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Comment by BarryMilo | Hacker News Reader

Montrealer here: We're fucked.

Bell, one of the two main internet providers, just bought my independent provider Ebox. There were a rather dependent independent mind you, all their lines were rented.

If I want fiber, Bell is my only option. Not the main one, the only one. Their pricing is reasonable if memory serves, but their customer experience is notoriously awful. I will never deal with them again unless I'm absolutely forced to.

Anyway, good article, we're fucked, deregulation brings us misery once more.

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Fucked in Ontario too. Rogers is trying to buy Shaw (who owns Freedom mobile) under the guise of increasing competition[0]. Another hilarious claim they make is that Rogers needs to buy Shaw to stay competitive with foreign streaming services[1].

[0]https://techbomb.ca/telecommunications/rogers-and-shaw-claim...

[1]https://www.thestar.com/business/2021/11/22/edward-rogers-te...

Videotron (of Quebecor) is trying to expand westward, and possibly buy Freedom. In Eastern Ontario you can use them, and their subsidiary Fizz for mobile.

Fizz has Internet too and it works pretty well although their tech support is non-existent and their website is awful and misleading.

I'm paying 120/mo for symmetric gigabit fiber from Telus.

Compared to my European colleagues this is in no way reasonable.

Good if you can get it. I'm 30 miles east of Toronto and the max speed I can get from Bell is 40Mbs. In Toronto I had Bell and it was 1Gbit/1Gbit. Fastest connection I've had.

Rogers offer 1Gbit/50Mbit but without any competition they can name their price which is a ridiculous $115 + HST.

The trick in Canada is to sign up and then move to another provider within a few months. Retentions will call you and you'll get a more reasonable deal. I do this with Rogers and Fido (which Rogers own) every 12 months.

I smell an opportunity here to provide a service where people pay to have someone else deal with these companies.

That's basically what it's like buying service from one of the smaller companies. I call my small provider with good customer service, they deal with Rogers and a Rogers technician shows up at my house to do the work. My life is 1000% improved by not having to talk to Rogers.

I'm in the same boat. I loathe having to deal with Bell, but they haven't tried to screw me in a while (they must have forgotten about me?) so I haven't had to deal with them for years. But the FTTH service they provide is unparalleled and unavailable from any reseller.

Don't Quebecors have Videotron?

Bell has DSL and Fibre, Videotron has cable.

Videotron and Fizz don't have fiber iirc, only cable and ADSL. Hell, they don't even have an eSim support for Apple Watches

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