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I’ve been with Teksavvy for nearly 15 years. This is a sad, sad day.
Same. They’re not just an ISP. They’re strong consumer advocates, bordering on activists. This is terrible.
I’ve been with Start dot CA for a few years and following their sale to Telus, I’ve been seriously considering switching to Teksavvy. This is tragic. Are there any good ones left? Our country is about to have literally no options apart from the big three.
Not any big ones. Maybe locally to you.
I’ve been with Lightspeed for years. They’re based in Burnaby though, so I don’t know if they are available Canada wide.
I use Coextro. Just some small company operating out of Mississauga. I wouldn’t call them amazing, but they try their best. At the end of the day they are really still at the mercy of Bell or Rogers (depending on if you go dsl or cable). They are smaller so they are likely a bit safer for now from being consumed by the duopoly.
I remember when the CRTC lowered costs that the resellers would have to pay the Big 3, and Teksavvy lowered their prices as a result.
Oh shit, not good. They’ve been the one bright spot in a sea of ISP bleakness.
I’ve been with them for nearly 10 years now. Stuck with them out of principle even though the speed/price weren’t as good as I could get elsewhere.
This seriously sucks, I’m so tired of a small handful of corporations owning every aspect of my life.
I was a big Teksavvy fan. Sooner or later though I had enough of their pricing. Beetween 1.5x to 2.0x for the same package compared to other independant ressellers. I guess I wasn’t loyal enough.
There are other independent resellers? I think Teksavvy was the last one, and I was sticking with them to support them, because they have been good for me for 18 years.
Rogers keeps sending people to the door. I keep telling them I have a rule, which is NEVER ROGERS, after my experiences with their customer support.
Depends on where you are. There is CanCom which is a distriputel? I think distributor. When I had them their customer support was excellent but believe only available in the west.
I used to be on Distributel proper, not as bad customer support as Rogers but it was pretty bad. Currently with Coextro (I know nothing of their corporate structure though) and their customer support has been as good as Teksavvy’s in my experience.
I’ve been with Lightspeed for years. When I did my research, there were lots. The issue will be that Teksavvy was the largest, and took on a bit of a leading role in advocating for cheaper Internet access in Canada.
A lot of the smaller resellers tend to be fairly local as well.
Their pricing was forced on them by the CRTC raising the rates independent ISPs have to pay the big 3 for wholesale services. CRTC must have known this would drive independent ISPs out of business, but they did it anyway. They seem to serve the big corporations, not the people of Canada.
Now we know why. The other resellers were either running at a loss, trying to get subs while looking to get acquired by ROBeLUS, or they were already owned by ROBeLUS and so had dramatically lower costs as a result. These are some strategies for killing a competitor.
TekSavvy is the last remaining large internet wholesale provider, as others have been snapped up by bigger rivals in what independent ISPs describe as a challenging regulatory environment.
Roughly half a dozen independent ISPs have been sold since February of 2022. According to BMO Capital Markets analyst Tim Casey, BCE Inc. paid roughly $139-million for Ebox, an internet, telephone and television service provider based in Longueuil, Que., and approximately $335-million for Ottawa-based Distributel last year.
Telus, meanwhile, acquired Altima Telecom and Start.ca for undisclosed amounts, while Quebecor Inc. snapped up VMedia, an independent internet and television provider serving customers primarily in Toronto, in July of 2022. The price of the VMedia acquisition was also not disclosed.
Montreal-based Cogeco Inc., meanwhile, paid $100-million for Oxio, a Montreal-based provider with 48,000 internet subscribers, Mr. Casey wrote in a research note…
🤦🤦♀️🤦🏼♂️
Sent an email to my MP. This is a competition issue similar to the Shaw sale to Rogers and the feds should get involved. You should do the same.
It’s astonishing how few independent telecom providers there are now
Now we know how these competitors were able to offer cheaper deals than TekSavvy for the last couple of years. They were all acquired and their costs are now dramatically lower as a result of not having to pay wholesale costs.
The CRTC has been doing a fine job of driving small ISPs out of business and keeping the market closed to all but the biggest established players.
