Canadian government pledges to connect 98% of Canadians via High-Speed Internet
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
EDIT: I am getting downvoted, which is fair. I did not provide any context and assumed it was common knowledge. In his throne speech, Trudeau had this to say about pharmacare:
> The Government remains committed to a national, universal pharmacare program and will accelerate steps to achieve this system including:
- Through a rare-disease strategy to help Canadian families save money on high-cost drugs;
-Establishing a national formulary to keep drug prices low;
-And working with provinces and territories willing to move forward without delay.
Essentially, the government will try to make drugs a tiny bit cheaper for consumers. It does not look the Pharmacare program is going to be universal and free, like the Medicare is. But perhaps your 2000$ per month drug price would come down to 1500$ per month, if you are below a certain income threshold, etc, etc. This is not nowhere near enough after Liberals promising Pharmacare for decades.
EDIT 2: The price of insulin in Canada is an order of magnitude lower than the US. Despite this, many Canadians are still forced to forego or ration their insulin and other drugs and supplies [0][1]. Reducing prices does not work nearly as well as one might think. Making them free does.
> At T1International, we found that 19 per cent of Canadians with type 1 diabetes had rationed insulin in the last year; 3 per cent were rationing at least once per week.
> Yes, Canada has less insulin rationing than the US (25 per cent) and at lesser intensity for sure; Americans who rationed often skip doses daily whereas rationing once per week or month was more common here. But Canada is a far cry from countries like the United Kingdom, where there was essentially no insulin rationing reported.
> In the U.K., all diabetes supplies, including insulin, are covered by the National Health Service. Such is also the case in many other high income countries. Even many middle income countries, like Morocco, cover the cost of insulin for their diabetic population.
[0] https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/07/29/cana...
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/blog/the-soaring-cost-of-...
As a side note, the fact that the federal government can use its spending powers to enforce policy that is not within its jurisdiction is very unpopular in Quebec and one of the changes Quebec wants made to the constitution.
https://budget.ontario.ca/2019/chapter-3.html#section-6
https://globalnews.ca/news/3496355/quebec-canada-constitutio...
https://ualawccsprod.srv.ualberta.ca/2019/07/federal-spendin...
Especially since the fact that the federal government has money to spend for these means that it's collecting too much and for purposes not under it's jurisdiction.
Quebec is very wise to want to put an end to this.
It's up to the citizens of each province to vote for the laws that serves them better, not some overarching central bureaucracy desperately trying to illegally acquire more powers.
2) It is up to the citizens of Canada to vote for laws that serves them better, and they have voted for federal politicians who created, expanded and maintained laws such as Canada Health Act (CHA). The democratic voice in federal election is no less democratic than the provincial election.
2) I don't think any provinces would have created reciprocal systems. Case in point:
CHA mandates reciprocity for the services provided under CHA. That is to say, if you are an Ontario resident and you get into an accident in BC and have to go to the hospital, you would not have to pay for the stay. Most provinces offer extra services that are not mandated by CHA. For example, prescription drug coverage and ambulance services. Since these services are not under CHA, there is no obligation for their reciprocity. Lo and behold, none of the provinces reciprocate these services. It is strongly recommended to purchase travel insurance for out of province travels for this very reason—a call in another province may cost you 1000's or 10's of thousands of dollars. Considering that the provinces are doing the very bare minimum they are legally obligated to do by the federal government in terms of reciprocity, I do not believe we would have gotten any reciprocity at all without the federal mandate. Also, Alberta would most probably have US-style healthcare system with US-level prices.
I was surprised they even allowed Starlink since it could threaten the potential business Rogers, Bell and Telus could have sometime during the next century.
The US has a lot more variability. Lots of big players and a million tiny ones. Usually you'll have 1 or 2 choices, but sometimes they're both worse than the usual suspect Canadian providers.
These statements only apply to DSL/Cable.
Is Canada involved at all in the tech behind Starlink? It looks to me it's 100% funded and developed by SpaceX here in the US.
The issue with Canada is that Big Telco owns the Government. So when it comes to competition there is none and they make sure nothing threatens their Oligarchy. Trudeau like others, promises to go after them every time there is an election and then does shit like everyone before him. I'm sure there is a payoff somewhere in there for him and the others.
Any money he throws at this will be tax payer money and it's just a different way of separating the masses from their wealth and funneling more of it to Big Telco. He will never offer any kind of support to companies like SpaceX since they are not part of the club.
Just good old corruption in plain sight of the masses. He knows they won't do anything about it and there are millions in favors he has coming when he decides to leave Government.
Or monitoring the transmissions of its factional enemies?
You don't seem to understand the true extent of what corruption can mean.
