3 ms·

Badly regulated monopolies suck.

by dsr_ 4y ago

vkou 4y ago
Internet in Canada isn't a monopoly, it's a government-protected oligopoly. And yes, it sucks. And no, nobody's going to fix it, because Canada's telecoms are far more motivated to lobby to protect themselves than Canadians are to lobby for the government to fix them. It's a classic collective action problem. It's why we can't have nice things.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  > Internet in Canada isn't a monopoly Depends where you are, and if you can consider Teksavvy et al as Rogers competitors. Where I am, Bell will only sell DSL1 at 6mbps. A newer subdivision that took a payoff from the local (now Rogers-owned) cableco. Before that acquisition forced Rogers' hand, that cableco didn't have anyone else selling on its lines.
gruez 4y ago
I'm sure they suck for plenty of reasons (eg. price gouging from lack of competition), but I'm not sure how those reasons relate to this outage. For instance I can imagine that a country with a more diverse telecommunications sector would be less vulnerable to a single provider going down, but this argument doesn't really pan out. I looked up how the market share is broken up in european countries[1][2] and they're roughly split 3 ways between 3 major competitors, which is similar to how the market share is split in canada. If there was a major outage with a major provider in germany, the impact would be roughly the same as with canada. Overall comments like this feels like a case of "maligned entity is in the news for some reason, so let's bring up all the other reasons we hate them" to me. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/469074/mobile-telephony-market-share-of-providers-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/469074/mobile-telephony-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/375986/market-share-held-by-mobile-phone-operators-united-kingdom-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/375986/market-share-held...
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  In Canada, mobile doesn't compete against wireline. With 3G Carrier Aggregation, LTE and now 5G, that's doable technically, but won't happen if one eats the revenue from the other. Personally, I blissfully slept through support tickets because my work phone is on Rogers, and my home wifi (for app pings) is on eBox.ca, which runs on Rogers lines (and is now owned by Bhell), so my work phone was totally dark.

Badly regulated monopolies suck.

by dsr_ 4y ago

Badly regulated monopolies suck.

vkou 4y ago

Internet in Canada isn't a monopoly, it's a government-protected oligopoly. And yes, it sucks. And no, nobody's going to fix it, because Canada's telecoms are far more motivated to lobby to protect themselves than Canadians are to lobby for the government to fix them. It's a classic collective action problem. It's why we can't have nice things.

Scoundreller 4y ago
> Internet in Canada isn't a monopoly Depends where you are, and if you can consider Teksavvy et al as Rogers competitors. Where I am, Bell will only sell DSL1 at 6mbps. A newer subdivision that took a payoff from the local (now Rogers-owned) cableco. Before that acquisition forced Rogers' hand, that cableco didn't have anyone else selling on its lines.

gruez 4y ago

I'm sure they suck for plenty of reasons (eg. price gouging from lack of competition), but I'm not sure how those reasons relate to this outage. For instance I can imagine that a country with a more diverse telecommunications sector would be less vulnerable to a single provider going down, but this argument doesn't really pan out. I looked up how the market share is broken up in european countries[1][2] and they're roughly split 3 ways between 3 major competitors, which is similar to how the market share is split in canada. If there was a major outage with a major provider in germany, the impact would be roughly the same as with canada. Overall comments like this feels like a case of "maligned entity is in the news for some reason, so let's bring up all the other reasons we hate them" to me. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/469074/mobile-telephony-market-share-of-providers-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/469074/mobile-telephony-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/375986/market-share-held-by-mobile-phone-operators-united-kingdom-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/375986/market-share-held...

Scoundreller 4y ago
In Canada, mobile doesn't compete against wireline. With 3G Carrier Aggregation, LTE and now 5G, that's doable technically, but won't happen if one eats the revenue from the other. Personally, I blissfully slept through support tickets because my work phone is on Rogers, and my home wifi (for app pings) is on eBox.ca, which runs on Rogers lines (and is now owned by Bhell), so my work phone was totally dark.