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.
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.
I fucking left and haven't had a cell phone plan in Canada for like a decade. My bill on TWO FOREIGN PHONES even roaming WITHIN CANADA is cheaper than maintaining a stupid Bell Rogers or Telus plan internationally.
The major sense I get from Canadians whenever I arrive back is an enormous sense of financial illiteracy. Like they just don't know or care about how badly they get ripped off all the time on so many things and will never care enough to do anything meaningful about it.
The problem in the end comes down to the fine line Canada always straddles due to the proverbial "sleeping with the elephant" (see quote from Trudeau Sr.)
The fear being that if Canada deregulates fully and opens critical sectors like telecomms etc. to full competition we will completely lose these industries to US (or Chinese, etc.) interests.
And yet at the same time domestic regulation is continually captured by predatorial internal interests.
Canada has always been this way, and it's frustrating as hell. Almost every industry has a caste of "goold old boys" who seek to prevent competition by capturing regulatory agencies.
Many times many participants all went to private school together @ Upper Canada College, etc. Or sit/sat on boards together.
You could say "ok, disband the regulation and let them compete" but many times that just leads to the total collapse of certain domestic industries because they simply can't compete with US capital.
> The fear being that if Canada deregulates fully and opens critical sectors like telecomms etc. to full competition we will completely lose these industries to US (or Chinese, etc.) interests.
I have never understood the reluctance of successive governments to allow foreign competition in our telecom markets. Telus, Shaw, Bell, and Rogers are all widely held public companies. They answer to global shareholders.
Yet, I can accept the argument writ large that some degree of sovereign relatedness for significant industries is sensible in a world where many foreign companies receive illicit government support for strategic reasons.
The best solution to bring down prices while protecting corporate sovereignty is a state-owned provincial provider. Mobile prices in Saskatchewan are significantly lower because of SaskTel. At times, yes, even a boring state-owned telecom is a good thing. Rogers/Telus/etc resist this notion, yet prices are evidentially a great deal cheaper in that province.
IMHO, the feds should create a fund to help provinces and municipalities build their own public broadband and mobile infrastructure, with the stated aim of competing with big-telecom.
I suspect that for every well-run public corporation, there are a dozen that are bloated and wasteful, and should have died long ago. SaskTel seems like one of the good ones, but it’s not that way because it’s a public corporation.
This doesn’t happen because people involved are less competent, it’s just that if they make some bad decisions or have some bad luck, they won’t be forced to answer to reality by the market by e.g. running out of money or being beaten by competition. Public corporations are too easy to keep going by continuing to fund through state coffers; to shut them down suggests that leaders made a mistake, so instead we throw good money after bad. It may not have been a mistake to attempt a public option, however even good ideas can fail for lots of reasons, and incentives just make it too hard to fail when it should.
To me the LCBO is the shining example of this: any reasonable analysis that compares with private competition for alcohol sales (e.g. Alberta, BC) would find Ontario has much worse store coverage, worse selection and lower net revenue per unit of alcohol .. yet, no politician would dare visit such an idea, since it suggests government (and its leaders) and ineffective.
The best thing would be to do a Yozma-style funding program. The government offers to match investment and provides clear buy-out terms for successful cases. If you lower the downside risk, you’ll get the competition you want in the space.
I'm not a fan of the LCBO's regulatory or wholesaling/importing arms, but.
I grew up in Alberta. Privatization of liquor there happened just around when I turned 18. LCBO vs the typical Alberta "liquor barn" type operation is no contest: the LCBO wins. On selection, on service, on presentation.
There are just a handful of decent wine shops in Edmonton when I visit. Their selection is meh. Almost every decent sized LCBO has a "Vintages" selection with a decently currated selection of wines. They are actually the superior retail experience, and they treat their employees far better on the whole.
The LCBO is also the single biggest importer of liquor in North America last I looked. Many European producers actually produce special labels and product just for the LCBO, because it buys in quantity for all of Ontario.
Politicians don't dare visit privatizing it not because of the suggestion it might make them look ineffective but because the LCBO brings in an obscene amount of revenue.
(The wine industry in Ontario is actually something I know a lot about. The real problem here is the regulatory side of things, and also the regulatory capture that what I call the "Niagara VQA Mafia" has over the domestic wine market. Becoming a wine producer in this province is stupid, it's been locked down to the same handful of meh grapes in an essentially locked in set of growing regions with no room for innovation, and the gov't totally destroys you on excise taxes, etc. not to mention the cut the LCBO takes from you)
Alberta has many kinds of liquor stores that optimize for different things, such as price, convenience or selection, all based on market demand. Last time I checked, they had far more SKUs overall (distribution is still centralized by the government for taxation and regulation).
Your experience at the LCBO might be great, but this is coming from less efficient operation. Would the private market support a “Vintages” section in every store and unionized cashiers at $30/hr? Probably not. Why should Ontario taxpayers be effectively subsidizing the alcohol retail experience in Ontario? It’s a ridiculous proposition.
The LCBO brings in a lot of revenue, but with a monopoly on most alcohol sales this is inevitable. Every privatization study (including the Liberals’ own study which they ignored) says that privatization would have no impact on revenues, which improving almost everything for the consumer (more convenience, more selection albeit via specialized stores, etc.)
> I have never understood the reluctance of successive governments to allow foreign competition in our telecom markets. Telus, Shaw, Bell, and Rogers are all widely held public companies. They answer to global shareholders.
Especially since it's a huge opportunity for profits for Canadian companies.
In Europe telecoms became an open market where any European carrier could setup shop anywhere else in Europe. The result was that the more efficient operators managed to grow considerably. Just take a look at the French Orange Telecom [0]
Opening the Canadian market to the USA or Europe would mean that Canadian companies could setup shops and disrupt the market in foreign countries. There's no reasons they would get crushed by their foreign competitors in an open market.
I mean, I remember the times when everyone had a BlackBerry phone and when Nortel was still a thing. These two companies were very much Canadians and killing it abroad.
> You could say "ok, disband the regulation and let them compete" but many times that just leads to the total collapse of certain domestic industries because they simply can't compete with US capital.
What’s wrong with this if it leads to lower costs for consumers and better service?
Canada wants to maintain a domestic industry, in part to not be held to the whims of another country's governing body. When the people that control your information flow, your food production, etc. are not within your jurisdiction, you're effectively at the mercy of both them and the government of their country.
... and largely, when American companies set up shop in Canada, they create a wholly owned subsidiary that is a Canadian company. I.e. McDonald's Canada and General Motors Canada are separate entities from their parent organizations.
Fun fact posted here before: The McDonald's locations that were recently shuttered in Russia were specifically founded by McDonald's Canada.
