said by zod5000:I still don't consider "resellers" to be competition. The DSL/Cables aren't going to sell their bandwidth so low, or rent their lines so low, that the competition will be able to undercut them.
You're also telling the companies that if you go and shell out all the money to lay down fibre/copper or whatever else, you've gotta share it... I've always wondered if that was a detractor for broadband improvement.
Most 3rd party DSL providers in Canada are NOT "resellers" excluding the west where Telus has most of the control.
The wholesale system has worked well at least here in Ontario. In fact because all the providers here are using the same network for authentication and network transit, my transition from Bell to Teksavvy was smooth and didn't require more than a few seconds of downtime!
It is a fact that Bell is wholesaling for a low fee per subscriber (currently around $20 per user per month) and the benefit of the way that bandwidth is handled is that the 3rd party provider can choose their own transit and buy network links from Bell.
You guys in the west are much different because of Telus' decisions regarding wholesale access. This I think is stifling competition there because Telus wants to be greedy and not allow competition but because of the CRTC ruling, they have to legally provide wholesale to providers that request it, which is very slim because of Telus' desire for control of network access and bandwidth.
Now fiber is a much different issue and will not be addressed until the major telco and cable companies start looking at fiber to the home.