After Big Drop in ISP Competition, Canada Mandates Fiber-Network Sharing

In an attempt to boost broadband competition, Canada's telecom regulator is forcing large phone companies to open their fiber networks to competitors. Smaller companies will be allowed to buy network capacity and use it to offer competing broadband plans to consumers. From a report: Evidence received during a comment period "shows that competition in the Internet services market is declining," the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said in its announcement. The CRTC said the "decrease is most significant in Ontario and Quebec, where independent competitors now serve 47 percent fewer customers than they did just two years ago. At the same time, several competitors have been bought out by larger Internet providers. This has left many Canadians with fewer options for high-speed Internet services."

The CRTC hasn't made a final decision on fiber resale. But in the meantime, until a more permanent ruling is made, large telcos in Ontario and Quebec will be "required to provide competitors with access to their fibre-to-the-home networks within six months," the CRTC said. The six-month period is intended to give companies time to prepare their networks and develop information technology and billing systems, the agency said. "On a temporary and expedited basis, the CRTC is providing competitors with a workable way to sell Internet services using the fibre-to-the-home networks of large telephone companies in Ontario and Quebec, where competition has declined most significantly," the agency said. "The CRTC is also setting the interim rates that competitors will pay when selling services over these fibre-to-the-home networks. These rates were chosen to allow Canada's large Internet companies to continue investing in their networks to deliver high-quality services to Canadians."

can the telcos force 3rd vendors to rent gateways

[Joe_Dragon]

can the telcos force 3rd vendors to rent gateways from them?

Re: can the telcos force 3rd vendors to rent gatew

[maxrate]

I think I know what point youâ(TM)re trying to make. Answer is NO. Tax dollars funded the incumbent monopolistic telcos here in Canada. Tax dollars did not fund gateway manufacturers. As such, it cannot be ignored that the telcos although private, were partially paid for by citizens and corporations. We have had 3rd part access to the telco networks for years - including fiber, but not the low cost / SOHO / GPON based systems. Thatâ(TM)s going to change soon.

Won't happen

[denelson83]

Robelus will only sue to stop it from happening.

Good

[jacks smirking reven]

This is a good model of how ISP's should operate, with a separation of the physical wire/fiber to what connects you to the internet on the other end.

Back in the before times when I worked for a small IT firm we were able to resell our customers DSL service under our own company because we were a reseller for the Bell in the area.

Literally when we signed up a customer I would have to go to the datacenter and take the line from the Bell device and hook it into our Cisco router and voila. Bell made money, we made money and the customer enjoyed calling me directly when their internet is down so they don't have to call Bell (I called them instead)

Re:Good

[Another Random Kiwi]

Sonic.net used to resell AT&T services in my area. They discontinued the VAR agreement because AT&T increased the wholesale price of access significantly and stopped responding in a timely manner when Sonic called them over physical line issues. Sometimes the VAR arrangement works - sometimes it doesn't.

Re:Good

[ToddDTaft]

I had a similar experience with DSL and the small companies getting pushed out by Verizon, AT&T, or whoever the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) was. The ILEC never officially stopped reselling, so they could claim that they were complying with legal requirements enabling competition, but they made it so difficult for the resellers by providing terrible service, high prices, etc., that many of the resellers gave up on the business, and the only remaining option was service through the ILEC or the legacy cable TV provider.

I think for this type of thing to work long-term, it either needs to be tightly regulated to prevent such shenanigans or the company that manages the last mile physical infrastructure needs to be separated from the companies that customers buy their service from. Otherwise, these companies can make competition impractical by charging way too much for their wholesale price (e.g. $65 wholesale to competitors, but customers can buy the service directly from that company for $70 retail) or by mishandling repair requests from their competitors.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

It needs to be two separate companies, with a regulated wholesale price that must be the same for all ISPs. That way the owner of the infrastructure can't jack up the prices or offer worse service for competitors.

Re:Good

[transporter_ii]

I worked either in or adjacent to a WISP for longer than I care to think about. It was rough because the backbone was provided by people we were competing against.

I guess it is probably better for the market than no competition, but the deck was fully stacked in the favor of the backbone provider. They made money either way, but had very little of the end-user support, as you say. Just about the time you got enough users to be making a little profit, you had to up your bandwidth to keep up with demand. This tilted things back in favor of the backbone provider. It was a vicious circle, and ATT wasn't going to come out on the losing end, that's for sure.

And the whole time they are using your money to build more towers that they will someday use to take your customers.

