of the apps on my phone, and standing out near the top with over 200 MB was my Tim Horton's app. My usage is simply scanning a QR code when I go there a few times a week. The app also receives special offers that are updated weekly. I'm not sure how they manage to inflate that to 200 MB in a month of usage.
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Same thing happened in slovenia, but only for "monopoly" infrastructure owner... so if they build eg. fiber, they had to rent it out, but smaller telcos didn't have to... which effectively meant, that they stopped fiber rollouts for a long time. But we did get a lot of money grants for municipal-owned fibers in rural areas, so basically the local government owns the fiber and rents it out to all interested telcos at the same price.
ratboy666 4y ago
I use TekSavvy as an Internet Provider (in Canada). Bell (the phone provider) REALLY wants me to "go optical". For speed... But - Bell (the phone provider) is forced to share the copper. They do NOT share the optical! If I "go optical", they rip up the copper, and force me to use Bell or the cable company. TekSavvy would be shut out (actually, they can use cable). I refuse to give business to the cable company (for other reasons). So - vDSL all the way! Fortunately 25/5 mbps is sufficient for my uses. Why TekSavvy? (1) they do NOT block ports (2) they can provide static IPv4 addresses -- so REAL INTERNET. Something I do NOT get from either phone or cable companies.
lodovic 4y ago
Aren't there any offers for 4g internet?

totetsu 4y ago

That's what happened in New Zealand with copper and fiber. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3563927/fibre-network-unbundling-the-new-zealand-way.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3563927/fibre-network-...

Gareth321 4y ago
The "conservative" government of the time really hit a home run with that one. No bullshit. Just fiber to most of the country. It's one of the best success stories in this space that I know of.

t-3 4y ago

So, the exact same situation as the US? Are municipal ISPs legal? Do they pull the same trick of begging for government money to build rural infrastructure and then never build anything?

thayne 4y ago
Not exactly the same. In the US, there are multiple Cable and Phone companies, but they basically carve up the country into regions, so they don't compete with each other in the same region. And in the US the cable/phone companies typically sell directly to consumers rather than having an intermediate ISPs that rent the infrastructure. But there are some similarities, and from the original article it sounds like the infrastructure ISPs want to be more like the US.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  DSL service in the US can be provided by independent ISPs. The telcos killed them off by letting their copper wires rot so useful broadband isn't achievable.
  - zekica 4y ago
    DLS on loops longer than 1000ft/300m is not competitive at all today. 1000ft can give you 70/20Mbps with VDSL2 (dedicated bandwidth of 17MHz) or 120/40Mbps with VDSL2 vectoring (dedicated bandwidth of 34MHz). The second option requires and uses much more electricity in the street cabinet. Neither option compares to DOCSIS 3.0 (no requirement to update splitters), DOCSIS 3.1 (requires updated splitters in the networks) (shared bandwidth up to 2GHz) and those won't be able to compete with Fiber's shared or dedicated 1THz+ bandwidth.
rstat1 4y ago
>Are municipal ISPs legal? Depends on the state. In mine (NC), they aren't not unless you had one before the telcos bribed the General Assembly to pass their build outlawing it. They're legal in a fair few of the states out west. There's one in Utah called Utopia which is a grouping of 11 cities that even provides a 10gbps service.
randomdata 4y ago
> Are municipal ISPs legal? Most certainly. Tbaytel, Bruce Telecom, and CityWest are municipally owned. Sasktel, provincially. There are also a number of cooperatives, which has proven to be a nice model as well. My family farm in Canada is connected with fibre, offering gigabit service, by one of those co-ops. Canada's rural internet landscape is half decent as the big players never established themselves there. > Do they pull the same trick of begging for government money to build rural infrastructure and then never build anything? Yes, there are some known instances of that.

