[xwolfi]

Man those prices, Ill use other currencies to be more precise, but in Paris, the 1Gbps was 30 euros and now that I live in Hong Kong it's 250 HKD. Canadian prices could be explained by the increasing cost with lower density, but damn, high speed dedicated fiber is still a luxury in some place, we forget, us dense cities' people.

Competition is not the only thing, in France we have 4 highly regulated fiber providers who must compete or pay fines, but in HK it's way more shady and we choose building and flats to get the best ones (cable is shit, former public telco is expensive, new kid is fast and cheap). It's still nowhere near your prices: a shit cable is 98HKD and an expensive HK Telecom is 500...

[ornornor]

The density argument is utter BS. A vast majority of the population is concentrated in 5 very dense cities, and no one is asking the incumbents to provide FTTH to every house in Nunavut.

It’s cartel behavior at its best. The Canadian telecom landscape is a sick joke.

[dmix]

The rural argument also never made sense because why not just start a nationalized ISP or subsidy that purely serves the rural north? Why sarcrifice the competitiveness of whole countries ISP market for a very small part of the country?

The same argument is used for keeping the postal service public when you could just subsidize the parts of the market that wouldn’t be self-sustaining rather than propping up the entire money-losing crown business. Burning tax dollars at the parcel delivery business in the age of e-commerce is a sad joke.

The whole “rural people are being protected” seems like a cover story for powerful friends of politicians to keep the money train rolling, and regular people eat it up on social media.

Plus Starlink et al has rendered the rural argument moot.

[ricardobayes]

Well in downtown Budapest 1Gbps is like 5 euros a month. There's no wonder why so many people become developers in Eastern Europe. Cheap and fast connectivity is key. The sooner western leadership realizes this the better.

[ChuckNorris89]

>the 1Gbps was 30 euros

That's still pretty good. In Austria that's 80 euros since telecoms here have the same government protected cartel as in Canada. And it's not even available in every building of the city, but you need to check before you move whether you have fiber or not in the building.

Similar in Germany.

One of the things I miss from Eastern Europe is the fast and cheap internet that's available in any building in the city.

[jacquesm]

You should check what an actual competitive market looks like, Bucharest for instance.