Internet Drama in Canada (nytimes.com) 88
We all need great internet service, but it doesn't happen by accident. From a report: Let's talk about internet policy! In Canada! Wheee! I'm serious that there are useful lessons from a saga over home internet service in Canada. What has been a promising, albeit imperfect, system that increased choices and improved internet service for Canadians is poised to fall apart. Barring a last-minute government intervention today or Friday, many smaller internet providers in Canada are likely to significantly increase their prices and lose customers or shut down. The dream of more competition leading to better internet service for Canadians is on life support. What's happening in Canada reveals why we need smart internet policy to be paired with strong government oversight to have better and more affordable internet for all -- and it shows what happens when we lose that.
The U.S. has botched it for years, and that's one reason America's internet service stinks. Canada may be a real-world experiment in what happens when muddled government regulation undermines internet policy that has mostly been effective. 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.
The U.S. has botched it for years, and that's one reason America's internet service stinks. Canada may be a real-world experiment in what happens when muddled government regulation undermines internet policy that has mostly been effective. 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.
This summary is worthless (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This summary is worthless (Score:5, Informative)
For those who still can't figure out how to bypass a paywall.
https://archive.ph/8Lr4K [archive.ph]
Re:This summary is worthless (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that this provision only applied to telecommunications services, and when the FCC took their "third way" approach to internet regulation in 2002 and classified cable ISPs as information services that pretty well killed any kind of a competitive ISP marketplace in the United States.
In Canada the first part of that happened as well, but the second part did not. So, unlike the United States, Canada does have a degree of competition between ISPs, and you can usually get better/cheaper service from the smaller independent ISPs if you seek them out. However, since the infrastructure is controlled by the companies that these small ISPs are competing against, these small companies are wholly dependent on regulatory enforcement to prevent the large incumbent ISPs from fucking them over.
This story is the most recent case where the regulatory body has chosen to side with the large companies at the expense of the small ones. My instinct as an American is to assume that this is due to corruption, but I'm not in a position to judge whether this decision was fair. Canada has fewer corruption problems than the US, but that doesn't mean none.
Re:This summary is worthless (Score:5, Insightful)
Canada has fewer visible corruption problems. They are there and run deep. ie.. SNC-LAVALIN, Charboneau commission. One prominent politician even publicly stated that her ear was available provided the corporation paid for a $10K breakfast. In Canada very little is ever done about it. It drags on and then the politicians bring forward racists laws that divide the country along linguistic lines.
Re:This summary is worthless (Score:4)
I have no clue who is right in this. On one hand laying down landline networks in Canada is not an easy task, given the geography. On the other hand, the large carriers still make a boatload of money.. but so do the small ISPs.
And by the way, the prices already went up. The 3rd-party ISPs dropped some of their prices initially, anticipating lower costs and a big fat cheque, but as soon as the big 3 appealed and the winds started to turn, those prices went up, higher than what they were initially.
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Re:This summary is worthless (Score:5, Informative)
The tl;dr of it is, in Canada, there is mandated wholesale access to incumbent telco last mile connections: the big telephone and cable companies must lease their last-mile connections to independent ISPs, who then use their own infrastructure to get the customer onto the Internet. There was a ruling by the Canadian telecom regulator a while back that dramatically increased the wholesale prices to the point that it would be difficult or impossible for independent ISPs to even match incumbent carrier retail prices, let alone compete with them. There was a (presumably final) appeal that was supposed to be ruled upon shortly after the New York Times article was published. The ruling happened and essentially denied the appeal, maintaining the increased prices.
We've already seen one of the largest independent ISPs (Electronic Box) sell themselves (in the literal transfer of corporate ownership sense) to Bell Canada, and others will likely follow into buyout or bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Canada ranks 103rd in the world for Internet pricing.
Canadian corruption (Score:5, Insightful)
Mr Scott reversed his own commission's ruling that the ISPs had been gouged, and then met for beers with the chief gouger. He didn't report it on his "contacts" sheet until someone published the picture.
One ISP, Tek Savvy, spoke up, but in a very polite-canadian way, at https://blogs.teksavvy.com/ope... [teksavvy.com]. The rest? Crickets.
Draw your own conclusions.
Re: This summary is worthless (Score:2)
It also has the obligatory "America sucks" component to boot, don't forget that!
