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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

“There’s effectively no municipal broadband movement in Canada,” Noss said. “There were enough opportunities in places that actually wanted it, and that’s where we focused our attention. People are pounding on our doors from all over the US. We have not had one inbound request from Canada.”

Can anyone here speak to - reasonably speculate on - why that is the case? I see a lot of Canadians complain on forums about their fixed and mobile access, what's preventing competition from solving that and stealing customers away from Rogers et al?

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I think Canada is just a few years behind the States. Three years ago, Google Fiber didn't exist, and the same comparisons were being made between the U.S. and South Korea as are being made made between Canada and the U.S. today.

I think part of the reason we're behind is simply that, despite the extreme cultural similarities, American content providers take a shockingly long time to bring their products to Canada. We're just not a high priority. I really don't think anything sets Canada apart, and in a few years we'll have the same demand for Gb broadband that the U.S. has today.

This. And thankfully, Rogers isn't as evil as Comcast-Verizon even though they have a quadruple play. They're evil enough, just not in ways average customers will often notice.

There is a small town in Alberta named Olds (not joking) that recently invested in their own fibre optic network. They have a college there and I believe they hope to build it into a superior technical school to attract students.

http://o-net.ca/

I grew up in Southern Ontario (born in 1990) so I can only speak to my experience in that province.

In my experience, the problem is sheer distance between subscribers. You're too far away for DSL, and there are no cable lines.

This leaves only a few options:

  - dial-up
  - satellite (stick with dial-up - trust me)
  - wireless
  - pay to have fiber/cable trenched/run (I wish!)

Wireless has become big in the last 3-5 years as providers have begun to offer their service at a reasonable price. There is still the problem of uneven terrain (sometimes you need a 100' tower to get over all the trees) but it's getting better.

I'd like to know where exactly they focused their attention regarding municipal broadband - I suspect it was in the prairie provinces. Back around 2000-ish, I recall hearing that some level of government was going to put money into "broadband for all" but it never truly came for us. Believe me, we "wanted it" and let people know

To clarify, you're talking about rural/farm areas, right?

Anything in Southern Ontario that resembles a suburb or urban area has coaxial plant.

The issue is more of 3rd party access to physical plant and incumbent ISP's entrenched interests in other industries (namely video).

Because the equivalent FCC in Canada (CRTC) is effectively run by the Big Three (Bell, Rogers, Telus), which also lobby to prevent independent ISP access and by sabotaging their routes - tracert on both an indepedent reseller and one of the big three showed massive latency during peak hours due to some sort of traffic shaping.

I do feel that the CRTC is making headway, if only slowly.

The CRTC operates under some rather vague law that could give it real power, but it still seems to be overly concerned with economic viability of the incumbents (which is not in its mandate).

Maybe one day this government agency will put a bad business that only exists because of its mono/duo/trio/confuso-poly position out of business, but I will not hold my breath for it.

Also in Canada, unlike the US, cable companies are required to allow third party resellers. So we can get either cable or DSL internet from smaller players giving us slightly more options.

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