There is more to domestic policy than being able to go to the foreign-owned big-box store in your foreign-made sweats to buy foreign-made underwear that is 5 cents cheaper. Especially if that savings is only used to pay for the higher cost of internet infrastructure owned by a handful of oligarchs and used to distribute foreign-made content consumed in your sweats while quaffing beer made by foreign-owned cartels and eating popcorn grown by foreign-subsidized farmers.
> The major sense I get from Canadians whenever I arrive back is an enormous sense of financial illiteracy. Like they just don't know or care about how badly they get ripped off all the time on so many things and will never care enough to do anything meaningful about it.
In reality there is nothing meaningful Canadians can do to fix this, that isn't how things work in Canada. MPs and MLAs don't listen and no party that could actually win will take the required steps to solve this problem. It's extremely difficult not to be apathetic when you know the fight isn't winnable.
People know they're getting ripped off, that's why anyone who can goes to America to buy essential goods.
Policy is defined by whoever writes the laws and decides their content, not so much by who votes on them.
PR is definitely an improvement on FPTP, which is hugely biased towards the Establishment.
But it's still very vulnerable to well-funded PR and influencing campaigns.
Real democracy is difficult and precarious. Solutions have to be systemic covering not just politics but also law, the civil service, education at all levels, the media, the military and police, and ownership of key public assets.
Don't you think laws will be written and advertised differently if every citizen has a chance to vote on them vs being slam dunk by the party in power?
There will still be well funded PR in a direct vote system, but it will hopefully be easier to expose and see the value of each law.
Sure the executive side of things can and should be improved, but it'll be harder, and I'd argue a different initiative.
> It's 2022, we have technology that can make direct democracy cheap, easy and secure
Are you from a parallel universe where operating systems, compilers, and software and hardware supply chains are secure against nation-state adversaries?
Leaving the country is not trivial for most people. I see this comment a lot from people who have left, but for lack of a better term it's an extremely "privileged" position.
If you're either not in a high demand industry, not highly skilled, or lack a degree you aren't going to be leaving Canada. Even if you are all of those things it can still be difficult.
I'd leave in an instant but despite being highly skilled I lack a university degree which in my experience has made it almost impossible, despite trying.
This, along with the increasing awareness regarding consumption and emissions, is way bigger than most people make it out to be. Even without dependents, it seems easy until you realize if anything happens to your immediate family, it becomes a lot more difficult to see them (and vice versa).
It's a tradeoff between freedom and community, but it's still a tradeoff most people aren't fully aware off.
"highly skilled I lack a university degree which in my experience has made it almost impossible, despite trying."
I'm in the same boat, highly skilled and lack a university degree. I left for ~8 years and came back.
The TN visa program has many qualifying jobs that dont require uni degrees.
It was VERY easy.. apply for US job, take US Job offer to the boarder, pay like $35 and get a TN stamp in my passport. Use this to get a Social security number, bank account, etc.
I'm STRONGLY advising all my kids leave. The taxes and how you are treated in Canada is shitty.
Try finding a Doctor here, or sign up for any programs. 6 month wait lists, overbooked, overcrowding... This country LOVES to make promises to get your votes, takes your tax dollars to pay for it, but fails to deliver when you need the services you paid for?
Get a decent job, they will provide good coverage and you can see a doctor next-day.
Surely relocating your life is such a big move that you can plan for it ahead of time and get a degree? It doesn't have to be from a good, expensive university, as long as it's recognized.
And I think for software engineers with experience getting a degree in CS while not trivial is doable, especially if you're not hoping for high grades.
"You don't have to be nasty because I suggested you might be privileged in some way."
it is always external factors isn't it? He's privileged, I went to the US for years because i am privileged.. Everyone else who has done this is privileged?
This is sort of the "everyone thinks they are above average which is impossible" problem.. Not everyone can be "privileged".. maybe that isnt the issue after all?
what have YOU done to make YOURSELF admissible? No one will do this for you... there isn't any form of "Affirmative action" program to enter a foreign country.
They admit based on your skills and abilities and their needs to fill those roles. Look at the requirements, find out what you are missing..
It's not the ticket out. It is the right to work in another country. Generally that requires some skills that are in short supply. That doesn't necessarily mean having a degree, but that doesn't hurt when trying to get a work visa.
So out of curiosity and someone who isn't Canadian, what exactly is keeping individuals?
Most countries I see, the problem is one of the two. Non-English industry and one doesn't speak the native language. Missing a desirable education + experience combo (e.g. any masters or PhD, STEM bachelor, software dev with 3+ YoE).
I'd imagine most individuals looking here would hit one of the requirements on the last, and English tends to be the language spoken in software dev in most of the world (or at least, the ability to). Several may be willing to accommodate non-native language speakers on several other fields, too.
At the very least, I know much of Europe is bending over backwards for skilled workers (backlash from trying to cheapen everything and from the US taking EU's skilled workers, I guess) and the US is Canada's neighbor.
Out of curiosity for someone who is Canadian, what’s the assumed pull? Historically it would be income and career opportunities, but the tide has turned on that quite significantly in the last 5-10 years. Outside of that, it’s safe, clean, people are friendly, there are nice things. With a middle of the road tech salary the price of internet is a non concern.
That said, Canadian politics and crony capitalism are a grind sometimes, but looking over the fence it’s not totally obvious that other systems aren’t trading one set of intractable problems for another.
Canada has problems, and it's good to talk about them lest we never be rid of them.
Suggesting "just leave" is a pretty facile argument if I'm being abundantly generous.
Fleeing a country whenever you take issue with industry cronyism is an excellent way to move to a new country every 3 weeks. It's also a great way to make sure whatever policies you disagree with flourish in your absence.
Changing country comes at a huge financial and emotional cost not everyone can afford.
What country did you move to that magically doesn't have any problems?
Canada has the same doctors per capita as the U.S., it's just that in Canada access to health care is considered a defacto universal right whereas in the U.S. for much of the population health care is a privilege or benefit associated with employment.
on concurrent note can't get out of country car insurance which is 200-300$/month for a junker car just collision liability bare basics. it is a bit of a crisis way established institutions fleece us Canadians.
didn't realize there was a doctor shortage in Canada - all I ever hear about countries with socialized medicine is how they are better than the US at delivering health care more cheaply - possibly true in some respects, but if there is no doctor to see you, than it really doesn't matter.
US system is far from perfect, but at least I can always find a doctor when I need one.
There's a shortage of primary care, family doctors in Canada, but that's a systemic issue resulting from a skewed payment system that undervalues family medicine. The result is some difficulty getting a family doctor after you leave home as many practices are fully booked with patients and there aren't as many young physicians entering family medicine as we need.
The outcome is having to go to a walk-in clinic or (worst case) the ER room if you need care and don't have a doctor. That's inconvenient because of having to sit in the waiting room for a few hours.