It has the largest operating area of any Telco on the planet.
In virtually all communities they are the one and only provider.
Yes, it's expensive. Yes, the CRTC is corrupt, and the whole setup is just guaranteed profits to the big telcos. But, you need to think about how hard it is to serve internet to communities of 20-100 people in the Canadian Arctic that don't have roads. There are hundreds of such communities served.
There are weekly outages because of everything from ice build up on the towers at -50C, wind storms blowing down towers, Caribou eating through cables, etc. etc. Most outages require chartering a helicopter and going to the top of mountains 300km from a road or town of noteworthy size.
Canada is BIG and the Arctic is REMOTE.
There's a lot of struggling 'ghost' towns out there formerly based around resource industries that are no longer viable. This could have a big positive impact in distributing more wealth to more parts of the country instead of having it all centred on Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
The federal budget should have been out in March, that got delayed because of covid. They announced it should be out in June. That didn't happen. They announced it would be out in July. That didn't happen. It's now November and there's not even a possible announcement date right now.
The reason the budget isn't out is because it's going to be very bad. The problem with cronyism is that special groups will spend lots of money to get their slice of the pie but the pie isn't going to be big this year. Those special interest groups are going to be angry they didnt get a slice.
I'm less than 5 minutes to a city with fibre, yet my geography makes it impossible to get anything other than satellite internet ($100/40gb).
Bandwidth is around 2-5 mbps on a perfect day. Will frequently drop to 500kbps depending on the time of day, weather, etc. Several times per month I'll lose internet completely, and particularly bad storms have knocked out my internet for several days before.
I can sometimes watch YouTube on 240p, streaming music isn't too bad, and browsing text-based website (ie HN) are slow but palatable. Once the monthly cap is hit, the speed drops to 128kbps which is pretty much unusable (even for text websites).
Latency is also pretty bad. Real time conversations aren't really possible, but thankfully Zoom has a phone dial-in option. Here's an example:
PING 1.1 (1.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=58 time=635.123 ms
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=58 time=839.064 ms
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=58 time=661.220 ms
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=58 time=584.197 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 4
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=58 time=629.539 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 6
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=58 time=733.270 ms
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=58 time=658.290 ms
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=58 time=590.062 ms
^C
--- 1.1 ping statistics ---
11 packets transmitted, 8 packets received, 27.3% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 584.197/666.346/839.064/78.501 msYou might want to check out the command-line based reddit client 'rtv'. It even supports opening up links/images in your browser of choice. Supports login/comments/upvotes/downvotes.
I've found lynx to be quite useful for reading The Star, The Globe and Mail and The Economist as a clean wall of text without any annoying paywalls.
Even found some radio streams (okay, bassdrive.com) that sound pretty good at 32kbps on AAC.
I'm sure they already have them filled out. After all, they designed them.
You just need to make friends with the landowners at the tops of the mountains.
Fast promises on slow internet in the North (August 31, 2015) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/fast-promises-on-slow-i...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/red-tape-slowing-sprea...
Giving telecoms money for infrastructure with no strings attached seems like a bad idea.
I'm on a cheap cell phone plan that toutes that it includes 5G access for no extra charge. It so cool that I can blow through my monthly data allocation in 30 seconds :D
Funny thing is, I'm on the same network, and if I disable 4G and go on 3G, I get ~16mbps on my speed tests...
Like, 5G and 4G save telecoms money by being more efficient with their spectrum, requiring less tower/leases and less power. Their equipment needs regular refreshment anyway, upgraded or not. But in Canada they still sell it as a more premium service.
US is loaded with lessons like this that no one wants to learn from.
eg: Bell's (later Verizon's) broken 1993 promise to deploy fiber @ 45Mbps across Pennsylvania, that netted the corp billions in subsidies
eg: Anything at all with the words Frontier & West Virginia
https://www.telesat.com/press/press-releases/telesat-and-the...
https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/elon-musk-s-spacex-closer-to...
Say there's 10,000 of these in space, that's 200,000Gibps or 195Tibps.
I don't think that's enough bandwidth for high speed internet for hundreds of millions of customers.
However I suspect it'll be cheaper and faster for sparsley populated areas. With Urban areas still leveraging physical wires.
https://rvseniormoments.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/07_ka-ba...
Starlink isn't for people who hate their Big3 ISP. It's for people who wish they had a Big3 ISP to hate.
"Hrmmmmm, if we put 100 satellite into this orbital plane, we'll cover 74m people, 25m of which have shit internet, 5m pissed off Canadians, and with an average monthly spend on data of _____, and on average using Xgb/s in peak hours, etc." But if we shift the plane a bit to the left we'll get....
