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Comment by spxneo | Hacker News Reader

too bad you can't do this in Canada

There are plenty of small ISPs operating in Canada. Many have been acquired by Bell / Telus / Rogers in recent years, but there are still dozens of players offering fixed wireless or fibre connections -- mostly in rural areas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_internet_service_provi...

https://www.infrastructureontario.ca/en/what-we-do/projectss...

why?

Overregulation. Source, I work in telecom in Canada.

And now all telecom companies are required to interconnect, right? Or did that not happen? The government mandated that after the "Rogers outage" - so that other providers can act as "backups", so "that never happens again."

> And now all telecom companies are required to interconnect, right?

No. That's not the case at all.

> so that other providers can act as "backups", so "that never happens again."

Also, no.

Also what do you mean by interconnect? BGP IP peering is a thing for a while. Big folks peer with big folks.

"Ottawa announces it will require telecoms to provide backup for each other during outages following Rogers system failure" - https://www.thestar.com/business/ottawa-announces-it-will-re...

Are you aware of this?

When there is only "telecom" and not "telecoms", Ottawa will have to rephrase that.

Canada will be abbreviated to CCP at that point.

Really? I found Canada one of the least regulated. Although there were a few weird hoops.

Out of ~10 countries I have supported WISP's in, I have never seen a country with less of a barrier to entry.

We did have a theory that our customers were rural, and that the cities might present different issues. But trying to do what they did in Australia would be add 2 zeroes to the end of every cost.

Ask TekSavvy that question.

Or Ebox. In fact some of hurdles were documented on dslreports forum. Starting with wholesale access to cable ( worked OK for a while ) continuing with wholesale access to fiber ( never happens ) and ending with the end of the 'sane' rates for cable ( final nail before Ebox, Destributel and other were sold to Bell/Telus/Cogeco )

> continuing with wholesale access to fiber ( never happens )

* https://mobilesyrup.com/2023/11/06/bell-and-telus-must-offer...

Or you can do what Beanfield did and build out your own fibre infrastructure to customers.

Fighting every municipality and Homeowners Association (HOA, aka Strata) along the way. Running fiber is tough here in the US, even motivated incumbents see a minimum of a 6 month delay waiting for permits in many municipalities to run fiber through existing conduit owned by said incumbent.

Beanfield runs fiber through streets and sewers, and provides networking to office buildings and condominium apartments. I don't think they serve detached houses, as the low density is not worth it.

Or Beanfield.

Regulatory capture and the regulator being in bed with the incumbents. Not Canada-specific even, this is a common problem in a lot of countries when it comes to telecoms.

Nether in Spain...

Neither in San Francisco.

In 2005 Google wanted to do a nice gesture and offer free wifi across SF. The Board of Supervisors literally asked Google how much they were intending to pay the city in order to offer free wifi... SMH.

It of course never happened.

There are a few in SF. MonkeyBrains being a local-friendly top of mind name. Downside is the smallest vibrations, wind gusts, or rain often leads to service degradation.

And also Sonic.net crew representin', although bizarrely they are(were?) only north of Market street :-(

I also had mostly-good experiences with Google Fiber (née Webpass) coming to the condo building, although despite their name it came in via WISP on the roof. I could have thrown a rock and hit the Webpass building from my condo but ... at least it wasn't Comcast and the whole building got gigabit IPv6 service for what any one of the owners would have paid for it from Comcast. I bet our units being pre-wired for Ethernet made the situation easier, but depending on the size of the HOA I'd guess not insurmountable even if one had to pull cat6 later

Uh there are tons of small wisps in canada what are you smoking?

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