In Alberta there is a genuine issue with doctors leaving the province (mostly for other provinces, not the country entirely), but that is the direct result of the conservative government there waging war on the public medical system in an effort to build support for a private system.
The only place I hear about the terrible medical care situation in Canada is in the American far-right press and some of their Canadian surrogates (e.g. Rebel News in Alberta).
Is there a country on the planet without a doctor/nurse shortage? I've never heard anyone anywhere say that their had too much healthcare available. No healthcare system is perfect but Canadians are not dropping dead in the streets for lack of doctors. There are localized issues, mostly due to the distances involved in Canada, but the population as a whole is doing better than most.
Just look at the COVID numbers. For all its problems, Canada's healthcare system is handling COVID far better than the US.
Yes. In Latin America rich people can almost always purchase better/faster healthcare. Lots of things are cheaper in other countries. Rich people in the US can buy instant healthcare too. Your cash just wont go as far in the US.
US has their own versions of this.. basically all General Practitioner aka Family Doctor offices closed here twenty years ago.. rural areas have not one local doctor in many places of the USA - keyword search "medically underserved"
> US system is far from perfect, but at least I can always find a doctor when I need one.
You can easily find this, and basically every other problem and horror story from countries with universal care, in the US. Long wait times, trouble finding doctors who are taking new patients, trouble getting appointments with specialists. All that stuff. It varies by location and by which healthcare "networks" you have access to.
And on top of that we get the how-the-fuck-is-this-still-a-thing nightmare of US healthcare billing.
It's awful if you have a chronic health condition or need specialists but when you get hit by a car and don't have to pay a huge hospital bill it is pretty cool.
Still it's hemorrhaging talent because of dumb pay schemes that could probably be fixed overnight if it wasn't for the aforementioned financial illiteracy
In Canada you get what you pay for... Healthcare is free but it's also pretty shit. Care in Europe is far better, care in the US is far better if you have money.
> The major sense I get from Canadians whenever I arrive back is an enormous sense of financial illiteracy.
Completely false. Ask any Canadian how they feel about their internet or mobile phone bill and they will tell you they're being ripped off. We have been battling Rogers and Bell for decades, they have too much money and influence at this point.
I mean my phone bill isn't 200$ and massively data capped with bad coverage anymore so if it's to get a better deal on your phone bill then that's my advice yes
I think financially literate people in Canada don't pay anywhere near $200. I've always paid around $50/mo for the last 20 years, without ever going out of my way to shop for promotions, and have been able to have all the data usage I could reasonably use (previously excluded watching videos when not on Wi-Fi, but the most recent plan of a few years has enough data that I no longer need to), plus extra bells and whistles like free roaming in the US. This is with both a corporate plan with Bell the last 6-7 years, and a regular single individual plan with Rogers all the years before that, so wasn't even with a lower cost provider.
There are huge promotions multiple times a year because the competition is fierce between the top providers. When long-term contracts that subsidized phones were still around up to a few years ago, the buyouts to switch providers were so aggressive that you could end up with an extra few hundred dollars in your pocket on top of a new phone every 2 years when switching providers, or staying with the same provider and getting the loyalty/retention department to match offers. Yes, there may be better deals to be found down south sometimes, but not by enough of a margin to deal with cross-border banking, currency conversion, and much worse consumer protection laws for most people.
Yes, additional competition might potentially help drive prices down, but the low ROI on the huge amount of infrastructure required for such a small population might also result in worse economies of scale for all players resulting in the need to cut corners on coverage or service quality to remain competitive.
Also, I'm not convinced coverage is better down south. Anecdotally, I seem to hit way more deadspots driving down I5 through Washington and Oregon than I do on Highway 1 across BC to Alberta despite having much larger swathes of populated areas. I'm also shocked everytime I go to New York and get zero cell signal in every subway station including near Wall Street, when every underground transit station in Vancouver has coverage (admittedly Toronto does not have this though).
I have one question, have the prices gone up or down over the past decade? I will admit I'm not familiar with the market there for about as long for sure.
Last time I had a bill in my name in Canada it was pretty pricey to get any reasonable amount of international (Not just USA) roaming plans with reasonable amounts of data, like around 200 for sure.
I'm not sure you intended to come across as condescending but it does read this way.
"The major sense I get from Canadians whenever I arrive back is an enormous sense of financial illiteracy. Like they just don't know or care about how badly they get ripped off all the time on so many things and will never care enough to do anything meaningful about it."
First, that isn't what financial illiteracy means.
Next, It is very easy to write things like this but what are your proposals? you seem to feel they are being "ripped off", speak down upon them for not doing anything, but fail to offer any solutions.. very helpful?
Are they really being ripped off?
I lived in the US for ~8 years and used T-Mobile. i dont find the T-Moble price to be too far off my freedom monthly rates.
we LOVE to complain about the prices differences, but never actually show what they really are.
it is hard to provide coverage in a massive country with low population. California has more people vs Canada.
>I lived in the US for ~8 years and used T-Mobile. i dont find the T-Moble price to be too far off my freedom monthly rates.
I pay Sprint (now T-Mobile) $20 total for two unlimited lines. Yes, that includes all taxes and fees.
Admittedly, I got a fantastic deal (only available for two weeks) for one of the two lines, got the other line as a free promotion also only briefly available, and then got the taxes/fees incorporated into the total when the account moved over to T-Mobile. But if I didn't have those deals, I'd pay $25 (after a group discount that's trivial to get) to Visible for an unlimited line on the Verizon network, or Mint Mobile's[1] $30/month for unlimited plan, or $20/month for 10GB plan (which might as well be unlimited for me, and probably 95% of others). My understanding is that nothing in Canada comes close to these rates.
[1] Canadian Ryan Reynolds as spokesman and part owner
Key for me is that since I don't spend most of my time in Canada, I need plans without insane roaming fees. Nothing like that there.
I would get into detail about what plans I'm on but it feels too much like dropping my own dox.
Again this is two separate phone lines from two separate countries which work fine in Canada, costing less than one Canadian phone line would.
I have only one specific proposal - ban banks from giving horrible financial advise by changing one letter. If you want to understand where I'm coming from it's this [1]
> it is hard to provide coverage in a massive country with low population.
I keep hearing and I personally think it's a distraction.
Yes covering all of Canada would be very expensive because of the low population. But, coverage is spotty after driving only 30 minutes outside of a major city centre. And there aren't too many of those.
I suspect you're right that people don't care enough to make this a major political matter. But isn't financial illiteracy a common problem among workers and consumers throughout the world?
In some countries, a worker has only a small amount of vacation, no sick leave, no worker organisation, a wretched minimum wage, high rental cost, and no hope of owning a home to escape the threat of eviction.
There are places where health care is available only through an employer and the cost of health treatment can bankrupt workers and their families.