Gigachad 4y ago

Australia had a much better plan to just make the infrastructure government owned like water pipes or power lines. Then each ISP pays the government for capacity. And it would have worked incredibly well but during the rollout, the conservative party got in and caused the countries biggest infrastructure fuckup.

skissane 4y ago
Now they are rolling out FTTN-to-FTTP upgrades, the fuckup is finally starting to get fixed. I think, given some more years, we’ll end up in roughly the same place as we would have been if they’d stuck to the original plan - we’ll just have wasted 15+ years and untold billions on the FTTN detour.
- weq 4y ago
  Murdoch bought the government to screw the NBN / stop TTN -- so his cable network would profit for longer. its that simple. Australia is NOT the example to follow, its worse then Canada they sold the public network to a private entity who then sold it back to them 10yrs later. EXACTLY the same situation. BUT WORSE!
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    I really doubt that’s the reason. Under the ruined nbn, video streaming was still perfectly usable. And slow internet hardly impacted the streaming companies. It was really gamers trying to grab 100gb updates and workers transferring large files who were hit hardest.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    History will remember the name Rupert Murdoch long after certain other famous names have been forgotten. The harm he has done will take generations to set right.
    - bpye 4y ago
      He certainly won't be forgotten in the UK any time soon [0] [0] - https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/anthony-hilton-stay-or-go-the-lack-of-solid-facts-means-it-s-all-a-leap-of-faith-a3189151.html https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/anthony-hilton-st...

andrewstuart 4y ago

Expect a big tough fight from the existing companies. They'll throw everything they have at it.

glowingly 4y ago

> So multiple end user facing companies would compete for access to the same infrastructure, and the infrastructure owners would compete for servicing the providers, not being able to directly own either of them. Both layers would be have the incentives to offer good service at reasonable prices, while the current incentive for the infrastructure owners is to hamper the small players as much as they can. afaik, Utopia Fiber out in Utah operates like this. They only do infrastructure and coordinate the last mile connections. A dozen or so companies actually sell the service to customers (and interface with customers). https://www.utopiafiber.com/ https://www.utopiafiber.com/ Sort of like a power coop, I suppose.

toast0 4y ago

Is Canada allowed to look to England for inspiration? I know the US is prohibited from doing so, but OpenReach is a not terrible model to go with. You've always got to be careful to provide continuity of service, but if you can force the incumbents to operate the infrastructure separately, so that all providers, including the incumbent retail product, must go through the wholesale department, and make those rates FRAND, and prevent cross-subsidization, you can get at least some competition; if you can work towards making that wholesale department independent, even better. In the US, when we had mandatory line sharing, incumbent retail would regularly charge below the wholesale cost, which made it impossible to compete on price, which makes customer acquisition for competitors really hard; then our regulators neutered the law until it barely applied to anything.

bpye 4y ago
> I know the US is prohibited from doing so I'm assuming this is just a joke, or is there something I've actually missed?
sgt101 4y ago
The Openreach model does work in the UK, for now at least. There are scenarios that will bring this down but so long as the government is wise to them all will be ok. Essentially all the government need to make sure of is that the pension liabilities are well managed and no deal that loads it with vast debt or pushes it overseas goes through. Still we will see. Canada is an interesting one though; the geography is wildly different both in terms of scale (~40x?) and population (60%). Most important : Canada does not have a megacity (London, Paris, New York, LA, etc) London is a pain in the arse to wire up (due to being compact and medieval) but it is very very profitable if you do manage it. This pays for wiring up the tail of the distribution of settlements. Now in the UK we have a tiny fraction of places that are ~10k from exchanges/local offices (places where the backhaul terminates and you have power and space to put kit in). My feeling is that this proportion in Canada will be much much greater. This really screws the economics. Repair overhead is exponential on line length (because you have to mount expiditions to get out and fix the thing). Optics is pretty resilliant (it's not bothered by water) but I think those burdens are going to stretch a neutral pipe provider to the limit. The answer is really that this is a matter for the government and not for private enterprise. Profit motives have limits, the Canadian people need to figure out how much they are willing to pay for rural Canada to have fast internet (> than LEO).

xzez 4y ago

To add to this. I believe the copper and coax infrastructure was subsidized by the gov't and so regulations were created to require granting independent ISPs wholesale access to the (last-mile) infra. AFAIK there are no similar regulations for the fibre networks as those were not subsidized. The telecoms which own this infra have been lobbying hard to erode those regulations, and, they've been rather sucessful because the CRTC - the telecom regulatory body - has been composed largely of ex-executives of said telecoms. Oh and if you think the internet situation is bad up here in Canada, then wait 'till you hear about our mobile phone rates.