But that would be regulation (Score:2)
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Show me in the US where there are still child laborers or leaded car gas. etc.
Re:But that would be regulation (Score:4, Informative)
Oh they're working on bringing child labor back.
https://thehill.com/changing-a... [thehill.com]
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I didn't realize I was on imgur.
Re:But that would be regulation (Score:5, Insightful)
Show me in the US where there are still child laborers
US industry still uses tons of child labor, it just happens in other parts of the world.
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Show me in the US where there are still child laborers or leaded car gas. etc.
Somewhat surprisingly there is still leaded aviation gasoline available for older piston engines. I don't know what proportion of the total aviation fuel it represents.
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Almost anything that flies that's not using JET-A (more or less kerosene) is using AVGAS (100/110octane low lead gasoline). Despite claims that this will change, most common small (1-6 place) aircraft are largely built on 1930s technology, and the FAA makes it incredibly difficult (i.e. prohibitively expensive) to change that.
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"Show me in the US where there are still child laborers "
Potato farming and Harvest Break in Maine.
Kids can be hired as harvest labor starting at 10, and non-harvest farm labor at 12. And that's not counting unpaid labor on a family farm. They can't work during school hours, so some school districts go on break so all the kids can go harvest potatoes.
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Seatbelts are great, getting fined for not wearing them is bullshit.
Where does the service stink? (Score:1)
I'm curious, where exactly in the US does the service stink?
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Places I have lived that have only one ISP.
$75 for 200/20 connection
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That's better than I have. Don't complain or get Starlink.
Re: Where does the service stink? (Score:1)
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Places I have lived that have only one ISP.
No doubt. Competition among providers and easy entry to the market is the great regulator.
$75 for 200/20 connection
That doesn't actually sound like a bad deal. People pay much more for cable TV and I'd argue a 200/20 connection is way more value. Naturally you want to get more and pay less. We all do. But that's not an enormous amount for what you're getting compared to what other things in the US cost.
Yes, yes, I know. I can get twice as much for half the price in England/France/Japan/Germany/Elbonia. That would be nice. Perhaps t
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What's up with Canada? (Score:4)
Wealth inequality (Score:5, Informative)
Backsliding on internet access? Trucker rallies? And worst of all, all the 'well-run' nations like Canada and New Zealand have failed just as hard as the US at preventing the housing market from becoming a commodities market, which (since it reflects ever-increasing wealth inequality) kills the dream of home ownership for more and more people. Nobody seems to have a solution.
One aspect of this is that wealth inequality is baked into the system.
Just about every system that trades in value will exhibit a pareto distribution, and this seems to be baked into the mathematics. It's not only wealth, but any creative outlet that has a measurable value. 2 million books are published each year, but only 1000 break even and 10 become best sellers. 5 composers dominate almost all of classical music, and of these, 5 compositions from each composer dominate.
This link [umd.edu] explores the mathematics, and has some neat animations [umd.edu] that show the effect.
Even with a completely fair system, wealth inequality will arise in the system over time.
So far, no one has been able to propose a solution to the problem, despite lots of people looking.
The good news is that wealth distribution doesn't last. Someone makes a lot of money, it goes to their heirs, and dissipates over time. The same conditions and abilities of the ancestor aren't passed down to the heirs (generally), so over time the inequality "churns", allowing other people into and out of the high earner spots.
If you have a solution to wealth inequality, you should write it up as a paper and publish.
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"The good news is that wealth distribution doesn't last."
"Oh fuck yeah, that's true." - King Louis XVI
Re: Wealth Inequality (Score:5, Informative)
One aspect of this is that wealth inequality is baked into the system.
So far, no one has been able to propose a solution to the problem, despite lots of people looking.
Oh yes, people have proposed solutions to the problem! Check out the history of Huey Long [wikipedia.org]. He was Governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932, and a U.S. Senator from 1932 to 1935. He was a riveting public speaker, and wasn't afraid to tackle issues like wealth inequality. During the Great Depression, he started a movement called Share Our Wealth [wikipedia.org].