There are places where people pay taxes but infrastructure is not maintained and has become unsafe. The water may not be safe to drink and the electricity grid may be fragile but tax payers bear the exorbitant cost of for-profit utilities.
There are inexpensive talk-and-text plans in Canada. A generous cellular plan may still be a luxury for most people.
Bruh I live in a so-called third world country and no such restricted thing exists.
Can also drink the water juuuuuust fine.
Electricity grid is more an affect of extreme tropical weather. The Americans come here and point at messes of coils of wire on every pole - like yeah that's how we make it repaired fast when a tropical storm hits.
Health care is immediately available for less than a benjamin. If a Canadian doctor puts me on a waiting list on a visit back, I tell him sorry gonna do it somewhere else don't bother making another appointment.
Then why aren't you doing anything about it? Why is the contrast between Canada and the rest of the world palpably stark? Why do banks get away with disgusting loopholes like getting around laws by calling themselves "financial advisers" rather than advisOrs?
A little harsh? Do something about it enough that I might consider returning
Oh please lost child return to us. We're begging you to come back. Gimme a break.
We are a country with 1/10th the population of the US -- the largest economy in the world and an aggressive military power -- and we're sitting right next to it, for most of our history barely holding onto an independent existence. Most of our "successful" industries consist of "ripping and shipping" raw commodities to service that market.
It should not surprise you why things are the way they are. It's gross how these domestic industries end up this way, captured by a cabal of self-serving corporate dickheads, but TBH on the whole the alternative would be raw subservience to US corporations who would steamroll our entire economy.
There is no easy answer, or it would have been done already.
This has always been the case. You're not special or particularly interesting.
It was, however, amusing watching so many Canadians return during the Trump years and COVID. Our Google office in Waterloo almost doubled in size from returning Canadians.
But we frankly should have clawed the subsidized portion of your tuition from you before you left the country.
George Walker Bush, as opposed to his father George Herbert Walker Bush. The father was commonly called "George Bush" while president, the son was called "George W. Bush". The emphasis put on the W while speaking about the son evolved into just "W".
>>W. is a 2008 American biographical comedy-drama film based on the life of George W. Bush. Directed by Oliver Stone and written by Stanley Weiser, it stars Josh Brolin as Bush. The supporting cast includes Elizabeth Banks, James Cromwell, Ellen Burstyn, Thandiwe Newton, Jeffrey Wright, Scott Glenn, and Richard Dreyfuss. Filming began on May 12, 2008, in Louisiana, and the film was released on October 17, 2008.
> It was, however, amusing watching so many Canadians return during the Trump years and COVID. Our Google office in Waterloo almost doubled in size from returning Canadians.
That was not my understanding of the trend at all. From all sources I've seen discussed over the years, it seems the Trump admin coincided with a record number of engineers coming to America from Canada. In 2020, 84% of graduating engineer from the Waterloo college went on to move to America [0].
However, what I was told and observed is that a lot of engineers previously working on H1Bs or other non-immigrant visas had their work authorizations revoked after the Trump administration decided to increase the scrutiny on "specialty occupations" [1]. From a friend of mine, I heard Canada was a popular destinations to send programmers who couldn't keep working in the US, no matter their passport, due to a lower bar on immigration.
Don't worry, I'm not at Google anymore. My condescension is inherent and essential, not a property of my employment. But I probably wouldn't have let it loose if you didn't come across as a precious ass, yourself.
Well considering if you voted in a party whose promise of voting reform has been heavily rescinded, I think pressing them to fulfill that promise would be a start.
Not sure what gave you the impression I voted red or the authority to assert that I did.
When a Liberal federal candidate came to my door last election cycle the electoral reform about face was the first thing I grilled them on. I didn’t get a satisfying answer.
First past the post is not going away any time soon.
>The major sense I get from Canadians whenever I arrive back is an enormous sense of financial illiteracy. Like they just don't know or care about how badly they get ripped off all the time on so many things and will never care enough to do anything meaningful about it.
Why Canadians pay much more and have access to less despite living in a country that is 95% culturally, economically, and politically identical to the US, I do not know. I didn't fully understand the disparity until I read the amazing stories in a /r/canada discussion. victorn72's account <http://np.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/1ueai3/why_are_our_pr...> caused my jaw to drop open.
That said, isn't the sheer popularity of crossborder shopping an indicator that Canadians aren't financially illterate? That they do know what's going on, and act accordingly?
I have a friend who didn't graduate high school cause he was too busy playing world of warcraft all the time who is the only millionaire I know from those days and he pulls stuff like this off all the time too.
> I fucking left and haven't had a cell phone plan in Canada for like a decade. My bill on TWO FOREIGN PHONES even roaming WITHIN CANADA is cheaper than maintaining a stupid Bell Rogers or Telus plan internationally.
A colleague of mine had an acquaintance in the Canadian CBP who apparently managed to get a cell phone plan in America that included free roaming in Canada via a postal box. So he ended up paying half of what Canadians paid (and also had international roaming at much cheaper rates). Kinda ironic considering that, as my colleague put it, his job consists mostly of taxing people trying to get a bargain by shopping across the border.
With all due respect, I don’t pick up on this at all. I get the distinct impression that everyone realizes how much we’re getting screwed but has a learned helplessness that we are no match for the corruption of our corporate political overlords.
Protest over $150/mo cellphone plans? We don’t even do that over 35% growth in housing prices year over year over year.
Doesn't T-Mobile USA have a free international roaming deal or something for North America + Mexico? Also back in the day Verizon had a "US+Canada" sub that was quite reasonable (not unlimited but nothing was back then).
> The major sense I get from Canadians whenever I arrive back is an enormous sense of financial illiteracy. Like they just don't know or care about how badly they get ripped off all the time on so many things and will never care enough to do anything meaningful about it.
It's ration dis-engagement -- even if they don't know they are doing it. Deep down even the most dedicated sheep know they have no ability to impact anything.
Canada is a democracy but that doesn't mean what people think it means. There's zero public accountability for anything and it's only getting worse.
The 'solution' offered for this created problem is always more bureaucracy and government and taxes, but no accountability on results.
Canada is the country of the future..! If the future is the movie Brazil.
> 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.
> 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.
> Oh and if you think the internet situation is bad up here in Canada, then wait 'till you hear about our mobile phone rates.
I wasted a good half a day going around different mobile phone shops in Vancouver because I couldn't understand why none of them had a $20 pay as you go simcard which would have me a dozen GB of data and some calls.
In the end one of the shop assistants who had been to Europe understood our confusion and explained that those just don't exist in Canada. He also showed us the coverage map and that the minute we left Vancouver cell service would be next to nothing anyway.