After lowering rates in 2019, which immediately sparked lower internet prices across the country, the CRTC then astonishingly reversed its own decision and raised them back up again in 2021. And 8 years after saying they’d grant wholesale access to state-of-the-art fibre technology, it’s still not available to independent providers. Which means smaller ISPs simply can’t compete against those faster connections of the incumbents.
Ian Scott was a Telus exec after all.
Minister Champagne always talks about how he wants ample competition, but we’ve yet to see any actual effective effort.
This might be a catalyst to a something being done. I sure hope so at least.
Because none are independent. Reselling someone else’s network isn’t really a great position to be in.
Ugh, this is so discouraging. I’m a big fan of Internet Lightspeed as an independent ISP (Vancouver area). I haven’t seen news of a buy-out for them yet, and I hope I never do.
Why the fuck does the government keep allowing competition to be snapped up by the big 3???
Rhetorical question i guess… But wtf. Do your job… Where are the antitrust regulations in this country? I am not a lawyer
Canada loves it’s monopolies. I can’t believe that Shaw deal went through – the government literally will not allow us to have more than 3 telecommunications companies. It’s ridiculous.
For context, remember that the Competition Bureau tried to block the Rogers-Shaw merger and was overridden by the courts. So continuing consolidation is a problem that won’t be fixed easily.
Canada was literally, actually, no shit created by corporations for the purpose of facilitating the extraction of value from human and natural resources by corporations. It genuinely exists to exploit us.
Hudson’s Bay Company remembers
IIRC they owned most of not all of the land from Hudson’s Bay down to, if not including central Ontario, Toronto & Ottawa etc
This is awful. TekSavvy was a strong advocate for positive change in a terrible, entrenched market, and the entire landscape is going to be worse without them. I guess at this point I hope that we see more municipal broadband efforts like in Olds, Alberta, though I fear that I’m never going to see something like that in any major cities.
Here’s a non-paywall link: https://archive.is/qfn4r
We were Teksavvy subscribers for 10 years but switched to Bell Fibe last year…all Teksavvy had here was 6 Mbps DSL with a lousy 720 Kbps upload speed. Felt bad because I liked them but needed better internet for today’s demands. CRTC screwed them.
It sucks because my community is still stuck on 100Mbps per second as the max over DSL unless we get cable internet. We have been back and forth between both DSL and cable and find we have issues on both regardless of the provider, router, or modem. At this point I feel like the lines to our neighbourhood/house are just so old and flakey and struggle to handle peak internet usage times. It just feels ridiculous though because there is fibre lines at the end of the street as those lines provide fibre access to the new communities.
These companies have no incentive to upgrade/maintain things beyond their initial installations because they control the market. Third party providers can only do so much when things don’t work. All they can do is essentially put in a ticket with Bell or Rogers and tell them to fix it. And Bell or Rogers uses their contracted workers to say “yeah looks fine to me” and calls it a day.
I’m getting quite sick of the CRTC not doing anything and not stepping in as much as they should be. I also don’t like that I see things like the Bell chairman in private undisclosed meetings with the CRTC. Overall it just seems like corruption runs deep. I guess I’m not really surprised anymore.
CRTC screwed them but they treat their loyal customers EXACTLY like the big three. They fuck us.
Right now new customers can save $400 a year compared to what I was paying for what most consider slow internet (40mbps down and 10 up). There was also an ACT NOW BEFORE ITS TOO LATE offer when I checked, less than two days left to snag a 100mbps plan for the price of a 40mbps one.
Literally no incentive to stay with a provider and be loyal, and all the incentive to hop around or threaten to hop around so that you get these secret special plans that they only pull out as a last resort
This is a very sad day.
Okay, who’s in to form a co-op and buy them?
You have my sword. I don’t have a lot more than that to offer though. And the sword is just a metaphor.
Canada needs co-ops and Canada needs public access to communication networks. Is there a lawyer in the thread?
Even if we did that, it will still die without a drastic change in costs from the CRTC.
