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Comment by igrekel | Hacker News Reader

I can find no link or detail or reference to what exactly is the CRTC's decision.

From a few mentions in the text, I suspect it is related to making broadband internet access an essential service that should be available to all canadians. Right now, many not so remote communities don't have broadband internet access and the situation is stagnating.

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To be perfectly honest, Canada has is a worst case scenario for providing broadband to everyone. With that in mind, they are actually doing a pretty amazing job. I got 16mbit internet downtown and even my cottage on an island in the middle of a lake in rural ontario has a 4mbit wireless link. It could be a lot worse.

If you're still interested, the "decision" and "framework" that they talk about seems to be "Telecom Decision CRTC 2008-17" ( http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2008/dt2008-17.htm ), in which they decide to institute a new framework for the mostly public telco/cableco to sell internet wholesale to the smaller ISPs.

The sector may be anti-competitive but it certainly hasn't stifled innovation, at least not across the board. The province I live in is almost the size of Texas with about 1/24 of Texas' population. Yet we'll have 100% broadband penetration by 2011.

When Bell was a monopoly, they had a phone in every household which you leased from Bell. Monopolies seem to penetrate the market very well, regardless of their level of innovation so I don't think market penetration should be by any means a measure of innovation.

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