Well yeah, cell service is going to be bad in the mountains, of course. No one lives there and there are giant mountains in the way. But any populated area of the country has good service.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Nothing is being fixed for the areas initially promised. My area, rural, was supposed to be the first to go fibre.... but Oz is huge... and so they chickened out and gave the rural guys nothing.
The main house still only has ADSL1 (8Mb/s peak, & generally sits around 2Mb with a lot of noise). As such, I use a tethered 4G connection for all internet in my cabin.
However, to cater for rural areas, they rolled out Wireless NBN, which is just a dedicated 4G connection and 50% more cost over standard NBN... staying on 4G is cheaper and has a closer tower (so the signal is better).
Starlink is starting to look better... (if only I trusted Elon Musk).
the original FTTP plan was never going to FTTP the entire country. most of australia - in the spatial sense of "most" - is sparsely inhabited and fixed-line is uneconomic. the original plan was always satellite + wireless + FTTP, based on density and perhaps a bit of political pork barrelling, and it is quite likely that the original design of which regions would be serviced by which tech was also somewhat optimistic, and might need to have been adjusted, even if the FTTP plan wasn't torn up by the liberal-national coalition
(the original FTTP plan was replaced with a "multi technology mix" plan -- the new federal government argued that their plan would be cheaper because instead of laying new fibre, just buy the existing degraded legacy copper lines from telstra, and also buy and reuse the HFC from telstra and optus.
so instead of spending tens of billions of dollars of public money building brand new infrastructure, spend tens of billions of dollars of money and reuse existing degraded infrastructure! think of the savings!
from memory getting the HFC regions to actually work was a bit of a fiasco, that part of the rollout was heavily delayed.
anyhow, it is great to see the coalition lose another federal election, albeit entirely unrelated reasons)
And even semi-rural, just outside the main cities, you might find yourself with "Fixed Wireless NBN" that promises to hit 25Mbps at least once per 24 hour period.
Broadband in Aus (I'm a recent migrant) is so far behind Europe and so expensive!
The Australian NBN would also have sucked a lot less if the government hadn’t sneaked in usage fees on the network.
It is, or at least was, insanely expensive to use the Australian next generation network. It cost ISPs providing service on the network thousands of dollars per month if a fiber customer actually used their gigabit connection, instead of a fixed line rental fee.
This doesn’t seem to be a problem. I have a gigabit connection, the whole speed is usable and there are no data caps. It doesn’t cost a huge amount, and I don’t believe the ISP is running at a loss to provide this service.
Until recently NBN fiber connections only came with 2 Mbps of bandwidth. Any usage over that was billed at $8 per Mbps to the ISP.
In other words, an ISP customer taking full advantage of their gigabit fiber connection could cost the ISP almost $8000 per month.
And that was just the cost for the local bandwidth in Australia. Add all the costs for cross connects and Internet capacity in addition to all the normal costs of running a business.
Obviously this was and is a millstone around the ISPs’ neck. You can find a plethora of complaints and write ups on the ISP business in Australia illuminating the extremely thin or negative margins in the business.
The only thing that kept the ISPs in business was statistical multiplexing at scale and aggressive traffic shaping.
> 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.
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.
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).
But it doesn't work any better than it would work if the network infrastructure were publicly-owned - and arguably coverage in remote areas would be better. And cost and time wouldn't have to be expended on regulation. And there would be no risk of the monopoly infrastructure-provider being bought-out.
There's no sense in having a natural monopoly such as a water or gas pipeline network be operated by a commercial monopoly, and then regulated to blazes. That's just make-work for civil servants. Same for internet cabling. Instead, let the government provide dark cable/fibre, and let retail operators negotiate peering, provide NOCs, and add services like Sport TV (which I don't have a use for).
It's good that there's a market in retail internet provision; I use a fantastic boutique ISP, with almost-instant telephone support from people who know what they're talking about, and don't have scripts. Because it's a market, I can choose to pay more for a superior service.
If you are looking up to Openreach then I feel bad for your situation. I’m in London and the best I can get from BT is 70 down / 20 up VDSL - advertised as 50 Mbps because presumably some people don’t get even 70. I shudder to think what it’s like if you live in a rural area.
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.
He's just exaggerating to sell his view which really has nothing to do with corruption, Canada gives special cartel licenses out, for instance the gambling industry. How those people running those outfits attain those is a mystery.
But there isn't an outright corruption like you would find in Ukraine or Zambia.
If you think Vancouver is corrupt, you really haven't travelled
To add: corruption is all relative. Corruption is a process not an absolute. Under that definition Vancouver is certainly in the process of corruption.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Municipal ISPs are completely legal, but it gets complicated.
Where I live (rural area), a private ISP covers the county with fixed wireless and competes with a national ISP that does the same but with satellite for infill where there is no tower coverage. The various levels of government announced plans for massive funding to provide "high speed" internet everywhere, and Bell manages to be the only qualifier for our county, taking the entire subsidy to the tune of millions of dollars. They still do not provide fixed wireless service to this day but they do continue to provide backbone and peering to the other ISPs. Eventually, and unreliably.
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.
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.
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.)
“…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”?
> 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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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?
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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
Bell, one of the two main internet providers, just bought my independent provider Ebox. There were a rather dependent independent mind you, all their lines were rented.
If I want fiber, Bell is my only option. Not the main one, the only one. Their pricing is reasonable if memory serves, but their customer experience is notoriously awful. I will never deal with them again unless I'm absolutely forced to.
Anyway, good article, we're fucked, deregulation brings us misery once more.
Fucked in Ontario too. Rogers is trying to buy Shaw (who owns Freedom mobile) under the guise of increasing competition[0]. Another hilarious claim they make is that Rogers needs to buy Shaw to stay competitive with foreign streaming services[1].
Videotron (of Quebecor) is trying to expand westward, and possibly buy Freedom. In Eastern Ontario you can use them, and their subsidiary Fizz for mobile.
Good if you can get it. I'm 30 miles east of Toronto and the max speed I can get from Bell is 40Mbs. In Toronto I had Bell and it was 1Gbit/1Gbit. Fastest connection I've had.
Rogers offer 1Gbit/50Mbit but without any competition they can name their price which is a ridiculous $115 + HST.
The trick in Canada is to sign up and then move to another provider within a few months. Retentions will call you and you'll get a more reasonable deal. I do this with Rogers and Fido (which Rogers own) every 12 months.
That's basically what it's like buying service from one of the smaller companies. I call my small provider with good customer service, they deal with Rogers and a Rogers technician shows up at my house to do the work. My life is 1000% improved by not having to talk to Rogers.
I'm in the same boat. I loathe having to deal with Bell, but they haven't tried to screw me in a while (they must have forgotten about me?) so I haven't had to deal with them for years. But the FTTH service they provide is unparalleled and unavailable from any reseller.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Not accurate. You've taken a valid data point and over-extrapolated from it. Openreach provides the physical cable for the majority of customers (excluding cable and FTTP, the latter of which is steadily expanding). However the physical cable connecting the customer to the IX is only a part of the picture of providing internet access - and you over-fixate on this.
