Hmmm... Can't Reach This Page
A friend called me two weeks ago because his IPTV app had stopped playing anything, just a spinning wheel and a generic playback error. When he pulled up the service's own domain in a browser to see...
Category
crtc
Money First, Accountability Later: Ottawa's New Internet Backbone Needs an Open Access Mandate
Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in front of hundreds of the world's largest investors on Tuesday and announced that Ottawa would reinvest "tens of billions of dollars" of capital into a new sovereign...
Click to Cancel Comes to Canada (And I Have Some Thanking to Do)
Back in November of 2025, I wrote a post called "Click to Cancel: Why Canada Needs to Catch Up" (https://mgamble.ca/p/click-to-cancel-why-canada-needs-to-catch-up). I griped about the 20 minutes I...
The AI Divide: A New Fault Line Opening Before We Finished Closing the Old One
Earlier this week I had the privilege of moderating a panel at Digital Access Day, the Canadian Internet Society's annual gathering of thoughtleaders working on the issues shaping our networks and our...
Bell touts tired "investment" argument, incorrectly labels indy ISPs as "resellers"
In a recent LinkedIn post, Robert Malcolmson, Chief Legal and Regulatory Office for BCE Inc (Bell Canada) once again used the old tired "it harms investment" argument in response to the CRTCs ongoing consideration of expanding mandated access to high-speed broadband networks while wrongly calling in
You can't get there from here - port blocking by residential ISPs
Recently I was working with one of my customers to setup the Azure Files [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/storage/files] service - a cloud based file sharing solution from Microsoft that allows you to "mount Azure Files shares from anywhere—from on premises to the cloud—giving you a truly
New CRTC Policy Direction Released - The ball is now in their court.
Today Minister Champagne announced the final Policy Direction to the CRTC [https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-development/news/2023/02/minister-champagne-announces-final-direction-to-the-crtc-placing-affordability-and-consumer-rights-at-the-forefront-of-its-future-decisions.html] ,
Canadian Independent ISPs - another one bites the dust
One topic I've been meaning to write about for some time now is the increasing number of independent ISPs who have been acquired by incumbents. As we start 2023, I was saddened to learn today that another Canadian independent ISP, start.ca [https://start.ca] has been acquired by Telus [https://mobi
Flanker brands are killing independent ISPs
Recently a relative of mine moved and needed internet access. Having not shopped for residential internet service in a long time, I was shocked to see that Virgin, the Bell "flaker brand" was selling 50/10 VDSL service for $40/month with no install fees and a Wifi-enabled DSL modem included. Yes,
Is Bell Mobility violating the CRTC Network Neutrality rules?
Earlier this week I saw a thread on Reddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/bell/comments/109lljm/sd_vs_hd_videos_as_a_selling_point_for_different/] pointing out that Bell Mobility has started limiting access to HD video streaming on its 5G plans, with access HD video being offered as a $5 upsell on selec
The CRTC once again fails Canadians
As you may have seen in the news recently, Canadian merchants are starting to charge processing fees for credit card transcations [https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/canadian-businesses-can-charge-credit-card-fees-starting-oct-6-1.6096370] . The history of this goes back to 2018, when class action law
Brief Summary of the Rogers Outage RFI
Late last night the CRTC posted the reply from Rogers to the request for information [__GHOST_URL__/static/Rogers-CRTC-RFI.pdf] (RFI) it sent last week. In the RFI, the CRTC asked Rogers to respond to 55 questions about the multi-day Canada-wide service outage that started early in the morning of J
Rogers outage postmortem - is it time for structural separation?
On Friday July 8th around 4:45AM, the Rogers network in Canada went down hard [https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-view-of-the-rogers-communications-outage-in-canada/] . Cellular, internet, and cable services were disrupted for customers across the country. The NetBlocks monitoring group esti
The cautionary tale of the $5000 pop-up window
It started with a pop-up window on an old Windows PC indicating there was a problem with the computer. The user needed to contact Microsoft support via an 800 number for assitance to resolve the error. Innocent enough, right? That single popup message kicked off a harrowing multi-hour odyssey duri
Canadians deserve service based competition
In my talk a few weeks ago [https://mgamble.ca/a-kafkaesque-nightmare-the-history-of-stir-shaken-in-canada/] at RAG New Orleans I ended by saying "Or maybe the situation is worse. Maybe the regulator fails to see that smaller players – who function without large scale facilities - are legitimate st
A kafkaesque nightmare - The history of STIR/SHAKEN and small carriers in Canada
Earlier today I had the honour of presenting a talk at Risk and Assurance Group (RAG) conference [https://riskandassurancegroup.org/new-orleans-conference-5-6-apr-2022/] in New Orleans on the history of STIR/SHAKEN in Canada from the perspective of smaller providers. RAG doesn't webcast its confere
The CST-GA is "SHAKEN" down small carriers
If you've been following by blog, you'll know that equal access for all telecommunications providers to participate in the SHAKEN/STIR call authentication framework has been one of the causes I have been most passionate about. In late August, smaller Canadian telecommunications service providers (T
The Canadian PSTN needs Next Generation Routing
Last week wasn't great for the Canadian Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Two of Canada's largest competitive carriers suffered outages - Iristel was victim of a DDoS attack that lasted over 24 hours, between November 15th and 16th. At the same time, Thinktel experienced issues related to
Canada's CRTC - Regulation at Sloth Speed
Almost one year ago today (357 days ago to be exact), Tim Denton [https://tmdenton.com/] and I participated in the CRTC review of mobile wireless services on behalf of the Internet Society, Canada Chapter [https://www.cpac.ca/en/programs/crtc-hearings/episodes/66153138/]. A lot has happened in the
We’ve been here before, and no, the sky wasn't falling.
The sky is falling, or is it?Over the weekend, the Governor in Council issued an order responding to petitions to the Governor in Council concerning Telecom Order CRTC 2019-288 [https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-development/news/2020/08/order-in-council-responding-to-petitions-to-