Long's plan included a series of bills for the redistribution of wealth. The first bill proposed a new progressive tax code designed to cap personal fortunes at $100 million (about $2 billion in 2022 dollars). Fortunes above $1 million ($20 million in 2022) would be taxed at 1 percent; fortunes above $2 million ($40 million in 2022) would be taxed at 2 percent, and so forth, up to a 100 percent tax on fortunes greater than $100 million. The second bill would limit annual income to $1 million ($20 million in 2022), and the third bill would cap individual inheritances at $5 million ($99 million in 2022).
The can hear him speaking about these ideas here [youtu.be].
Huey Long was assassinated in September, 1935.
His life was documented in an eponymous movie [imdb.com] in 1985.
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Wish I had mod points. I don't have a solution, but one would think that a civilization that was interested in self-perpetuation would take this seriously. Today's nation states, are really a loose amalgamation of people who start out with related goals, but after a number of generations...kapoot.
But if we think of sci-fi book storylines, Foundation, Dune, as the well known, many other lesser known. On order to maintain a multi-thousand year empire you would need some sort of self-correcting mechanism bui
Re:Wealth inequality (Score:5, Insightful)
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"The good news is that wealth distribution doesn't last."
The issue is that this is only true for a fair system, which we don't have. We have a system that makes it easier for those with wealth to gather more wealth and those without wealth to stay poor.
Re:What's up with Canada? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm Canadian. Worse, Albertan, putting me in the belly of the beast.
The trucker rallies were a very vocal minority of Canadians...that about one-third of Canadians supported. Why the support? Because people are tired of the pandemic and want it to just go away. The problem is that it isn't. So they fool themselves into thinking that the pandemic is just public health measures. I want it to go away too, but it's hard when I, and half of the people around me, are sick. But why did the rallies happen in Canada? Social media and several complicit police forces.
The Canadian housing market has always been open to foreign investment. The problem is that the well-regulated Canadian financial markets weren't hit anywhere near as badly as the US financial markets in the 2008 real estate crisis. Our real estate markets didn't fall much, if at all, while things were going tits-up in the US. The stability attracted investment money, and our real estate markets have been doing well ever since, especially in our bigger cities, like Toronto and Vancouver, but also just about everywhere in the country. But why didn't Canadian government bodies clamp down on foreign investment? Because home-owners like myself are benefitting, and massively. I feel for people that don't own property, but at the same time, my real estate investment (my home and the land it is on) has made me $1m over the last few years. Show me a solution for those looking to buy into the market that doesn't destroy my property value and I'll give you all my support.
Canadian Housing market (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't about wealth inequality. It's about purchasing inequality. Elon Mush doesn't consume 1000x what I do but a 25 year old is consuming less than half of what they are contributing to society because housing has become a huge consumption transfer from young people to the elderly. Our socialist party, the NDP, wants to increase mortgages from 25 years to 30 years. This doesn't increase supply it only increases the amount of money and time time the 25 year old can use to transfer wealth to my generation and my parents generation. It has gotten so bad that our evil and incompetent conservative leader in Ontario, the one who shrugged all responsibility for the truckers freedumb rally in Ottawa* is actually the only politician who is trying to tackle the housing shortage by changing the rules that allow the NIMBY crowd to prevent new housing**.
*the rally was on a city street outside the parliament buildings which made it a provincial jurisdiction.
**as the owner of three homes and the father of 5 kids I'm torn on who to vote for. Make myself wealthier or fuck the next generation. Bizarrely, the NDP gets most of it's support from people under 30.
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It costs a lot in fuel to move those rigs.
When you see those big trucks moving, it is because someone, somewhere is paying for them to move. As always, follow the money.
I'm in Canada (Score:3)
We do pay some of the highest internet access fees in the world, or so I keep reading. My gigabit connection costs me around $75US/month or so. But yes, I can pick between multiple providers should I choose to do so - and they aren't the "smaller" providers referred to above.
Our dilemma is in rural areas, where penetration is low because we have vast swaths of land with sparsely populated communities. For lots of those the price is significantly higher and the performance can be poor. Those providers - often indeed small - are probably the ones in trouble.
Now I could be off base, because while I attempted to RTFA... paywall.
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Now that I think about it, I mostly read that our cellular data rates are very, very high. Maybe I conflated it to internet access in general.
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That’s a lie.
Australia has completely rolled out the NBN which gives 100Mb/s service to most people with a mix of FTP, FTN, Cable and wireless.
The NBN is then onsold to ISPs who provide the service.
