A couple of months ago I moved into a new residential area that the developer has dubbed “new downtown Markham“. The 20 year development plan is massive, including thousands of residential units, a piazza, a promenade & high street, a commercial district and a massive central park. The entire development has a green slant, from using collected rain runoff to water the plants, to using exhausted energy from one residence to heat or cool another. The place is cutting edge, and fitting of Markham, the city that calls itself “Canada’s high-tech capital”. So it was a great disappointment to me when I found out that my options for connectivity were limited to the same choices as always: Bell or Rogers. Worse yet, The area is so far from a Bell central office that DSL service is only offered at 3mbps speeds.
What did I expect? I expected that if a developer has the gall to self proclaim their new construction project “New Downtown Markham” that it would have some aspects of downtown communication infrastructure. Copper and cable doesn’t cut it anymore. If you’re putting in over a thousand residential units, run fiber links to the community. If you don’t want to manage the links, let a third party do it – I drive by 6 companies on my way to work that would have been happy to provide voice and data services to this community. It would have cost the residents here less, we would have had better service, and best of all, we would have had choice. Giving me a choice between Rogers and Bell is like offering me the “choice” between two domestic light beers. They’re both going to be poor substitutes for what I really want, and I’m going to be disappointed either way.
What really gets me is that the Downtown Markham site for office leasing opportunities touts Markham’s “world class infrastructure”. Oh sure, the infrastructure in the city exists… But the way things are now, if a business actually wanted to use that infrastructure they’d have to pay to pull the lines in from the interconnects (rather than just pay to hook into the network that the development should be wired with already). The developer wants to attract fortune 500 companies to build their HQs here. Maybe if a few of them sign on, and the demand is great enough, Remington will pull their heads out of the sand long enough to sign a build out agreement with a local fiber owner. Even if that happens, I’m still stuck. Remington’s development of the future is already built – And it has last decade’s broadband technologies, and last century’s voice tech.
On December 11, 2008, the CRTC passed a resolution allowing the deregulation of Canada’s telecommunications networks. Prior to this resolution Bell and Telus were mandated to allow competitors access to their network at prices that were regulated by the CRTC. The competitors were then able to provide telephone and internet services to the same areas that the incumbent telcos serviced by “renting” the lines from the incumbent telcos. It might sound a bit unfair – after all, competitors were then able to provide the same services as the incumbents without having to invest billons of dollars into network infrastructure. If the networks were built out using corporate re-investments or private investment funds, it would be easy to side with the telcos. But long story short, the networks built by Bell and Telus were built with taxpayer subsidies. The government ensured that these companies were successful in return for building a national telecommunications network that would service their citizens.
The enforced competitor access at fixed prices all stems from the source of funding for the networks. The government allowed a monopoly to be created, so they allowed competitors access to the monopoly-holder’s network to even things up a bit. The CRTC’s decision last December allows the incumbent telcos to set whatever prices they want for competitor access. As any company with any business sense would do, Bell and Telus will use this opportunity to push competitor rates for access to their network sky high. As the independent service providers die off because they cannot afford the access fees, Bell can raise prices for their own customers. After all, who are their customers going to switch to? When Bell decides not to replace aging infrastructure because it would be too costly and their customers suffer with slow speeds or service outages, customers will not have the option to “vote with their wallet” and leave for another company.
If this decision is not reversed, independent internet service providers and telcos will be forced out of business in a matter of months. In a country where we already pay more than other developed countries for fewer/slower services, we will find ourselves with unaffordable internet access that will never increase in speed or service quality. Our telephone and internet services will be regulated by a corporation, not our government. When the bottom line is profits, you can bet it won’t be the consumer who benefits.
I wrote to my MP, John McCallum (MP for Markham-Unionville) last week regarding the issue, and asked him what his position on the issue was, and what he was going to do to help reverse the decision. I am sad to say that Mr. McCallum responded to tell me that while he supported net neutrality, he felt that a network built by a company, and not the government, should be regulated by that company. The letter was written as if he understood the issue, but I have to question if Mr. McCallum actually knows the background here. So, Mr. McCallum, I’m calling you out. If your position is that a private network should be regulated privately, then how can you allow the networks that were built with our taxes to be regulated in the same fashion? Why do the taxpayers not get a say in a decision that will ultimately affect them so very negatively? How can the government pour dollar after dollar into a project and then refuse to ensure that project benefits their citizens?
I urge everyone to get involved with this issue. Write your local MP. write Stephen Harper, write the opposition leader and write industry minister Tony Clement. Write anyone you can who will pay attention. Check out CompetitiveBroadband.com for more ways to get involved. Do anything to get the word out – If you don’t, you may find your communication services are the next items on the chopping block when it’s time to cut back.