I also wonder how they'll price discriminate it all. Flat rate really doesn't make sense if they're constrained for capacity.
Just running the math, as 2 people that uses ~250gb/m total, that's 2000gib / 2.7m seconds in a month, we're using on average .0007Gibps.
(Badly) assuming perfect distribution of demand, each 20Gibps could support 30k connections like us.
While there are 10k of these satellites in space, I'm not sure how many (if any) are overlapping the same area. They're probably hovering over an ocean half the time.
The plan seems to be to heavily subsidize (and try to extract political credit for) StarLink and SpaceX so that existing rent seeking monopolies can price gouge customers even more. What's interesting is that with regulations around aerospace SpaceX can't and won't hire Canadians. The country effectively went 180 degree backward from the Nortel years when it seemed interested in being a pioneer in network tech to simply being a consumer. Seeing how Nortel didn't protect it's IP again foreign nations, that's probably a good thing that SpaceX doesn't hire Canadians.
This pattern also extends to the rest of what remains of the Canadian aerospace sector. When Trump slapped tariffs later judged to be illegal on the Bombardier CSeries the Trudeau government simply... looked away and did nothing, allowing Airbus to swoop in and grab the plane and it's IP. Again, Canada will handle some assembly while engineering moves to Europe.
Are these measures... popular with the Canadian public? Help me understand here.
There are like 3 companies that control the internet oligarchy. They used the government backed fibre expansion subsidies to build out infrastructure, then claim that magically made everything more expensive.
Our telecom is required to be all Canadian companies, but all their customer service is farmed out to India or other similar region call center's.
We pay through the nose of asymmetric internet speeds. I hope starlink and other factors push for a price revolt.
But StarLink still has to talk to a ground station. I doubt they will let a Canadian customer just connect to an AT&T station or T-Mobile even if they are in range. Could the local operators even segment the territory into exclusive zones by placing the ground stations a certain way?
how is this going to be distributed? if this is given to the incumbent telecom, what safeguards are there to prevent them from pocketing the money and not delivering?
Is this a speed bump or a no internet vs internet scenario?
Those are two very different propositions.
If it's access to the internet, that's a great idea. If it's a speed bump - I'm not interested in paying for someone else's luxury. If you want luxury - go ahead and purchase it.
Also, if we're going to government sponsor access to High-speed internet, we should convert internet service providers to a government service as well.
How does it make sense for tax payers to pay for internet service hardware and have corporations come in and make profit off of it?
143 out of 230 kept with 20 out of 230 in progress.
Political discourse can be difficult enough without hyperbole making things worse.
The 25,000 Syrian refugee promise, for instance, was broken because that number was reached two months after the stated deadline. Six billion in green infrastructure over four years turned into five billion over five years. The revenue-neutral tax changes (lowered taxes for the poor, raised taxes for the rich) resulted in a small net decrease in taxes (The Tories, who hated that tax policy should be cheering for this - but instead, they are complaining that he didn't raise taxes for the rich enough!)
On the other hand, things like 'end subsidies for the fossil fuel industry' had zero work done on them.
I wouldn't grouse too much about the first category of promises - especially when the CPC didn't want to take any action on any of those items. A half-assed implementation that gets most of the way to the finish-line is one thing.
I would grouse quite heavily about the second category of promises. And about the mountain of corruption scandals that the Liberals are finding themselves in.
All things considered, though, I would not expect this particular pledge to be carried out successfully. Expect an avalanche of money to be dumped into the laps of Telus, Bell, and Shaw.
Promises that help established big corporate businesses: Kept
Promises that don't: Broken
One of two that has over 1,000+ comments. It was only reason I originally voted for him.
1) Canada's "most expensive telecom in the world" comes up a lot.
While this is somewhat true, internet/cell phones are expensive here, what people seem to forget is the number of customers and the land mass. You cant take Phone costs in Ontario (Population 14.57 million, area 1.076 million km²) and compare that to California (Population 39.51 million, area 423,970 km²) and think you will pay the same rates.
Yes, most of Ontario is close to the border, and in cities, but your cell phone works over a massive area and you pay for this.
2) Canadian government pledges to connect 98% of Canadians via High-Speed Internet
This is the liberals, and probably gettiing ready for elections so they promise the world but history shows they also wont deliver on it.
- Ontario Wynne pledges to lower insurance rates (this becomes a "stretch goal") - Trudeua pledges electoral reform (nope, never took place).
- Ontario Liberals move to ban two-tier health care (2003) How long do you think Trudeau's wife waited for her COVID treatment? Do you think she was she treated in a hallway like other Canadians?
Sure, maybe Ontario has twice the size, roughly, of California. But I doubt the northern parts get any cell coverage.