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> Bear with me for a lesson in Canada’s home internet service. The bottom line is that Canadians have something that is relatively novel to Americans: Many peop

> Bear with me for a lesson in Canada’s home internet service. 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. > That’s because in Canada — similar to many countries including Britain, Australia and Japan — the companies that own internet pipelines are required to rent access to businesses that then sell internet service to homes. Regulators keep a close watch to make sure those rental costs and terms are fair. At least from a British perspective it's not really an option to "pick a home internet provider that they don’t hate." Just like Britain's other fake markets for gas and electricity it's just a single service with multiple alternative brandings you can choose between. Maybe there is some choice of your upstream provider but frankly it doesn't matter since the narrow pipe is between your home and the exchange. And now living in the internet backwater of San Francisco it's much the same. We have multiple options for DSL! Several alternative providers of the same shitty service. AT&T would even send people door to door promising that fibre internet would soon be available if only I'd sign up now and switch out my current shitty cable internet for a service with 10% of the downstream bandwidth. (If you're lucky enough to be in a street with Sonic you can actually get fibre but for the rest of us Comcast cable maxes out at 30MB upstream on a 1GB plan.) As a natural monopoly it would frankly make much more sense to simply provide internet as a municipal service.

sgt101 4y ago
>At least from a British perspective it's not really an option to "pick a home internet provider that they don’t hate." Just like Britain's other fake markets for gas and electricity it's just a single service with multiple alternative brandings you can choose between. Maybe there is some choice of your upstream provider but frankly it doesn't matter since the narrow pipe is between your home and the exchange. I'm sitting in rural suffolk on 1GB fttp. More and more fiber is out there, in the 2025 target for 85% with fibre available is looking unlikely to me, but on the other hand I think it very likely they'll get high 70'% Staggeringly my in-laws farm in rural scotland is now going to have fttp by summer 2023. The problem with municipal services is that it's fine for the big cities, but it is punitively expensive for the last 5% You might not care about that... but 5% is a big deal in an election!
- laurencerowe 4y ago
  National services are fine too! The reason you have physical fibre in rural Suffolk is because of national broadband subsidies targeted at rural areas.
OJFord 4y ago
> At least from a British perspective it's not really an option to "pick a home internet provider that they don’t hate." Just like Britain's other fake markets for gas and electricity it's just a single service with multiple alternative brandings you can choose between. What're you expecting, a provider with nicer smelling gas and bigger megabits? Prices differ, service differs, tiers can be quite different; they're not all the same company. In metropolitan areas you can get FTTH (at least to the block of flats) anyway, so you can switch provider and be using different fibre if that's important to you.
- laurencerowe 4y ago
  > In metropolitan areas you can get FTTH (at least to the block of flats) anyway, so you can switch provider and be using different fibre if that's important to you. Whichever company you choose it's the same physical fibre from the home to the telephone exchange. It's very likely the same physical fibre from the telephone exchange to the internet exchange (though maybe the individual providers have their own routers.) Edit to add: > Prices differ, service differs, tiers can be quite different; they're not all the same company. The different companies can offer the same service in different ways but ultimately there's little difference between them because they're all reselling what is substantially the same thing. Most fibre internet is just rebranded Openreach (British Telecom) infrastructure. A substantial minority is Virgin (Cable TV only built out to maybe 30-40% of homes.) And then a handful of small local fibre broadband providers.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    To be clear by service there I meant like 'customer service', the support, experience of being a customer etc. Anyway we're basically in agreement on the state of differences or lack of them - I just don't understand what more you want to be different that can be?
  - aembleton 4y ago
    Depends. In Bolton I had the choice of OpenReach, Virgin and CityFibre. Three physical lines to the house.
MrDOS 4y ago
> Just like Britain's other fake markets for gas and electricity it's just a single service with multiple alternative brandings you can choose between. Admittedly, the last mile is all Openeach, but operators like AAISP are much better at getting results out of Openreach than the big retailer operators. It's not perfect, and it's kind of bad a lot of the time; but it's still miles better than most of Canada, where major retail operators also own the last mile, and can't be bothered to fix anything for third-party providers on a decent timeline without a CRTC complaint.

sgt101 4y ago

>At least from a British perspective it's not really an option to "pick a home internet provider that they don’t hate." Just like Britain's other fake markets for gas and electricity it's just a single service with multiple alternative brandings you can choose between. Maybe there is some choice of your upstream provider but frankly it doesn't matter since the narrow pipe is between your home and the exchange. I'm sitting in rural suffolk on 1GB fttp. More and more fiber is out there, in the 2025 target for 85% with fibre available is looking unlikely to me, but on the other hand I think it very likely they'll get high 70'% Staggeringly my in-laws farm in rural scotland is now going to have fttp by summer 2023. The problem with municipal services is that it's fine for the big cities, but it is punitively expensive for the last 5% You might not care about that... but 5% is a big deal in an election!

laurencerowe 4y ago
National services are fine too! The reason you have physical fibre in rural Suffolk is because of national broadband subsidies targeted at rural areas.

OJFord 4y ago

laurencerowe 4y ago
> In metropolitan areas you can get FTTH (at least to the block of flats) anyway, so you can switch provider and be using different fibre if that's important to you. Whichever company you choose it's the same physical fibre from the home to the telephone exchange. It's very likely the same physical fibre from the telephone exchange to the internet exchange (though maybe the individual providers have their own routers.) Edit to add: > Prices differ, service differs, tiers can be quite different; they're not all the same company. The different companies can offer the same service in different ways but ultimately there's little difference between them because they're all reselling what is substantially the same thing. Most fibre internet is just rebranded Openreach (British Telecom) infrastructure. A substantial minority is Virgin (Cable TV only built out to maybe 30-40% of homes.) And then a handful of small local fibre broadband providers.
- OJFord 4y ago
  To be clear by service there I meant like 'customer service', the support, experience of being a customer etc. Anyway we're basically in agreement on the state of differences or lack of them - I just don't understand what more you want to be different that can be?
- aembleton 4y ago
  Depends. In Bolton I had the choice of OpenReach, Virgin and CityFibre. Three physical lines to the house.

MrDOS 4y ago

> Just like Britain's other fake markets for gas and electricity it's just a single service with multiple alternative brandings you can choose between. Admittedly, the last mile is all Openeach, but operators like AAISP are much better at getting results out of Openreach than the big retailer operators. It's not perfect, and it's kind of bad a lot of the time; but it's still miles better than most of Canada, where major retail operators also own the last mile, and can't be bothered to fix anything for third-party providers on a decent timeline without a CRTC complaint.