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,
crtc
A collection of 14 posts
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/
Is Bell Mobility violating the CRTC Network Neutrality rules?
Earlier this week I saw a thread on Reddit 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 select plans. Here
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. The history of this goes back to 2018, when class action lawsuits were brought in BC, AB, ON, SK
Brief Summary of the Rogers Outage RFI
Late last night the CRTC posted the reply from Rogers to the request for information (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
Rogers outage postmortem - is it time for structural separation?
On Friday July 8th around 4:45AM, the Rogers network in Canada went down hard. Cellular, internet, and cable services were disrupted for customers across the country. The NetBlocks monitoring group estimated the outage knocked out a quarter of Canada's
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
Canadians deserve service based competition
In my talk a few weeks ago 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 stakeholders