From there, you're routed through to infrastructure owned and operated by the individual ISP you've chosen - and these infrastructures are not identical. Some do more filtering and inspection than others. Some are pure ipv4, and some support ipv4/ipv6 dual stacks. Different routing designs within these networks mean that latency and jitter can be very different (one major ISP is particularly notable for poor internal latency due to a legacy network design). There's a lot of complexity here that you're ignoring.
That's not always true - Hyperoptic for example runs it's own at least between cabinet and building, I don't know about after the cabinet. I also don't care, it doesn't matter to me? Price and performance do.
> 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.
Yes that was exactly my point. They're about as different as they can be, what's the problem.
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?
If only there had been some central planning so that three houses could have been provided with physical fibre instead of one house getting physical fibre three times...
Here too, it's only 'cable' that's not so common or perhaps not available here any more. I don't know why really but was never as popular here even for TV I don't think, mostly either satellite or not.
Also 4G/5G is a relatively popular choice here. And Starlink an option to both of us.
> Here too, it's only 'cable' that's not so common or perhaps not available here any more. I don't know why really but was never as popular here even for TV I don't think, mostly either satellite or not.
I think cable TV ended up being too expensive to build out. In the US it tends to be above ground on utility poles (which I think are also used for electricity) while the UK required trenching. This slowed the rollout and satellite TV (which carried the same channels) ate their lunch.
We could have had fibre much earlier had BT been allowed to roll it out but Thatcher wanted competition.
>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!
National services are fine too! The reason you have physical fibre in rural Suffolk is because of national broadband subsidies targeted at rural areas.
> 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.
This monopoly is actually disrupted in the province of Saskatchewan where there exists a government-owned telecom provider, SaskTel.
The existence of this provider has driven down prices from the big 3 (Telus, Bell, Rogers) because they have to compete with the offerings of this reasonably priced provider that isn't driven by profit.
I use Teksavvy in Ontario because they truly have the interest of consumers in mind. I've actually had them lower my bill after they were allowed to cut costs due to CRTC regulations. Unfortunately these regulations are being attacked by the current head of the CRTC who is a plug for the big 3.
It's a really sad state of affairs in Canada. All we can do is keep supporting companies that fight for the consumer.
Bell had fibre to the door installed in my neighbourhood. I had a very fun time watching a low quality salesperson’s head gears grind to a halt when I explained I will gladly pay a premium to never do business with Bell ever.
Bell and Rogers are predatory and awful to work with. Never ever be swindled by low-looking prices. You pay for it with low-quality service.
Bell often has a good price then an asterisk where you see the price jumps, alot.
Bell sends cold call salespeople to neighbourhoods every 6 months (before the pandemic). They're as bad as Jehovah's Witnesses.
But Bell is literally double for phone and Internet compared to the local cable TV/ISP offers. Plus their reliability and support are abysmal stuff of legends.
My local cable TV Eastlink has a local cable access channel with local hockey games Bell doesn't have that. That was my Dad's key argument and he never saw Bell again.
For reference housing cooperatives in Vancouver used to have a fixed price service with Telus of ~20CAD for 15 mb/s symetrical, typical rates were at around 40-50 for similar services. This was great as many of the residents are retired seniors with very little internet needs (basic Netflix or Zoom). throughout the pandemic the government gave the go-ahead to pipe owners to increase rates, this deal was canceled and people moved to regular pricing with 40% discount on $90 base rates, effectively doubling people's rates.
There are some interesting comments on this comparing to the situation in the UK with Openreach and the "market" for broadband. However there's something much more interesting happing in the UK at the moment. We are awash with PE funded FTTP (fiber to the premises) startups, in my town there're two pulling their fibre through the BT ducts and putting small boxes on the top of telegraph polls. We can now get 1gb finer for under £40/month.
It's basically a repeat of the 90s / early 00s, their exit strategy is clearly for a larger player to build a conglomerate out of all of them, just as happed with [lost of small cable tv companies] -> NTL & Telewest -> Virgin Media.
The Netherlands. There's some regulatory capture here, too, but uncapped fibre Internet and mobile plans are all reasonably-priced compared to Canada. (ok that's not saying much!)
On another note, fibre is head and shoulders better than cable for latency. I can type on my computer in OVH Montreal and it feels like it's under my desk!
In the Netherlands it's a kind of strange situation. All the infrastructure is owned by KPN. They are also one of the biggest internet providers but they must allow others on their network.
I live in the US, and my experience is that internet is consistently fast in most places. Many locations offer 1GB internet plans, and the speeds increase every year. From a quick glance at the wikipedia rankings, it looks like the US internet speeds are about the 10th fastest in the world, and are faster than all European countries and Canada (more than doubling average speeds in Canada).
Competition is definitely a problem, especially in rural areas, and I'm excited for the increased competition from offerings like Starlink in rural areas and 5G internet in cities. Starlink is especially great in that it adds an option in many countries, not just the US.
It used to be that resellers only had access to Cable lines, but some resellers are starting to offer Fiber [0], the problem being that the rates are super high
I believe that Lightspeed's Fiber is only backbone and still uses Shaw for last mile. Only Telus provides Fiber to the Home in BC at least.
The pricing is ridiculous, Fiber is almost twice as much as cable internet from Lightspeed for the same download speeds, so unless you need the symmetric upload it is hard to justify.
Telus will give you a bunch off their fiber plans if you can haggle with them, it's a pain and you have to do it every time your service renews, but I'm paying ~$65/m for 1Gbps so it's worth it...
Starlink pricing is non-competitive in areas with lines already laid down, even in a price-gouging market like Canada, and as a renter, you're not going to have the ability to mount a dish anyways.
And if it ever does become competitive, the good old boys' club that runs Canada's telecoms can always get the government to tax/ban it.
There are no technological solutions to corruption, only political ones.
"There are no technological solutions to corruption, only political ones"
Yes and no. It isn't politically easy to disadvantage an obviously better alternative that half of the world is using.
Even the French government with its Minitel [1] had eventually to throw the towel in. And the Czech government, which used to be even more corrupt, still could not prevent slow unravelling of government-owned monopolies such as the Czech Telecom, Czech Railways, Czech Post etc. They had to adapt to the changing and more competitive world and shake off some of their bloat.
Like everywhere else in the world, Starlink will be utterly game changing for rural and remote areas that don't have access to anything better than 5mbit DSL (or even worse).
The the far North, especially, things will get much better.
