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Comment by davidy123 | Hacker News Reader

Yes. I am in rural(ish) Canada. A community got together and with regional and national funding created https://fibreargenteuil.ca/en/ It was intense, they had to fight, sometimes publicly, tooth and nail with the utility pole controllers. But I'm typing this from fast, reliable (knock the nearest of many trees) fibre internet with very reasonable (all things considered, though I wish they had a more basic tier for down and out folks) pricing.

I follow a few rural internet groups, at first most members thought Starlink would be all they'd ever need, now they are very unhappy.

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One of the awful things I found here in (quasi-rural, near Hamilton) Ontario is this phenomenon:

1. No broadband from any of Rogers, Bell, Cogeco, etc. for multiple decades, and no real local offerings; despite being only a few km from a major centre

2. Nothing seems to be happening, so some local companies start offering point-to-point wireless services which fill a hole. They start putting up antenaes and stringing fibre all around. Fees are high but not awful. Bandwidth is low, but so much better than what one could get before. Also Starlink gets announced and deployed for some people.

3. Suddenly Bell shows up and starts running Fibe up and down the rural roads. What wasn't "economically viable" for them before suddenly super viable. Local wireless companies -- who took big risks to get a product to people -- lose hundreds of customers overnight.

I now have 3gbps fibre optic direct to my house when I had a 15mbps wireless connection a few months ago. But I'm sure some local small ISPs are going to be out of business by the end of the year.

I hate the way Canada is run.

That's somewhat similar to what happened in the US during the initial timeframe of DSL.

Regional Bell says your DSL is $60-120/month.

Your local ISP buys a circuit to a DSL aggregator (Covad, Northpoint, Rhythms, etc) and starts offering DSL for $50/month (their cost was $25-30/month).

After increase in customers, regional Bell says "we're offering $29.95/month for 6 months to new customers". ISPs nationwide start losing thousands of customers.

One by one, DSL aggregators start to go out of business which means ISP have no DSL connectivity and can't sell DSL anymore.

DSL is dead from anyone but regional Bell.

Them's anti-competitive practices for ya'

Here in Canada the CRTC ordered incumbents to file tariffs and phase II cost studies for aggregated FTTP a few weeks ago by April 23rd. That is in part due to the new CRTC chairperson and the new policy directive that came into effect early in February. The CRTC quickly rejected the incumbents' "woe is us, we can't do that" letters last week. The 6 largest Canadian independent ISPs sold out to the large industry players over the past year in large part because they've hemorrhaged customers over the past 5 years without access to FTTP facilities. The regulatory problem being faced now is that competition has been almost completely gutted and now needs to be rebuilt.

A bit of backstory: Ian Scott, former chairperson of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), allegedly held solo/ex parte meetings with Incumbents while a review of a 2019 CRTC decision that reduced fees the big telecoms would be able to charge smaller internet service providers for access to their broadband networks, was underway [0].

That 2019 decision was reversed in 2021.

[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-crtc-chair-...

Maybe there's a business there.

"Fake" a local internet company in order to provoke Telcos into rolling out fibre.

It seems to work well enough for fake "grassroots" movements.

You would need something like a political party to hire them.

Google Fiber?

Such disappointing potential

Typical google seemed to think a politics and business problem was actually a technical one and then give up completely when it was clear they would actually have to make a real business investment to get what they wanted.

... still. It's unfathomable why they stopped. They could have singlehandedly created a new semi-national ISP, and they could have sold it off by now to focus on their core competency of launching new increasingly irrelevant messaging apps, rewriting GMail in slower and slower ways, and of course challenging the world, by boldly going where noone has dared going before, dropdown-by-dropdown sub-account-by-sub-account day-by-day they are inching closer to opening the gates of the insanity dimension, and the moment will come when God will get fed up because he/she can't find the fucking property/website/account in Google Analytics...

Just a reminder https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-crtc-sides-...

Law has been modified recently https://www.canada.ca/en/radio-television-telecommunications...

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