Broadband plan an indictment of CRTC delays
Over a third of Toronto homes worried about paying internet bills
The City of Toronto’s executive committee is meeting Jan. 27 to discuss the building of a municipal fibre broadband network to address internet affordability problems in Canada’s biggest metropolis. City council is then scheduled to hear the proposal on Feb. 2.
To be sure, action on affordability is urgently needed. A recent report by the Brookfield Institute at Ryerson University found that more than a third of households in Toronto are worried about paying their home internet bills over the next few months. More than half of the city’s low-income households also have download speeds below the national target of 50 megabits per second.
These are big problems at the best of times, but even more so now as the pandemic has made super-fast, affordable internet a necessity for education, work and health care.
According to a proposal from Toronto’s chief technology officer, the city would run its network on a wholesale basis — effectively providing the pipes over which qualified internet service providers (ISPs) could sell super-fast services to end users.
By controlling the wholesale rates and enabling competition between ISPs, the city would ensure affordable internet by taking the power to set consumer prices out of the hands of Bell and Rogers.
It’s an intriguing and laudable plan, but it will be costly and take years to implement. Better, faster options for getting lower-priced internet already exist.
The fact that Toronto is even considering building its own network to ensure affordable pricing for an essential utility is a shameful indictment of the regulatory delay in putting these options in place at the federal level.
Under existing CRTC regulations, Bell and Rogers are in fact already required to sell wholesale network access to TekSavvy and other independent ISPs. After years of review, the CRTC determined the wholesale rates Bell and Rogers charge are far too high.
In August 2019, the regulator ordered the big companies to significantly lower those rates, which would have led to lower consumer prices from indie ISPs and correspondingly from Bell and Rogers as well, as they would be forced to compete.
But the big companies launched a wave of appeals, including one to the CRTC. Several have since been rejected, yet the regulator continues to review its own decision more than a year later. Indie ISPs and therefore end users — including millions of Torontonians — continue to pay inflated prices.
The situation is even worse when it comes to ultra-fast fibre. The CRTC ruled in 2015 that super-fast fibre also had to be made available through wholesale, but it still hasn’t set corresponding rates.
City council wrote to cabinet backing up that decision at that time, but it has been largely absent in supporting the CRTC’s order to lower wholesale rates. No one affiliated with the city has expressed concern on the public record with the continued delay of the order being implemented.
This ongoing delay should be frustrating to anyone who can’t afford a proper connection.
A city-owned fibre network that isn’t controlled by big companies is an ideal, but it will take many years and millions of dollars, at a minimum. If Toronto city councillors really want to make the internet affordable, and now, they would be better served by demanding long overdue action from the federal telecom regulator.
There is no silver bullet to internet affordability in Toronto or Canada for that matter — it will take a variety of strategies and approaches to truly lower prices and get proper connectivity to everyone who needs it.
But the CRTC’s wholesale rates order is the first, most immediate action that can be taken to make affordability a reality — not just at some indeterminate time in the future, but now.