Re:Good

[e3m4n]

Your wrong in the aspect that this is what is going on. Forcing telecoms to wholesale fiber is not the same as a 3rd party last-mile company selling equal access. I work for a regional isp. I was ground zero when devices like the lucent portmaster 4 was new and shiny, allowing PRI connections into a dialup pool (a requisite to 56k speeds). When DSL same on the scene the regional public service commissions mandated selling DSL wholesale to the ISPs. What the telecoms did was charge us a loop charge of $35, thats no ip, just a ATM connection back to our network. Meanwhile the telecom sold full internet for $33 amd allowed naked dsl (dsl without an accompanying POTS). We were stuck with a $35 overhead, the customer was required to pay for a POTS line, and we had a $150 install fee we paid the telecom who waived those fees for their direct customers. Keep in mind that this was 2003ish pricing, so adjust for inflation. My point is it did NOT level the playing field. A customer could get internet for $33/mo directly from the phone company, but the cheapest we could sell internet was $50 and they were forced to pay another $35+taxes/fees for a POTS line. Thats $33 vs $95. Not in the least bit level.

Bell hissy fit

[dskoll]

Meanwhile, Bell had a little hissy fit and said it would cut capital expenditure by $1B [newswire.ca] because of the evil CRTC.

ISP competition in Canada sucks, but then competition in general here sucks. Our competition laws are weak and weakly enforced, and the incumbents have the ears of politicians.

Fuck Bell, Rogers and Telus. I'd love to see them broken up, TBH.

Re:Bell hissy fit

[Can'tNot]

Competition used to be pretty good. I'd have difficulty finding the stories now, but the CRTC has been working against smaller ISPs for many years now.

Oh, here's one [archive.ph]. As I recall, that story was about Bell throttling access for small ISPs. The small ISPs wanted to be neutral providers, but Bell was violating network neutrality principles and forced the small ISPs to do the same. The small ISPs protested, and the CRTC ruled against them.

Re:

[witherstaff]

In the early Bush Jr. days in the states, Powell's son was put in charge of the FCC. He just so happened to previously be legal for a major Telco. There was a quick change in laws on how the telco reform act - which allowed thousands of ISPs to flourish - was to be implemented. The major telcos all did the whining of "We won't do improvements to speed if we have to share the lines - that taxpayer money funded" The gov returned the monopolies to the telcos, speeds languished, and most small ISPs closed up sh

Re:Bell hissy fit

[jenningsthecat]

Fuck Bell, Rogers and Telus. I'd love to see them broken up, TBH.

I'd love to see Telus and Rogers broken up. As for Bell, if I held the button that ended their sorry-ass existence I'd keep pressing it until my thumb failed, then I'd switch hands and repeat just to make sure the job got done.

Those skanky dog fuckers switched my elderly mother-in-law from copper to fibre without telling her, then lied and said they had switched her back to copper when they hadn't. That was just the beginning of a long string of lies over the next eleven months as they repeatedly failed to make their VOIP-over-fibre telephone service work for more than a few hours at a time, even though internet and TV worked flawlessly.

We finally ended up switching to Rogers. That was kind of a frying-pan-to-the-fire choice - but at least the cable company made the telephone work when the telephone company was unable to do so.

I'm happy to see the CRTC doing something about the dominance and abuses of Rogers and Telus. But for me Bell is in a different category. The only safe thing to do with Bell is to rip it into small pieces and divide those pieces among regions, municipalities, and small private service providers. If it was my decision I would drive a stake through Bell's heart, burn the corpse, scatter the ashes to the winds, and declare a new national holiday to celebrate an end to their tyranny.

Re:

[PJ6]

That rankles. We all depend on utilities, and they should not be dependent on private wealth to get built out or maintained.

Re:

[scamper_22]

To be honest competition is not the answer to 'natural monopolies'
You're just not going to get 20 companies each running their own cable to a person's home...

ISPs are one of those. What you need is effective regulations to manage the natural monopoly. While this can help. It also can result in this kind of action by Bell. Bell makes the investment in anticipation of making profit.

As far as Canada goes, I think a crown corporation should be in charge of the lines themselves; along the lines of Canada Post an

It worked well before

[NomDeAlias]

Making them do the same for the cable and landline broadband worked out well for the consumer. This will likely just be more of the same.

Re:

[Major_Disorder]

Making them do the same for the cable and landline broadband worked out well for the consumer. This will likely just be more of the same.

I get my Internet from one of the smaller ISPs and am completely happy with them. My price has never hone up since I have been with them. They never try to upsell me. My speed almost always tests out as slightly faster than what I am paying for.
https://aebc.com/ [aebc.com] for the record, and they rock.

Re:

[NomDeAlias]

I suffered a price raise being with a smaller reseller in the past but it was due to the Rogers jacking their prices on everyone including the resellers so the savings over buying direct from Rogers was still present.

Had this arrangement in the UK for decades

[HuskyDog]

For as long as I can remember, the UK has separated the carrier network from the ISPs and it seems to provide plenty of competition. I have fibre to the premises at home with the fibre provided by the national carrier "BT Openreach". They are required by law to provide access to any ISP and I therefore have a choice of dozens of competing providers and can switch easily between them if I want. I just pay my ISP and they sort out the payment to Openreach for the backbone network and the local connection to my house.

