This telecom Death Star may have a thermal exhaust port too
Certainly it would not be a stretch to say that in telecom the oligopoly has been very successful at controlling the market. All westernized democracies in the 90s deregulated telecom. Prior to that it was treated as the essential service and natural monopoly that it is, like water and electricity. It was through mandated universal service everyone received telephone service based on the principle that a telephone had become an essential service. These telecommunications acts transferred enormous amounts of wealth to a very few executives and shareholders from ratepayers and taxpayers who had funded the building of these monopolies. It’s no coincidence, that the Telecommunications Act, 1993, in Canada has very similar or the same language as the act in the US and other acts in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, etc. The reason is, these acts were written by lobbyists or proxies for the large telecom incumbents who colluded together on the premise that by banding together it would be easier to convince their native governments to go along with tide or be left behind their peer nations who were all deregulating, i.e., to keep up with the Joneses. That is how the idea of “facilities-based competition” became the standard model in every westernized country at the same time. Facilities-based competition sounds good because it suggests there will be more facilities-based competitors, but what it really means, is the barrier to competition is virtually insurmountable for new entrants, because the marginal cost for new entrants to build new facilities is very high while the marginal cost of incumbents to expand or upgrade their facilities is relatively very low. And because the CRTC and ISED have consistently backed the large incumbents in disputes with small providers, big telecom can’t lose. Consequently, large incumbents in Canada have about 95% of all wireline circuits, 99% of all fibre optic circuits and 100% of all mobility circuits today…28 years after deregulation was supposed to spur competition.
Nobody would support facilities-based competition in water, electricity, gas or roads; all essential services and natural monopolies, but many governments have either been hoodwinked into believing that facilities-based competition is the ONLY way to provide telecom or they are complicit in the grift. The answer is to do what many nations have done, such as New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, The Netherlands, Spain, etc., and that is to discard the idea of facilities-based competition in favour of structural separation between wholesale and retail telecom. This eliminates the inherent conflict of interest of vertically integrated telecoms like Bell and the resulting price and non-price anticompetitive behaviours. The wholesale provider(s) are mandated and subsidized to provide universal FTTP and strictly prohibited from providing retail services. This allows retail providers to flourish because the livelihood of the wholesaler depends on it. Retailers can then compete on a level playing field unencumbered by anti-competitive behaviours of the wholesale facilities owner. More competition leads to better services and lower rates for consumers.
The advent of the structurally separated model is an acknowledgement that Internet, like the telephone before it, is an essential service. Therefore, every citizen must have equal access to it. So, by providing universal FTTP every Canadian would have equitable access to the Internet and connectivity will cease to be a barrier to one’s ability to equally participate in and benefit from our society and economy.