Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Internet Losers.

>The telecommunications situation in Canada is terrible.

Your complaint is that some rural area has poor service. Is that not the case around the globe?

I've had high-speed cable service since long before it was available in most urban centers in the US (much less the rest of the world), including when I lived in a mid-sized town. Here in a suburb of Toronto I've had top-notch, leading-the-bandwidth (15Mbps around the clock) high speed for a low cost for almost a decade.

I think our situation is quite good, actually. Broadband penetration is very high, average caps are competitive with the world, and bandwidth numbers lean very high on the curve.

There is so much misinformation about this whole situation (not helped by people making "incremental cost" calculations that assume that the infrastructure for infinite bandwidth is already in place): The best is the other post where someone talks about it being Soviet-style central control. The humorous aspect is that CRTC is essentially unwinding that central control, put in place back when Bell was the big, untouchable monopoly. It was then that many of the "unlimited cap" companies were basically given leave to leach off of Bell in the name of competition.

Bell is far from alone in providing bulk bandwidth in Canada. If the economics are so straightforward, clearly Teksavvy and the like will just run a Cogent or the like to their distribution. If they don't, ask yourself why not.

Ultimately this is a lot of people up in arms because they want their free lunch.

There is a reason why lots of technical people from Canada seek to find their fortune in the United States.

This really disturbs me. I just moved to Seattle where I signed up for Comcast internet. A couple of days later, my connection stopped working until I activated my account on comcast.com. I did, and the first thing I saw was

High-Speed Internet Data Usage: 17% 43GB of 250GB

They sure hide that fact when you signup, not that I have any options, as Comcast is the only provider where I live. This is a horrible direction we are heading. And, if you go over the limit, they call and warn you. If you go over again, they cancel your account.

Your complaint seemed to be entirely based upon the difficulties in getting broadband in a sparsely populated area. And then some big telco coming in to try to undermine it. We've seen the same story again and again, over the globe. There is nothing unique to Canada in that.

As to Bell being a monopoly, that's a bit laughable of a concept now. I haven't used any Bell services for personal use in well over a decade, despite being in the center of Bell territory.

As to Canada's situation, it regularly ranks in the top tier of broadband penetration and broadband speeds. It sounds like you're the one using your anecdote inappropriately, because actual metrics refute you.

They'd gladly put their own infrastructure in to the ground, only they're not allowed to.

You're conflating issues. Because of the in-the-ground angle, companies are allowed to terminate twisted-pairs at the switching station, providing their own voice or data services. We recently hooked up a business backup high-speed ADSL line, the line provided by Bell, with the data provided by Cogent. Our primary data service, by the way, is provided by the electric company who have a distribution network of fiber.

What is changing is if Bogent terminated that line, but instead of providing their own infrastructure they simply leached off of Bell's. That was put in during the "Soviet style" control.

Again, this is all a bunch of people inventing a reality where they can have their free lunch. It is a tiny percentage of people making a loud noise, trying to burn it all down to get their way. I'll happily endure the down-arrows while a rallying mob tries to construct some ridiculous perception of reality.

Yep. Most online services that have a presence in Canadian market will start to see cuts in their revenue. I was using NetFlix, but no longer. Many of my friends and co-workers are not using Dropbox for backup anymore. It makes no sense. Many went back to good old fashioned portable drives.

In addition to purchasing less of online services, many people that I know refuse to buy anything from Bell and Rogers. No cable, no landline phone, no satellite tv. In fact, with the new mobile companies popping up in the last 12 months, you can save quite a bundle.

There is an angst growing amongst customers that spreads like wildfire. In past few years, I converted almost every one of my friends and relatives to Teksavvy internet. At that moment in time, it made sense. It no longer does and I wish that this turns up the heat enough to make it an election issue. It is, pardon my french, a fucking racket.