After Big Drop in ISP Competition, Canada Mandates Fiber-Network Sharing (arstechnica.com) 28
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."
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 (Score:1)
can the telcos force 3rd vendors to rent gateways from them?
Re: can the telcos force 3rd vendors to rent gatew (Score:3)
Won't happen (Score:2)
Robelus will only sue to stop it from happening.
Good (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
ILECs have played dirty as long as there have been ILECs. My very first job was with a local dial up ISP. There were two serving my rural community. All our other options were long distance calls. Mine was owned by an old NYNEX guy (who, side note, taught me everything I know about cable management; those guys were PROS at it) who never trusted the ILEC (Citizens and later Frontier) despite our seemingly excellent relationship with them. We were on a first name basis with all the central office techs, business office people, etc. At one point we had over half the lines coming out of our local central office; more than 600 POTS lines. The building still stands (it's a beauty shop now) with huge bundles of copper entering it.
Anyhow, that was our main office. We had small POPs in nearby towns, with a few dozen lines, and a T1 data circuit back to HQ. We did this to reach as many customers with local calling as possible. It cost a small fortune.
Meanwhile, our competitor was accomplishing the same goal with simple call forwarding. What we were spending thousands a month to do they were doing for under $100. I asked my boss why, it seemed silly, he said, "Citizens is setting them up for failure." I thought he was paranoid.
Low and behold, about three years into this business, Citizens filed a routine tariff change with the Public Service Commission that went largely unnoticed. Buried on page 200 something out of 600 was a two line change to the commercial call forwarding service our competitor was using. It changed it from a flat fee to a per minute charge. They were bankrupted inside of two months. Just gone, employees unpaid, customers cut off, doors boarded up.
Simultaneously, Citizens themselves got into the ISP business, at $5/mo less than we charged. The CO techs remained easy to work with but suddenly our calls to the business office were no longer answered. For added insult, they tried to blame us when the local media picked up on reports of issues with 911 calls not going through, because their telco switches were overloaded, which was somehow our fault for having so many lines. Lines THEY sold us.
We had tried to get into channelized T1s years prior, for ease of maintenance (600+ POTS lines and individual modems are not fun to manage) and so we could offer 56k service. We were always told it was "coming soon", magically, we got it exactly one year to the day after they gave it to themselves and used our lack of 56k to beat us over the head with when marketing. :(
Re: (Score:2)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Bell hissy fit (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:2)
Re:Bell hissy fit (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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 (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
Had this arrangement in the UK for decades (Score:3)
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: (Score:2)
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? (Score:3)
Re:Sharing what again, exactly? What OSI layers? (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:3)
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: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
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
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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 (Score:2)
Until the CRTC is gutted this means jack shit.
If you're outside Canada, CRTC is filled with ex telecom execs.