[ergo98]

My anecdote was...anecdotal. Nonetheless Canada's broadband deployment rates are in the top quarter of the OECD, and it regularly ranks very well in bandwidth in the same comparisons. Empirically Canada isn't doing so terrible.

Really? I was under the impression that Bell was just selling access to their last-mile infrastructure

Your understanding is wrong. If TekSavvy were just terminating the loop, Bell wouldn't even have the technical ability to do anything to restrict or harm them.

The situation here is that Teksavvy has access to bulk wholesale Nexxia (Bell's backbone) rates that were forced upon Bell by the CRTC. Again, this was an agreement that was established when Bell was overwhelmingly dominant in certain areas of Canada. If those wholesale rates are "fair", however, then clearly Teksavvy can just arrange with another provider to handle that service. The reason they can't, of course, is that the rates they were paying were essentially monopoly subsidized.

[pyre]

Is that really the reason why? I find it also possible that they haven't been able to setup the infrastructure to peer with other providers yet, as it seems they were only given 90 days before this went into affect. I don't know what sort of timeline is reasonable for them to be able to hook-up with other providers as I've never worked on that sort of infrastructure before.

[ergo98]

Yeah, that's the reason why. Just to be clear, Bell has been making their intentions clear for a long, long time. They were packet shaping "reseller" connectivity as long as two years ago.

There ARE DSL providers that locate hardware in Bell switching centers and don't use the Nexxia network. Primus is an example. Funny thing about Primus is that they, too, are implementing UBB, but it isn't because of Bell: It's because they don't want the ultra high throughput users that are being punted from TekSavvy from all migrating to their network.