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.
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.
Oh shit, not good. They’ve been the one bright spot in a sea of ISP bleakness.
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’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.
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.
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.
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
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.