I’m sure he is. It’s easier for Scandinavian countries because they don’t have such a large, deserted territory. But most of the Canadian population is concentrated in specific areas, mostly in the southern part. There are some relatively large towns below the 55th parallel, but for the most part it’s large, empty land with small communities and reservations spreaded across the territory.
Starlink would provide broadband to communities that still don’t have it, or have it at a higher price because it’s a different satellite internet provider. Even more so past the 55th. I’m sure Santa would appreciate too.
No it doesn't. To have a "stationary satellite", you need to put it in a geosynchronous orbit, which is 32,000km up. With starlink, it's at about 550km up. The latency difference is _huge_. With starlink, you can easily get 50-150ms ping times. With geo satellites, you get like 2 _seconds_. That's completely unusable for many usecases of the internet like video calls or online videogames.
You are correct, but the exact ping times (to the ground station) is 6.7ms for Starlink (if directly above) or 10-15ms just for the link.
For geostationary, it is 400ms if you are on the equator, and 450ms if you are north/south. Realistically it is about 600ms from what I have seen in Europe.
Well yeah that's true, but is ping really important when you live in the far north...is it so important that a whole part of a country is highly dependent on a private US company?
>That's completely unusable for many usecases of the internet like video calls or online videogames.
stationary is ~600, and it's absolutely possible for video-calls (from my own experience)...but yeah no good scores for your counter-strike...but then better go hunting/fishing irl when you up there.
> Well yeah that's true, but is ping really important when you live in the far north...is it so important that a whole part of a country is highly dependent on a private US company?
In a word, yes. High ping isn't bad for just gaming, so much of the internet is written by people who assume that roundtrips are cheap that ~600ms internet connections are just painful for everyday use. If you feel that relying on Starlink gives SpaceX too much power, you need to start thinking about other LEO constellations, not substituting with GEOsats. Because they are simply inadequate.
> North Canada is not accessible...and probably never will (not enough customers)
Literally everywhere in the world will be accessible once they get enough intersat links and the polar sats up. Right now, they are limited by both the bent-pipe architecture they use for the first shell of sats (because intersat links were not ready), and because they launched the 53° shells first (because they get the most customers with the fewest sats operational the fastest).
And they need to do this even if they'd have only a single customer, because their FCC frequency allocation requires them to provide service in all 50 states, including the very northernmost parts of Alaska. They plan to achieve this with a 97.6° shell of 10 planes, which will provide service all the way to the pole.
They have demonstrated the intersat links, and have launched 867 satellites to working orbits with them since last September (excluding the ones that failed to deploy). Assuming they are launching the shells in sequence, if they maintain their current rate of ~4.5 sats per day on average, they will complete the 53.2° shell by the end of the year. After this, the next in line is the 70° shell. Assuming the same launch rate, it will complete in a bit over 5 months. It doesn't need to be entirely complete for service to start, but the sats will also need a few months to drift into position before they are usable. So about this time next year, Starlink will be usable in all of Canada below the ~72° line. The remaining islands will get service about 5 months after that.
And none of that requires any of their more speculative projects to work, but just for the things they are already doing to continue at current pace.
From Space-stations, Vans, and hyper-speed-vacuum tunnels.
And even if they have 867 satellites up it's still not really good, there was a good article here recently. But that's how Elon collect's his money, make big promises deliver nothing "Big" but something that already exists.
> is it so important that a whole part of a country is highly dependent on a private US company?
Sure, fine, that's something worrisome. But be honest with your arguments from the get-go, instead of saying a stationary satellite would be better. I'll pass on the weird condescending gaming tone.
I am not an apologist for Bell any other the other terrible providers in Canada. There are many reasons to hate them. But why are Canadians surprised it is expensive? Landmass larger than the US with 1/10 the population. Yes, most of it is empty and unserviced, but building a national network costs the same amount no matter how many users it has.
Most of the comments here are comparing the UK or EU. Australia is close, and the NBN shows what a nightmare it is.
Bell has been using this as an excuse for decades now while barely providing any services to rural areas. More than 90 percent of Canadians live within 150 miles of the US border in areas that are networked. Apparently, this 90 percent is paying for infrastructure that does not exist.
Considering things from the mobile perspective (but largely true for internet too):
> Yes, most of it is empty and unserviced
Well, that's the key, isn't it. Look at the highly optimistic coverage maps from the companies and you'll see how little of Canada is covered. Actual coverage is significantly poorer than those coverage maps indicate outside urban areas.
> but building a national network costs the same amount no matter how many users it has
These "national" networks are a few paltry routes across the country and in no way compare to the national networks of other countries.
The most obvious counter to the apologists' landmass argument is the provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan where mobile rates were half that of the rest of Canada despite having lower population densities than most of the other territories. They both had robust state-owned companies that competed with the big 3 (likely soon to be big 2) and all 4 profitably operated at these lower rates. In a very controversial move, the state-owned company in Manitoba (MTS) was privatised in 1996 and bought out by one of the big 3 in 2017. A few years later the rates in Manitoba rose to match the rest of the country. This highlights the real reason for expensive mobile in Canada.
That's true, but Canada has suburban sprawl just like the U.S. where, in most cities, home internet is just as expensive if not more so. Think how much less wire, amplification/splitter/switching/etc. equipment, and drilling would be required to install new home internet infrastructure to serve the same number of people if the Greater Toronto Area was as dense as the (4x denser) Stockholm metro area. The one of the obstacles (in addition to monopolies and regulatory capture) may be that the built-up area near the U.S. border still aren't dense enough to have infrastructure efficiency comparable to European countries with cheaper and faster home internet like Sweden, Finland, France, etc.
This is not really true. Yes, there are economies of scale to be had, but if you're talking landmass of Canada, then the primary cost is laying fiber, which tends to be a one-time cost (some caveats there) almost entirely subsidized by the government.
Telcos can then expand networks in cities, towns, regions, based on expected utilization (some of which is also subsidized.) Most of the costs here are operational: management, maintenance, customer support, however there are also costs associated with customer premisis equipment, aggregation hardware, copper/fiber to the homes. (These are not associated with the total landmass of Canada.)
Telecom providers in Canada are extremely monopolistic, very aggressive in keeping competitors at bay (if anyone remembers the huge full-page ads that the big Canadian providers put out when Verizon was planning on entering Canada -- "Americans are going to take our jobs!!!".)
Canada has subsidized networks for rural users. We've, as a population, invested a lot of money in connection remote communities. And next generation internet is going to be powered by 5G, which will make it a lot cheaper to connect remote communities.
Nova Scotia resident here, prices are already incredibly high even with the limited options for third party providers. For proper fibre my only option is Bell with a base price of $80/mo (w/ discount, typical rate of 109) for 150 symmetrical. With many people here switching to remote work, Bell knows what’s coming and is eager to continue raising prices.
