From: Evan Leibovitch via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
On Mon, Apr 27, 2026 at 11:56 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk < talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
From: Evan Leibovitch via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
The fact that there is no competition left is a very big problem for consumers.
There is competition, the question is how much? Right now we have had a duopoly of Rogers(cable) and Bell/Telus(fibre).
The duopoly is an historical accident: Cable TV and copper telephone didn't compete in any way, so big monopolies were allowed to form in each. That didn't have to happen. Originally, many communities had their own provider (Cable was originally called CATV: Community Antenna TV). Then each service went vertical, creating virtually unbreakable monopolies. Then cable and phone fought it out for internet. Each leapfrogged the other. But they've both ended up with fibre. Where each has provided fibre, they are trying to rip out their old wires so that they don't have to maintain them and they prevent competitors using them. Example: I was using Vybe Networks for ADSL on Bell's copper. A trunk got cut, probably by a home construction. Bell refused to fix it. So I had to ditch Vybe (they cannot afford to resell optical). Possibly worse: Bell and Rogers seem to have divided up my area. My area is much more naturally serviced by one provider. I infer collusion was involved. Half is only serviced by fibre from Bell, half only by fibre from Rogers. I think that where Rogers has fibre, Bell still has copper and where Bell has fibre, Rogers has co-ax cable. Teksavvy offers a static IP address on service over Bell fibre. Bell will not. Teksavvy's price isn't competitive BECAUSE OF THE CRTC.
Freedom Mobile, now part of Videotron, is moving into home Internet. It's the main reason prices are cheaper in Quebec. The documentation suggests that Bell and Telus are now encroaching on each other's turf. And now, of course, we have Starlink, now in Canada <https://starlink.com/ca/residential>.
I've not heard that any majors are competing on actually installing fibre. They just resell, like Teksavvy.
There are other specialty options. If you're in one of the apartment or condo buildings that has Beanfield availability, you have access to some of the best value Internet in the city.
Nibbling at the edges. I have no idea if Beanfield provides fibre trunks or just consolidates a multi-unit building's traffic.
The CRTC decision is bad. Worse: the competition bureau has dropped the ball.
Both true.
Looking down the road there may be room for improvement. One of the truisms of telecom policy is that the Canadian south is expected to overpay for its Internet on the presumption that they are subsidizing access in the North. But i wonder if the newfound access to Starlink may change that paradigm in the medium term.
CRTC accounting is involved. I don't trust that it is actually doing what they say.
Wires are a natural monopoly.
Yes, but Internet access can come by DSL, by fibre, by coax and by satellite dish. With the exception of DSL each of those is offered by a different vendor. My house is wired for three of those four, plus I have a roof antenna.
Surely you don't have internet access via roof antenna. Long ago Look made a good attempt, but it failed. If you have Bell fibre, your DSL days are over or soon will be. The cable situation is probably similar.
The owners of the wires should not be allowed to use vertical integration to make their monopolies dominant in so many allied businesses.
We used to be uncompetitive as a country in cell rates but of late that has come down, maybe partially by the expansion of Videotron beyond Quebec. That is only in its infancy and I wish it well.
I went to Freedom just before the take-over. My needs are modest. The mobile phone monopoly has fewer walls: hardly any added value (coverage and roaming still matters a bit). Hardly any vertical component, as much as they try. The CRTC has been hacking at phone lock-in: number mobility, phone purchase lock-in. They have not attacked bundling, which is a serious issue: linked monopolies are stronger that separate ones.
I don't have experience with resellers beyond Teksavvy (and now EBOX). I repeat that my reasons for changing were non-monetary. Teksavvy is a reseller that is all-too-quick to blame its wholesale suppliers for its own bad actions.
I've used a sequence of DSL providers this century. Each has been taken out by mergers or CRTC pricing squeezes. Each user has their own horrible experiences. I've had a lot with Bell copper and a little with Bell fibre. Not so with Teksavvy. The community feeling is that Bell tries to make servicing worse for third party customers. I cannot verify this. Support is a bucket brigade: only the ISP can talk with Bell. My latest Bell fibre problem took a month to fix. For this service, I'm a direct Bell customer. Several appointments were skipped, involving me waiting half a day for a no-show. My mother had a problem for 30 years that Bell would not fix. The trunk on the road leaked and gave bad service when the weather was wet for a while. They refused to fix the trunk; they just swapped copper pairs. But those pairs went through the same trunk. We suspect that eventually my mother was the only customer on the trunk. Fiber wasn't available nor was cable. Twenty years ago, Bell offered DSL (not ADSL) on the line but they would not supply it 5 years ago.
My major anti-competitive beef with Robellus is more focused on being both carriers and owning primary creators of content (CTV, CITY, Sportsnet, TSN, MLSE, Crave, etc). That's an awful conflict.
Yeah, vertical integration. Funnily enough, the US Supreme Court decided that vertical integration was not relevant to anti-trust analysis. If I remember correctly, this was in the 1970s. I was so hopeful when Biden appointed Lina Khan to head the FTC. Oh well. She's now head of Columbia University's new Center for Law and the Economy. Someone to watch. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Khan>