There are only two kinds of ISPs in Canada:
- The two physical line monopolists, Bell Canada and Rogers, with their stratospheric prices (there are probably a few others but I did not bother to learn their names),
- A plethora of the cheaper TPIAs, all of whom seem to be hell-bent on convincing their customers that their service is unsatisfactory and on chasing them away.
I got my first internet connection, back in the day when TPIAs were not a thing. My provider was Bell Canada. They charged tons of money, but the service was rock-solid, and they increased the line speed, every time they upgraded their equipment. The price remained the same. Thus, my DSL speed went up from 1 Mbit to 6 Mbit, and I did not have to pay a penny more than the original contract had stipulated.
Then, TPIAs emerged and offered lower prices for the same line speed. I made a switch. Since then, I changed seven providers. All of them offered the same array of issues:
- Periodical service degradation, with intermittent and growing packet loss.
- Rather regular outages.
- Incompetent, reluctant, and abrupt customer service and technical support staff.
- Pointless arguments about insignificant matters.
- Delaying tactics.
- Rudeness.
- Lies.
- Indifference.
Overall impression is that their goal is to get rid of customers who are less than happy with substandard service and to only keep those who put up with that. This combined with the highest Internet prices in the visible part of the universe makes me wonder why it is Canada which is so special. Nowhere else in the world the Internet is so unstable and costly. Canada likes to blame its huge, sparsely populated territory, for just about anything, but Canadian Internet is not a spiderweb nor grid – it is a hair comb whose teeth rise from the USA, no further than 100 miles from the border. The size of Canada is the lamest excuse for its abysmal record on the quality and availability of Internet. Maybe it is so horrendous, because its users have been silenced, by the oh, so convenient shutting down of DSLReports.COM web site and CanadianISP.ca database that rated ISPs by their performance? That could be a suspicious coincidence.
High-quality and affordable Internet gives a huge boost to small to medium-sized businesses. The lack of it serves only gigantic, trans-national corporations whose Internet connections are not affected by consumer Internet availability. Hmm. Are we talking about dirty competition?