The situation was no different a couple of years ago when I was still on ADSL via twisted pair and has been the case since I moved from dial-up connection about 20 years ago. Apart from a few very limited exceptions, it is the same everywhere in the UK.

Re:

[Teun]

It's similar in The Netherlands.
Similar is not the same, here there are more backbone providers and the majority allow competition on their lines.
But the biggest (incumbent) provider charges a lot more than some of the newer and smaller line owners meaning the same ISP has to pay different charges depending on the area you are in.

Sharing what again, exactly? What OSI layers?

[MIPSPro]

It's not immediately clear what the government is proposing to force sharing on. It seems like the best way to do it would be to prevent ISP's from actually laying infrastructure (cables, microwave towers, satillites, fiber, anything that lives at layer-2 and below of the OSI model). They can operate at layer-3 (IP) or above only. Then don't allow the physical-network people to form exclusive deals with the logical-network folks. Is that essentially what this is saying or something else?

Re:Sharing what again, exactly? What OSI layers?

[Guspaz]

It's just an extension of the TPIA regulations that have been in place for decades. It's probably even identical to some extent on a technical level. In the most broadly used access methodology under the regulations, for DSL, the incumbent telco would provide the last mile from the customer to their local POP, and there was a charge for that, and then they'd aggregate all the traffic for the third-party ISP's customers to one (and sometimes two) POPs (usually at 151 Front St. in Toronto). There was also a capacity-based fee for the aggregation network usage. After that, the traffic is handed off to the third-party ISP, who routes it through their own network to get to the public Internet. How sophisticated that network was depended on the size of the third-party ISPs. Some just had some routers to shove it over to transit providers (and TORIX) in the same building, some of the larger ones had maybe a second POP (with connectivity between them) and their own connections to a few different peering exchanges in different cities.

From a technical standpoint, and keeping in mind that I'm ignoring a bunch of technically available but seldom used options (such as indie ISPs colocating their own DSLAMs in individual Bell POPs), the DSL services from the ADSL through VDSL2 eras were all run through PPPoE. The PPPoE logins had an e-mail like format so that the incumbent telco could tell which ISP the login belonged to. The customer's router talked PPP, the customer's modem talked PPPoE, and Bell would forward the traffic as PPPoE all the way to the third-party ISP's PPP endpoint boxes, so the customer's traffic was basically in a PPP tunnel for the entire trip over the incumbent ISP's network.

The new XG-PON fiber services are still using PPPoE, even for the 3 gigabit and 8 gigabit symmetrical services. So I'd imagine that adapting the old TPIA model from VDSL2 to multi-gig fiber is going to involve basically the same aggregation approach and technology as it always has.

Cable TPIA worked a bit differently to DSL (there's no PPPoE, and connecting to individual cable POPs was a thing), but it's not super relevant because access to higher-speed cable tiers (like 500 meg and gigabit) was already available: I have gigabit cable via an independent ISP with an incumbent last mile, for example.

TekSavvy

[nuckfuts]

This is exactly what the CRTC had mandated in the past with regard to copper wire (telephone) infrastructure. Smaller ISPs such as TekSavvy sold services running over the wires of larger carriers such as Telus, resulting in far better deals for the consumer. For example, TekSavvy offered ADSL service with no monthly cap on data, which no one else was offering.

I'm glad to hear that similar competition can now be expected with Fibre Internet.

Re:

[MeNeXT]

Yes. This is true but it doesn't fix the problem since the price that TekSavvy pays is way above what it should be. This is why most small ISP are disappearing. Local loop needs to be nationalized. It's the only solution.

It's sad. We kill competition and then we pretend to care. This decision by the CRTC is too little to late.

Re:

[illaqueate]

I was previously on Teksavvy via Rogers Cable but when fiber came to the area I switched to Bell. I do like supporting competition but 1000/50 cable that frequently had connection issues (slowness, dropouts, etc) vs 3000/3000 fiber is a no brainer. And the only downtime I've had on fiber is when the router was a bit flaky and had to reboot. So yeah... it had to happen otherwise the third party providers were dead in a lot of cities

Re:

[dskoll]

I'm on TekSavvy DSL and reasonably happy with it. But for what I get, it's expensive. 50Mb/s down, 15Mb/s up and one static IP runs me $73.95/month plus tax. TekSavvy can't really lower its prices because of what it has to pay Bell for access.

I'd love to get fibre, but currently the only option is Bell. If/when TekSavvy gets access, it's going to be a lot more expensive than what Bell charges.

More token "effort" bs courtesy of the CRTC

[ChoGGi]

Until the CRTC is gutted this means jack shit.

If you're outside Canada, CRTC is filled with ex telecom execs.