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Rural areas seem like they would be good candidates for switching to Starlink. I mean, that's what it was built for... right?
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Well, sure. But at $714 up front for hardware and $129/month for 40Mbps down, that's high cost, low performance.
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Canada's dilemma is that we expect others to pay. I live in a suburb and it took government funds to build out fiber in the area. This was/is a new development where Amazon built a data centre. Why use your capital when public funds are easily accessible.
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or so I keep reading. My gigabit connection costs me around $75US/month
I think what you're reading is not related to what you are using. Canada has a relative high *base* cost for internet. That is a crappy 60Mb connection is comparatively expensive to its western peers.
But shit man $75/m for a gigabit connection is among the cheapest for much of the world.
$75US gets you under 250Mb in Australia.
It's $10US/m cheaper than gigabit in Germany.
It's what I pay for my 600Mb connection in the Netherlands.
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I'm starting to realize that...
https://www.shaw.ca/internet/p... [www.shaw.ca]
Gigabit fibre for $90 USD ($115 CDN). My plan is about $75 - got it at the right time during a promotion.
Speedtest shows 945.86 up, 108.39 down... guess I should stop complaining...
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It's cell data that is super expensive. I pay $25 for 500 MB a month and am happy that I get 128kb/s if I go over instead of dinged for overages, 50 cents a MB is common IIRC.
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I guess I don't follow. I'm also Canadian, about 100km outside of (on the edge of) Toronto.
I pay $385/month, for a home phone (welcome to an office), two cell phones (with a total of 30GB/month, we use ~5GB), 100Mbps/20Mbps internet (which covers our needs spectacularly -- two offices etc), every tvision channel short of a sports package, and the convenience of a dozen streaming services not-free-but-all-built-in (netflix, disney, prime, etc).
It's all 100% reliable, and the cell coverage hasn't missed nor
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OTOH, I'm 80 km outside Vancouver, lots of my neighbours commute into Vancouver. It was only 3 or 4 years ago that I got cell coverage and could ditch the dial up connection.
I do have, subsidized I believe, a LTE rural internet connection for C$100, including taxes, a month. Usually about 20/20 with a 250 GB cap.
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Okay, but hang on.
100km outside of Toronto is still the greater Toronto area. It's still urban.
80km north of Vancouver is wilderness.
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East of Vancouver, not north. About 6 miles outside of Greater Vancouver (GVRD) though I am slightly north of the main population centre and almost in the mountains.
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Who is your ISP that offers gigabit at $75US/month? I would be interested in switching to them.
CRTC is a complete failure (Score:3)
The CRTC (the Canadian telecom regulator) is in the pocket of the big three telecom companies and cannot be relied upon to protect consumers. Only government intervention will do that, and so far the government has shown no spine.
Eroding fairness (Score:5, Insightful)
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I still think the physical infrastructure should be government regulated and all carriers have to share it and support the cost of its maintenance and expansion. It makes no sense that there are 3 sets of carrier lines throughout every neighborhood.
I wrote this in other comments on this story. I don't see how that's sustainable. What I'm buying from an ISP is a link with a router and backbone connection at the other end. That's it. If one entity builds and runs this, what exactly are the resellers doing to add value? Are they providing their own routers? Their own backbone connections? That doesn't seem to make sense.
If the Canuck ISPs were offering cheap service reselling something with a regulated price, I'm kind of suspicious that regulated price m
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Well the cheapest prices in the country are in Saskatchewan where the Province still owns Sasktel unlike everywhere else that privatized. Good service I understand but they only make a couple of hundred million profit a year.
That's the thing about public, which is not quite the same as private and regulated, they only have to be somewhat profitable instead of having the highest telecom profits in the world.
Note, Sasktel may be more about cell then land internet, I'm not sure about that
Time to start .. (Score:2)
i got better service by accident... (Score:5, Funny)
I got to upgrade from 28.8 (yeah right, 21.6 more likely) dialup to 56k when a drunk driver took out the big grey box down the road about 20 years ago.
And went from 6mb DSL to 25mb DSL when a different drunk driver took out the same big grey box about 2 years ago.
Re:i got better service by accident... (Score:5, Funny)
sounds like you know what needs to be done
Some actual info (Score:5, Informative)
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TelSavvy is my provider. They are excellent and I'll stick with them even if they're a few bucks more than Bell because I don't want my money to go to one of the big players.
