Speaking from personal experience I can tell you that Canada's Internet service, especially in rural areas is terrible.

The lobby group Open Media wishes to fix this through






http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story ... forms.html

I can tell you that internet in rural areas here in the U.S. is also terrible and exspensive.

The same way we were supposed to get high-speed internet in here, like 3 years ago and still nothing.

also in Europa are in many areas no high-speed internet.

[*]Audit internet service providers to measure internet congestion, speed, billing and practices that prioritize some types of internet applications over others, so that consumers are well informed


I don't really like that idea, it would be too much like a mobile plan where they would end up charging you for usage.

This is such a pain. The whole internet issue in Canada is not the politics of it, but the economics of it. It is very much a classic oligopolistic monopoly, where there are about 4 major ISPs across the country. They're allowed to operate in this manner because the government organization, the CRTC (Canadian Radio-TV and Telecom Commission), sanctions it by forcing the major ISPs to share their infrastructure with the "little guys", smaller ISPs that have no networks of their own. The small ISPs then sell that internet out at a much cheaper rate than the major ISPs could ever afford, while enforcing no bandwidth restrictions. The big ISPs are then forced to accept this as a "free, open-market" solution, where they are unable to set the prices on access to their own networks. OpenMedia has done nothing but confuse the issue for months now, making it seem like the big ISPs were the problem. But without profitable, large ISPs and their networks, there is no internet in Canada. And leaving those ISPs alone, without real competition does nothing to encourage innovation.

The solution to the problem is to allow more companies in, but let the big ISPs set the rates for access to their networks, making it necessary and profitable for the small ISPs to start their own networks. This would make it possible for large ISPs to focus more effort on rural areas, which, quite frankly, are so vast, that there are literally kilometers of nothingness all over the country.

Spending billions of dollars addressing the problem might make it easier to buy out the big companies and "ask" them to extend networks to rural areas, but it does nothing to address the real issue of the uncompetitive marketplace.

The Alberta Government almost had it right when they built Supernet.

The argument goes something like this

Q: Why is there now high speed outside of the major towns?
A: There is no backbone infrastructure.
Q: Why is that?
A: Not economically viable for private enterprise to build out

So the government funded a province wide fibre-optic build out. Unfortunately in true Klein era style they assumed that all these private ISPs would magically pop out of the soil or something and supply this new bandwidth to the end user. Well nearly ten years later and my county makes a similar assessment, only replace backbone with tower infrastructure. Though to the counties credit they seem to be having more success in getting ISPs on the tower infrastructure.

In my opinion the lesson learned from this (and many and many examples in the past) is that build out of utilities (and telephone/internet service is a utility) requires massive investment and the only way to quickly make that happen is to use public funds. Obviously any use of public money will be at least in some part a political issue.

My post is going to be very blunt, but Bell sucks, Rogers sucks, and the CRTC needs to be abolished. That would solve many of Canada's telecommunications problems (mostly dealing with Television, SimuSub is bullcrap). Bandwidth caps and speeds here are ridiculous when compared to the United States and other countries. Heck, even some of the more "poor" countries have better internet service than we do.

nice and complete

not sure what to think, I still think that we need the CRTC around in some form but it needs reforming.

but there is no doubt that Canadian Internet in general just plain sucks

This just makes me mad. The CRTC always makes the wrong decisions.