dmt0 4y ago
Oh look! This year Canada slides again on the Corruption Perception Index! https://transparencycanada.ca/news/canada-slides-again-on-corruption-perceptions-index https://transparencycanada.ca/news/canada-slides-again-on-co...
donmcronald 4y ago
> I believe the copper and coax infrastructure was subsidized by the gov't and so regulations were created to require granting independent ISPs wholesale access to the (last-mile) infra. AFAIK there are no similar regulations for the fibre networks as those were not subsidized. That’s why they cut out the copper when they light up the fiber.
- dleslie 4y ago
  The crtc ruled that wholesale rules shouldn't apply to fiber, so prices are even worse. Apparently Canadians don't need fast internet.
Teever 4y ago
> AFAIK there are no similar regulations for the fibre networks as those were not subsidized. Which irks me because these companies were able to build out these fibre networks because of the advantage that they received from being practically gifted publicly owned utilities.

ars 4y ago

Your post is almost the exact opposite of what the article says. Although I had some questions about the article, especially when they said "The bottom line is that Canadians have something that is relatively novel to Americans: Many people have options to pick a home internet provider that they don’t hate." While simultaneously saying that all service is through the same companies - only the billing name is different.

katbyte 4y ago
*had The small independent isps were almost universally loved. Now they are being killed off. That all said I will say the big ones we have left, while awfully overpriced, still provide waaay better (not great) service then what I heard from across the border with Comcast etc

IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago

Separating the layers doesn’t help because there will never be competing infrastructure at the last mile, or, if it happens, it is inefficient almost by definition. There is nothing wrong with infrastructure owners also offering the other layer, as long as you mandate that they charge the same prices internally as they do externally, run separate books, and don’t cross-subsidize. Running the lines is a natural monopoly. Since digging ditches isn’t too complicated, there are a number of countries that have seen success with leaving this business in the hand of governments. As an alternative, you should be able to compare costs across time or geography, both domestic and international, and get a fairly good idea what it should cost, then set wholesale prices accordingly.

stormbrew 4y ago
> There is nothing wrong with infrastructure owners also offering the other layer, as long as you mandate that they charge the same prices internally as they do externally, run separate books, and don’t cross-subsidize. It seems a lot easier to require them to be separate companies than to invasively regulate them like this. If the infra side of it can’t be profitable then run it as a crown corp, or subsidize it, but asking companies to play games with their books is practically begging them to come up with the most creative way to bypass the intent. Accountants love puzzles. And i think this is borne out in history as well. Whether the Paramount Consent Decree or the breaking up of Bell, breaking up vertical integration works well until either new technology created new opportunities for integration (streaming) or they promise to be nice if they could have just a little integration, as a treat, and then shoved that wedge open as hard as they could (telecom).
throw0101a 4y ago
> Separating the layers doesn’t help because there will never be competing infrastructure at the last mile, or, if it happens, it is inefficient almost by definition. OSI Layers 1 and 2 should be either an independent non-profit corporation providing equal access to all Layer 3 plays, or a government-owned utility. Take the profit motive out of fibre infrastructure.

kkfx 4y ago

Let me add a small correction: private monopolies led to high prices, because when our (EU) TLCs where just a single public company quality of service where far superior and prices were FAR lower than now. So to say: ANY national critical infra like: - transportation means (roads, rails networks for instance) - energy production and distribution - TLCs - health, pharma included - weapons productions MUST be ONLY and ONLY public shows for the sake of the State and Democracy itself. We in the west have lost our global position for the sake of few legal thief profits. Do remember that VERY well.