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The issue is that our regulator is far too cozy with the industry players and is not fulfilling its mandate of looking out for consumers. The regulator needs an overhaul, not a termination.
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That is not necessarily true. Certain essential services must be regulated precisely to avoid incumbents from excluding entry to newcomers, especially in situations where duplication of infrastructure is impossible or not cost-effective, or where infrastructure uses public right-of-ways.
Too much vertical integration (Score:4, Insightful)
We need to change this to follow the gas company model. You probably only want one set of lines, so one company can own the lines. But it's prohibited from providing service. Instead, it leases the lines (under government oversight since it's a utility) to lots of companies which provide service. That breaks the vertical integration between line-owner and service-provider. The part of the service which should only have one company (laying down and maintaining the lines) has just one company. The part of the service which should have multiple companies providing service (ISPs) have multiple companies competing.
Vertical integration is desirable early on. When cable TV companies first began, nobody knew the best way to lay out wires to each home. Some sort of hub and spoke model was probably better than one central station with individual lines to each home. But how many hubs should there be? What's the optimal average length of the spokes? What sort of technology do you use to split and combine the signals at the hubs? These sorts of questions are better answered by competition with vertical integration. But today, all this has been sorted out. Competition has arrived at the best near-optimal solution. And in fact all the cable companies use the same hardware (following the DOCSIS standard) for cable modems. Once things reach that point, there's no longer any need for such vertical integration, and the economy is better served by eliminating vertical integration and splitting up ownership of the wires from providing the service.
Contrast this with cellular service space in the U.S. Unlike cable Internet, cellular technology is still developing, and tighter vertical integration is desirable when the technology is in its development stage. e.g. When 3G service rolled out, two of the carriers tried GSM, two tried CDMA. And in the end CDMA turned out to be superior (for those of you who still think GSM won, the GSM standard was updated to incorporate CDMA [wikipedia.org]). Likewise when 4G service rolled out, Sprint tried WiMax (which used SOFDMA [techopedia.com]), while the others used LTE (which used fixed OFDMA). And in the end LTE turned out to be better. You want vertical integration when these sorts of things are being decided, so a mis-step at one end (GSM phone companies eschewing CDMA) does not necessarily sink the company since they have other sales providing them time and money to redirect (GSM phone companies survived from revenue for providing phone service, until they could implement UMTS based on wideband CDMA a year later). Likewise, although the WiMax debacle hurt Sprint (they basically had to pay to build a 4G network twice) to the point where it eventually had to be bought out by T-Mobile, it did not immediately kill the company since they still had significant revenue from service.
So there are development stages where vertical integration is desirable, and stages where it's no longer desirable. It's this transition we're getting caught on. Uncertainty over when we should transition, and people not understanding that this transition exists so the old regulatory ways may no longer be optimal.
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Same problem as the U.S. The ISP owns the lines and provides the service, and local government regulations prohibit anyone else from laying down lines. Meaning you effectively have only one choice of ISP.
And that's what I'd want to address. In my neck of the woods, pretty much everyone is wired for AT&T and Comcast. I don't think any other companies can or want to get permits to dig more trenches. It sounds quite expensive and difficult so I'm not surprised.
I think one of the big hopes for 5G is that it provides the opportunity for other providers to enter the market. Modulo, of course, getting spectrum licenses.
We need to change this to follow the gas company model. You probably only want one set of lines, so one company can own the lines. But it's prohibited from providing service.
That's a reasonable assertion but I don't expect it to work. In the gas market, a lot of the
Drama indeed (Score:4, Informative)
"America's internet service stinks" (Score:2, Troll)
Shite (Score:2)
A pay-walled article where the summary doesn't even state what happened? Great work, gents.
Bell, CRTC and oligopolies (Score:3)
We donâ(TM)t need lobby groups when Bell is out dining with the head of the CRTC. Canada generally has oligopolies, which is essentially the next worst thing to a monopoly, though with minimal government oversight.
In France the big telecom companies work together to create shared infrastructure, to reduce their direct expenses. In the Uk the regulator OFCOM has seemingly worked hard to keep the telecommunications companies in check. Canada has neither of this going on.
Canadian ISPs suck balls (Score:2)
Not the Only issue... (Score:2)
The Usual Suspects Here (Score:1)
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