I pay £29pcm (regular, no discount/promotion) in the UK for exactly the same (and actual service exceeds the headline 150 comfortably) which is, at time of writing, CA$46.67.
Are you in a large city or rural area? Rural prices in Canada are extortionate, and the commenter your are replying to, their price is is likely in a City
Yes, that's in London. In actually rural UK you're very unlikely to have fibre.
(Even in smaller towns/villages the cost to hook up an unconnected house to the cabinet, to the owner if they want it ahead of when Openreach might eventually get there, is North of £10k. I imagine if you want to pay for that installation somewhere rural it's even considerably more, since the nearest fibre might be miles away. They might not even do it, I don't know.)
Hyperoptic, FTTB so only in cities and perhaps only London - I think might only be flat blocks too (copper to each individual flat) - but if you can get it it's great, I'd definitely recommend. Pretty sure you'd get your 1Gb symmetric for less.
I wonder if the CRTC is reading any comments about Canadian content from this US website. At the same, time the Canadian government uses third party US website services to provide government of Canada services.
Simply going to canada.ca pulls in these US sites:
assets.adobedtm.com
use.fontawesome.com
www.google.com
ajax.googleapis.com
s.go-mpulse.net
Not too much to worry about there. Dig a little deeper.
Australias NBN for all its painful mistakes at least had the structure right. National wholesale network with strong regulatory power to drive efficiency. Lots of problems but consistent, national problems that require solutions because hurt many people. Canadas problems sound different.
When I first moved to the US from Canada I couldn't believe the difference in the internet and phone prices. Now whenever I visit from friends and family back home I stand on my soapbox and preach the problem. Anecdotally, most aren't even aware it's bad.
He could be rurally located. Its a similar rate for the same speed out to the farm here, which doesn't seem unreasonable when you consider how expensive it was for the ISP to bring fibre out to the farm.
In Ottawa Canada I happen to get Bell Fibe 1.5gbps for $35/month bundled with my rent. It used to be $100 for 1gbps but my building made a deal with Bell which got us great savings and an upgrade.
I really can't complain. Service has been rock solid for the past 5 years with fibe. But I hate the company and the way they run their business. If I had an option for a smaller company with better support for fiber, I would switch right away. But I don't, it's a monopoly.
Two companies I like a lot are Start.ca and Teksavvy, they both resell cable and DSL service and have great support staff. But since they resell, they get shafted by Rogers and Bell on service costs. The regulations are abysmal for competition here.
How about this: I pay $130/month CAD for 10mbps point to point wireless. And only 4km from the city (where there's fiber). There's both cable and fiber 750m from me @ the highway. Nobody will run it to my house.
FWIW I have a natural gas line to the house, and it was put in at the road recently. Why they didn't run fiber at the same time, I don't know. But that's North America for you. The land of mediocre.
Enjoy it while you can. I was getting this with Bell while living near downtown Toronto (in a condo). Shortly before I moved last summer Bell started raising rates with the excuse that "they need the money to invest in new infrastructure". Without competition from smaller ISPs expect RoBellUs to squeeze us like oranges until there's no more juice left.
Not to crap the thread but in India we get 100Mbps(Broadband) no data cap for just 10$ a month. 3$ per month for 2GB per day data (60GB total). We have a tonne of local players for broadband which helps with the lower price. Its a shame a first world country like Canada has the rates so high. Perks of free market and capitalism I guess.
Good job misleading everyone and painting a rosy picture of India because yay, nationalism.
There is a data cap on broadband. It's called "commercial usage terms" and it defines a data cap of 3.3TB a month often written in size 6 font or omitted. This is when you're using either Airtel or Jio, the two biggest broadband providers in the nation. Quoting prices for 4G internet is pretty much useless because of how unreliable it is.
The prices for calls and internet have started to increase after Jio and Airtel both admitted that the prices in India are unsustainable. Jio also acquired several smaller internet service providers. My apartment complex has only two options — Jio or Airtel.
Speaking about my net postive broadband and 4G experience from the past 4-5 years living in a metro city (Kolkata where its not even BJP) in India is "misleading everyone" and "nationalism" ? What level of mental gymnastics did you have you perform to even arrive at this conclusion ?
To counter your 2 arguments,
Argument 1: Before Jio even penetrated the market we had a bunch of different operators ( Docomo, aircel and even airtel etc ) who charged a bomb for literally 1GB of data, I remember having to shell out a premium on my docomo during 2015 just for some talktime and 1GB which I had to use cautiously for browsing. Even now after JIO incrementing prices its still cheaper than what the operators use to charge before 2015-16. You get a freaking 1GB per day and unlimited talktime now.
argument 2: Growing up we had BSNL broadband run by your so called "elected left government". It was ABSOLUTELY SHIT. Words cannot describe how pathetic BSNL's service and speeds were. But as per your last sentence there was NO other choice, it was a damned monopoly and literally a shit one, people had airtel/docomo dongles but it used to cost a bomb. Then came a lot of small scale ISPs and also JIO/airtel who provided insane speeds at decent prices which the general public had yet to experience and made it accessible to people. I personally use a local one, it says unlimited and I have it pushed to over 2TB in a month by downloading a shit tonne amount of 4K remuxes, installing epics/steams video games. The speeds did not slow down at all. I think I might be in maybe 1%-2% of all people in India who has even gone upto a TB of data in a month. I don't know if there is actually a cap at 3.3TB but your phrasing sounds like every indian household uses 3.3 TB of data every month and cries in a corner about it not being truly unlimited.
I cannot believe the levels of cynicism in your comment, how naive and rose tinted your your views are about India's history with internet services. If you are mad with the insane internet infrastructure advancements this government has brought , I hope you stay mad.
I suppose laying cables down the streets requires some kind of authorization. Also, the Canadian government is forcefully stopping foreign owned companies from entering the telecom market.
As a counter point I live in the Baltic states (however I think the situation is very similar in most ex-communist countries in eastern Europe) and free market capitalism has worked relatively exceptionally great here.
Both for cellular and wired internet there is no price regulation and very little regulation regarding ownership/mergers however there are many competing companies in both areas and due to this competition you can get 100Mbps for less than €10, 1Gbps for around €20 and uncapped cellular plans also go for around €20. I hardly see how additional regulation could improve this situation, probably would only result in less choice and higher prices..
Parts of Europe have cheap internet, parts have fast internet. Sometimes both, sometimes none.
It's already impossible to talk about the coverage in Germany as uniform, there's everything from Fiber to only 25 Mbit, to 1 Mbit (this is not a 'city' vs 'rural' thing, it's kinda random, especially for Fiber), lumping together Europe sounds weird.
Local players mostly would be in bigger cities. My Apartment complex in Bengaluru has Jio, Airtel, Act, Bsnl and local provider. I went with local one and they are very good as well.