concordDance 4y ago
You seem to imply those were provided by the government at the hight of European power (well, "position"), but that doesn't ring true to me. When was drug invention and making done by governments in Europe? Was weapon making done by governments rather than companies other than in the world wars? When did they do energy production?
- kkfx 4y ago
  > When was drug invention and making done by governments in Europe? Always for war/research, as in the USA with the NIH before the infamous Bayh-Dole Act, all "private" research in EU was done mostly by individuals paied by the public. Electricity? The same: all EU countries, well at least all major countries (not sure for some non-major) have had ONE unique State/public electricity operator. TLCs? The very same. Water supply? The very same. Rails? Equally. When "privatizations" start they were prepared to DEMOLISH, slowly, the public parts to justify a passage and then they made hyper-expensive and hyper-bad services also reducing much their coverage. Back than for instance in my home country (Italy) TeTi (national phone operator) was obliged by law to connect any home anywhere, after privatization, renamed SIP, law change they are "obliged only if possible". Rails? I do not have a map for Italy, but was roughly the same, here is for France: http://carfree.fr/img/2015/06/sncf.jpg http://carfree.fr/img/2015/06/sncf.jpg of course the left side was when rails were public. About health: when my mother was young (she's a surgeon) at she's hospital there was a mess, in the sense that there was far less "style" and "property" in hoteliers terms, but ANYONE were admitted in the shortest possible time, witch means roughly short and no special "triage/color bureaucracy", now good luck if you need emergency services they are cut and bureaucratized so badly that just for a broken finger you might need HOURS of waiting time. Long story short ANYTHING has degraded except of some private profits. > Was weapon making done by governments rather than companies other than in the world wars? Only in the far past, not in the last century UNFORTUNATELY. > When did they do energy production? Until around the '60s all "big national player" like ENEL (Italy), EDF (France), Endesa (Spain) etc was 100% public, oh and at that time 90% of nuclear reactor was built and put in service. They are still there. All new ones after privatizations IF there is ONLY one in service is a record. And a very expensive and late record.

rkagerer 4y ago

This comment is spot-on, although there are some non-traditional options emerging. I've been on Starlink for months now and it's not bad in my semi-rural area (and the fastest option available here). In Toronto a client has used Terago for over a decade (they have their own radio network), which is expensive but has also been great (and managed to stay up when both Rogers and Bell were knocked offline by a major fiber backbone break some years back). Personally I think reducing barriers and finding ways to make it cheap to install new infrastructure (eg. piggyback off hydro facilities?) would also help a lot to stimulate new startups.

deleted 4y ago

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michaelmior 4y ago

This does not consider wireless options, which for some are the only choice. My parents live in a rural area and cannot access the Internet through either of the options you mentioned. (Excluding dial up, which for obvious reasons, is not really an option.) They have tried various satellite and fixed wireless options and finally settled on 4G service from one of the national telecoms. (This was unfortunately after erecting a 40ft tower that now serves no purpose.)

erfgh 4y ago

How is it a monopoly if there are two companies selling something?

katbyte 4y ago
Might as well be when they basically match each other’s prices. We have three telecom companies for mobile so “competition” - but they don’t compete abs our mobile prices are the worst
newsclues 4y ago
Most markets in Canada are a duopoly between Bell (phone/fibre) and the local cable provider.

redmen 4y ago

It's cheaper to roam permanently in Canada with an American cell plan than to buy from these Canadian crooks. Canada, especially Vancouver is one of the most corrupt places in the first world I have ever been.

nhooyr 4y ago
Can you expand on the corruption you've seen in Vancouver?
- redmen 4y ago
  Go to Richmond where there is an underground economy and you can buy a drivers license. Go to ubc where there is massive cheating and you can pay to have others write your exam for you. Look at the monopolies everywhere. Look at how long the taxi industry kept out uber and lyft.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  I agree with the sentiment, but not sure if "corruption" is the right word. It's generally the form of legal "captured industries." Regulatory agencies, government, associations, etc. work together to put a fence around some industry for their own benefit. In Canada, right now, I'd say the worst offender is real estate and while I don't live in Vancouver, it seems from the outside like it in particular seems to suffer the most from this. Toronto as well, obviously. Any time any gov't makes any tepid moves to try to deal with these types of situations they're put in their place. Already the mumbling is starting about the Bank of Canada and interest rates and the property market. And all the gov'ts measures around regulating real estate practices are completely de-fanged. When the Trudeau gov't made moves some years ago to close loopholes in tax code re: the use of corporate taxation by "consultants" and "small businesses" (who really aren't, and are often just individuals) to shelter assets, the pitchforks came out and they had to back down. So middle class wage earners are taxed like crazy while a whole cabal of fake-businesses pay some of the lowest corporate taxes in the western world while really just being effectively employees. But I digress. Everything in this country -- from telecoms to commodity/resource sectors to wine (dear god, VQA Ontario, don't get me started), to the tech sector, etc. -- falls prey to this. It goes back to colonial times and has a lot to do with being a resource rich colony with a small(ish) population cordoned off from our more powerful neighbour to the south. Historically that neighbour tolerates our local bourgeoisie as long as the commodities keep exporting for cheap and we stay compliant. So a little caste of bullies runs things up here, profiting off us and off of their exclusive access to this world. Because the alternative would seamingly mean the disintegration of the country.