Regional co-ops (or regional branches of a national co-op) could provide wireless internet. It’s not ideal but if a person is not willing to accept Rogers, Bell or Telus, it could be acceptable.
Totally. But this is very different from buying TekSavvy. TekSavvy serves the vast majority of their customers via ROBeLUS’es last mile infrastructure. They can’t do that via regional wireless and so whoever buys them will have to keep paying ROBeLUS. If they can’t break even at this point, a new owner such as a co-op will have the same problem. The only owner that won’t is ROBeLUS. The only solution to this conundrum is federal intervention via CRTC, Industry Canada or the government itself. My guess we’ll hear from Jagmeet first.
Oh god no, I don’t think the suggestion is we should form a co-op that buys TekSavvy. I can think of a lot of reasons that’s impractical. But I think there is realistically a space for Internet co-ops to be viable for some parts of Canada, if not universally.
who’s in to form a co-op and buy them?
dang, nvm. *puts sword away*
Rogere, Bell and Telus
I had Rogshaw come to the door yesterday pushing their merger high-speed promo. Hopefully Teksavvy doesn’t get gobbled up by the three-headed Robelus. Sad day indeed.
Not going to be long until we see the return of tiny data caps with more frequent price increases.
This is a very sad news. I was rooting for them to be the last standing ISP that’s not part of the big tech.
What industry turmoil?
TekSavvy is the last remaining large internet wholesale provider, as others have been snapped up by bigger rivals in what independent ISPs describe as a challenging regulatory environment.
Roughly half a dozen independent ISPs have been sold since February of 2022From the article
Personally I wouldn’t call that turmoil. I’d call it industry consolidation.
Consolidation can be tumultuous; but I’m just citing the article. They go into much further depth about the situation.
the only turnmoil is the TPIA. When the wholesale rate (regulated by the CRTC) is higher than the retail rate…
But the corruption of our Government[1] is right in our face.
[1] it’s corruption, not incompetent. Also it is pan-partisan. Whichever would be at the helm would be paid for by the telecartel.
I’ve really enjoyed my time with TekSavvy. My wife - then fiance - told me about them when I moved into our new place before her when I was comparing internet prices from the “Big 3”. Their front facing disdain for the monopolization and lobbying of telecom in Canada was fascinating to see and made me a big fan, alongside their competitive pricing and good service as well. Although it’s only been just over a year I’m really going to miss them if they change everything/are bought out. Hoping for the best here but it is looking grim.
Oh man you missed them in their glory days. They would pressure the big three, prices were lowered, and they gave that back to us customers. They emailed us telling our plans were getting cheaper, faster, or both!
Now they’re just the diet coke of the big three. They offer the same crap that all the other ones do - nothing for loyal customers but like over $400 off for newer customers, limited time offers for even faster and cheaper plans…
It’s all shit. You hop from service to service, or you tell them you’re going to do that and all of a sudden they offer you amazing plans to get you to stay.
Teksavvy will literally throttle your speeds if you’re late on your bill, without warning, days before they initially told you they were going to cut you off. This ruined my plans to download a few things before I was stuck offline. This forced me to use up all of my full speed mobile data (another thing that most developed countries don’t have and scoff at, data caps). Then you gotta argue with them to NOT have to pay for services that were not provided/withheld.
That sucks. Long time Teksaavy customer.
One would think that the current Liberal CRTC would be better at maintaining competition than the previous Conservative CRTC, and yet here we are. start.ca is now telus, and teksavvy is soon to be… Rogers? Bell? Viacom?
Fuck it, bring on Starlink!It’s sad when I could likely get faster and more reliable internet connected to a satellite than over cables hooked directly to my house. You’d think living in a more major city in a sprawling suburban residential area would get you reasonably reliable internet, but not even that is the case. Is it too much to ask CRTC to allow some competition?!?!
Now, would I rather give money to Bell/Rogers/Telus or to Elon Musk? Damn, that’s not an easy choice.
One would think, except politics is a farce these days, both sides of the coin are corrupt as hell. Pierre Trudeau probably rolling in his grave
