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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

In Canada our internet became much faster for cheaper with better customer support when the government allowed competition from smaller players. Telecom also got better when they allowed a foreign competitor to compete against the government mandated oligopoly. But the market is still heavily regulated in a way that benefits the existing monopolies.

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I think Canada is a great example of how not to do it, despite some price decreases in recent years. We seem to have (near) the worst of all worlds: huge geography, little competition, and government regulation that props up the oligopoly without driving prices down like Europe. Mobile data is even worse.

I'm running out my contract with TekSavvy (~$80 CAD for gigabit) before switching to Novus (~$60 CAD for 2.5), and my partner and I just switched to Fido (~$30 CAD for 80gig and international calls/SMS).

Considering the geography and all the per-capita math (and pain), I don't think we're doing too bad as a country any more.

That last one is a phone plan.. not exactly apples to apples (it's good, but an 80GB/mo cap is rarely enough for home.. and nothing like a 2.5gbps internet plan).

Because grandparent (that I was replying to) stated "Mobile data is even worse". You're right that it doesn't compare to a 2.5G pipe, but that wasn't my point

Canada is very urbanized so your huge geography does not matter much. It is much harder to get fast internet in a rural and mountainous country like Norway and they have succeeded way better than Canada. I think the Canadian telecom oligopoly is almost entirely to blame.

> In Canada our internet became much faster for cheaper with better customer support when the government allowed competition from smaller players.

What the CRTC did was force the big players who own all the infrastructure to allow resellers to resell their services, and have to pay no more than cost to the big guy.

Those "smaller players" have a marginal involvement in the entire network aspect. They usually host ISP emails and sometimes DNS. Some of them do provide better customer service than the upstream big guy. At least until they need upstream help to resolve your issue, then it takes forever.

The other type of small players, who install their own infrastructure in smaller municipalities, were not impacted by this change. Some provinces (SK, QC) do give generous grants to those small players to install fibers. But AFAIK there is no federal involvement specifically to help them.

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