Ensorceled 4y ago

Adding to this, if a company does rent it to smaller service providers, they provide terrible support when there are cable issues. I had to leave one of those smaller providers, Teksavvy, not because I disliked Teksavvy, but I had a cable issue and Rogers (the cable monopoly mentioned above) just would not fix it. For months. At the start of the pandemic when we were all working from home.

mewse-hn 4y ago
I also had a bad experience with Teksavvy renting the last mile from Shaw. Bought the service at 75mbit and quickly requested an upgrade to 150mbit, they said the work was completed when it clearly wasn't. Had to send them multiple emails, speak with them on the phone, have them send me a replacement modem, etc etc etc until I straight up begged them via email to put in a ticket with Shaw to fix the bandwidth cap. The problem was finally fixed, they asked me to send the replacement modem back, I did, then they called me asking where it was. They had the tracking number that showed they received it. I desperately wish there was actual competition in broadband.

frankfrankfrank 4y ago

“…to actually separate infrastructure owners from the service providers…” is the crux of it, but what could also be done on the opposite end, rather than constantly screaming at the castle walls, is for the tech sector to once again emphasize efficient code and data. I do not know the exact nature, but from my years of experience and living the growth of tech and the internet, all I have witnessed to this day is ever increasing sloppiness and waste of resources, bandwidth, and computation. There should be a framework for, at the very least, to build websites and services that are bandwidth efficient. Here’s the challenge … How do we get to a place where the evaluation and value determination is incentivized to be efficient computation and bandwidth? The rather obvious start may be the inherent connection to “climate change”; all this waste of resources, computation, and bandwidth is immensely energy intensive. There have been posts on YN about low data or bandwidth sites, how do we get that initiative to the the primary measure of success, not, e.g., wasteful and sloppy design and “experiences”?

jamincan 4y ago
> I do not know the exact nature, but from my years of experience and living the growth of tech and the internet, all I have witnessed to this day is ever increasing sloppiness and waste of resources, bandwidth, and computation. As an example, I was checking bandwidth usage of the apps on my phone, and standing out near the top with over 200 MB was my Tim Horton's app. My usage is simply scanning a QR code when I go there a few times a week. The app also receives special offers that are updated weekly. I'm not sure how they manage to inflate that to 200 MB in a month of usage.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

Same thing happened in slovenia, but only for "monopoly" infrastructure owner... so if they build eg. fiber, they had to rent it out, but smaller telcos didn't have to... which effectively meant, that they stopped fiber rollouts for a long time. But we did get a lot of money grants for municipal-owned fibers in rural areas, so basically the local government owns the fiber and rents it out to all interested telcos at the same price.

ratboy666 4y ago

I use TekSavvy as an Internet Provider (in Canada). Bell (the phone provider) REALLY wants me to "go optical". For speed... But - Bell (the phone provider) is forced to share the copper. They do NOT share the optical! If I "go optical", they rip up the copper, and force me to use Bell or the cable company. TekSavvy would be shut out (actually, they can use cable). I refuse to give business to the cable company (for other reasons). So - vDSL all the way! Fortunately 25/5 mbps is sufficient for my uses. Why TekSavvy? (1) they do NOT block ports (2) they can provide static IPv4 addresses -- so REAL INTERNET. Something I do NOT get from either phone or cable companies.

lodovic 4y ago

Aren't there any offers for 4g internet?