After big drop in ISP competition, Canada mandates fiber-network sharing | Hacker News Reader

After big drop in ISP competition, Canada mandates fiber-network sharing

arstechnica.com

66 pointsmorkalork19 comments

Bell and Telus had mastered the art of extracting government incentives to pay for their fibre build outs as well. They would demand subsidies in the 100s of millions of $ in some cases.

In one example they had Fibre running to a city in Northern Ontario. Of course it was along a highway and already strung there for years. A subsidy was made availabel for providing highspeed internet to rural customers and rather than build out new infrastructure, the ISP just said they would connect anyone along the path of the fibre that was already there. That fibre had ALREADY been subsidized by a previous government.

Starlink has hopefully brought an end to that. Now instead of spending 10s and 100s of thousands of $ to subsidize the connection of a house, they simply need to provide a $800 subsidy for a Starlink dish.

Starlink isn’t without its downsides. It seems like terrestrial WISP would be more cost effective in some of these situations.

I run a fibre ISP in Ontario. Where I live and operate we have rocks, hills and trees. WISPs are not a realistic option to service many of the customers we serve.

Starlink has not brought an end to the subsidies. The Ontario government is in the process of rolling out subsidies of >$5000 per home under the AHSIP (Accelerated High Speed Internet Program). It should have increased competition (it was set up as a reverse auction), but the terms were such that all the smaller ISPs were unable to participate. The smallest award was $24.7 million to serve 3265 homes which works out to $7565 per home. The bonding requirement put that far out of reach of local ISPs as nobody can get bonded for $24 million when you're only doing $5-10 million a year in revenue. This program is supposed to be fully rolled out by the end of 2025.

This is an astounding amount of money per household just to be gouged by the provider afterwards as a customer. If we're already paying that much through taxes, we may as well own it as a utility.

Nationalize them, make it a public utility.

Force the top execs to work in call centres.

Unlit fibre is no different from water pipes or streets, it should be owned by the municipality.

Agreed.

> OpenMedia Executive Director Matt Hatfield said the "decision should be a lifeline for small ISPs—but it comes so late, most have already sunk. Fibre Internet is the high-speed Internet gold standard Canadians now demand, and the CRTC's indifference to that reality has led to most small ISP players being edged out or absorbed by telecom giants over the last few years."

Correct. Beanfield, TekSavvy, and Smart were the three fiber competitors in Southern Ontario. Smart sold to Telus (telecom giant in western Canada), and TekSavvy has made moves in preparation for a sale.

TekSavvy and Smart made their money providing fiber to underserved Canadians who were NEVER going to get served by Bell, and Bell lobbied like hell to drive them out.

%s/Smart/Start/g

I didn't realize that Start.ca was sold this year. TIL

The exact same thing happened in QC with Ebox, whom Bell purchased.

Alas, in the US, the appellate courts in a madcap act of pro-big business judicial activism overrode the FCC's legislative mandate to insure fair and reasonable Unbundled Network Element (UNE) access for fiber. Where-as with DSL and other networking, there had been competitive ISP access to markets, the courts overruled the good work Congress & the FCC has done to favor pure corporate monopoly, for vague ass reasons:

> Thus, we determine that, particularly in light of a competitive landscape in which competitive LECs are leading the deployment of FTTH, removing incumbent LEC unbundling obligations on FTTH loops will promote their deployment of the network infrastructure necessary to provide broadband services to the mass market.

https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-03-36A1.pd...

This lead to a number of years of the FCC & courts walking back the good in progress work, 2001-2006, to create a court enforced monopoly over local & recently (things are still getting worse) long range fiber.

Truly one of the saddest worst boundaries America has towards becoming a respectable nation, where we can build utilities that compete to serve our people. Incredibly wild colossal pro-corporate pro-monopoly judicial activism out of no where. It's so unclear how America can re-decide, re-figure this out. The decisions of the court seem the most immutable, nearly impossible to change (although this Supreme Court is doing an amazing job ignoring & overturning precedent as is pleases then).

This should absolutely be changed, everywhere, asap. Good job Canada. Wish you well.

This is what we have in France. One there is fiber somewhere all the ISPs can use it.

There is even a month delay between the moment the fiber is available technically and the moment it is made available to subscription to give time to all ISPs to prepare their offer (which means update their website with availability data because the offering is the same everywhere)

Amazing how the government is _finally_ coming around to this, especially after the ship has sailed in terms of mergers with Rogers/Shaw, Telus/Numerous smaller ISPs, etc.

_Now_, there's a problem with competition, because they approved it all in the first place!

Amazing.

The best solution is for electric utilities to run fiber. This brings competition back. EPB in Chattanooga, TN has been providing Fiber for ~2 decades.

ah, the ongoing extortion continues!

> Bell protests, says it will cut fiber spending

That one seems like a huge lie. They stopped building a bunch of subsidized builds locally at the end of August. All signs point to this being driven by financial considerations. Bell loves keeping their dividend high, and higher costs for financing compared to 2 years ago means that money for interest payments has to come from somewhere.

This should have been a thing after Rogers staged that cellphone outage while trying to buy Shaw. Oh wait, they did... except it only was supposed to cover cellphones.

just nationalize it already

Reply on news.ycombinator.com