By Harold Phillips | March 2026
Last November, I was helping my cousin set up internet at her new apartment in Mississauga. She'd just moved from Berlin, where she'd been paying €25 a month for symmetrical gigabit fibre. We pulled up Rogers and Bell together. I watched her face cycle through confusion, then disbelief, then that flat look people get when they've decided to just accept something terrible. We found her a TekSavvy plan at $65 a month for 500 Mbps. She called it "not terrible." I tried to explain that, for Canada, it actually wasn't.
Canadian internet is expensive. Not "slightly more than ideal" expensive. Genuinely, embarrassingly, internationally-documented expensive. We pay more per megabit than most of the developed world, we get less infrastructure investment than comparable countries, and every few years there's a regulatory hearing that generates press releases and changes almost nothing. This has been going on for decades. At some point, "the market will fix it" stops being optimism and starts being a punchline.
The Problem
We have three big providers — Rogers, Bell, and Telus — who collectively control the vast majority of the country's internet infrastructure. They built those networks decades ago, often with public subsidies and spectrum licences that cost a fraction of what they'd cost today. That infrastructure is now the moat. If you want to offer internet to Canadians, you either own a piece of that infrastructure or you lease it from someone who does.
The CRTC is supposed to regulate that lease process. The theory is that smaller independent ISPs can buy wholesale access to the Big Three's networks and offer competitive prices. TekSavvy, Distributel, Vmedia. That's the model. And it works, sort of, in the sense that you can pay less by using an indie ISP than by going direct to Rogers or Bell. But the wholesale rates are set by the CRTC, and the CRTC has spent years flip-flopping on what those rates should actually be.
In 2019, the CRTC issued lower wholesale rates that would have made independent ISPs meaningfully cheaper. Then, in 2021, they reversed course. The big providers appealed, the government sent it back for review, and the whole thing dragged on. The indie ISPs that had expanded based on the 2019 rates had to walk back pricing. Some didn't survive.
That's the problem in a sentence: the people who set the rules keep changing the rules in ways that favour the people who own the infrastructure.
My Take
Here's the thing. I don't actually buy the "Canada is big and cold and infrastructure is expensive" argument. Not fully.
Yes, geographic density matters. Stringing fibre to 50 farms spread across 200 kilometres of northern Ontario is harder than wiring a European city. I get that. But when you look at countries like Australia, which has similar density challenges and a similar history of privatised telecoms, they managed to build a national broadband network with mandatory wholesale access. It wasn't perfect (the NBN rollout had real problems) but the political will existed to treat internet as infrastructure. Here, it doesn't.
The density argument also falls apart when you look at Canadian cities. Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver. These are dense, urban markets. Rogers and Bell have no geography excuse in the 416. And yet here we are, paying $90 a month for 1 Gbps when you can get that for a fraction of the cost in comparable US cities, let alone European ones.
I'll be real with you: I think this is a regulatory capture story dressed up as a geography story. The Big Three have spent decades and considerable money making sure the rules favour their position. That's not a conspiracy. It's just how large incumbents work. They hire the same people who used to work at the CRTC. They fund the think tanks. They commission the economic reports that say wholesale access would "reduce network investment." The independent research mostly says the opposite. But that research doesn't have a lobbying budget.
What I've Seen
I was paying $89 a month to Rogers for 500 Mbps until late 2022. I'd been on that plan for three years. Hadn't checked prices in a while. Hadn't thought about it.
Then one Sunday I got one of those "your bill is increasing by $5 next month" emails. I opened it, looked at my bill, and realized I'd been on autopilot so long I'd just assumed this was what internet cost. I spent about an hour comparing plans and switched to TekSavvy at $60 a month for the same speed. My partner thought I was overreacting when I was visibly annoyed about it ("it's $29 a month, Harold") but that's $348 a year. And I'd already been overpaying for three years. Do that math and it's over a thousand dollars in fees for what, exactly. The right to pay Rogers directly.
The switch itself was completely uneventful. The speeds are identical. TekSavvy uses Rogers infrastructure in Toronto anyway. I'm literally on the same physical network. The only thing that changed is I'm not paying Rogers' margin on top of the wholesale cost.
That's the part that actually gets to me. There's nothing special about Rogers internet. They didn't build a better network for residential customers — they built the network and then charged whatever they wanted because there wasn't meaningful competition. When a regulated wholesale option forced prices down, they appealed the decision. And they mostly won.
The Other Side
The counterargument you'll hear from the Big Three (and from some economists who study telecoms) is that capping wholesale rates reduces the incentive to invest in new infrastructure. If Rogers knows that any fibre it builds can immediately be resold by TekSavvy at regulated rates, why build more?
It's a real tension. I'm not going to pretend it isn't.
But I'd push back on a few things. First, the Big Three haven't historically underinvested in infrastructure when required to provide wholesale access. They've continued to expand networks because they need to remain competitive in the business and enterprise markets regardless of what happens in residential. Second, in countries with strong wholesale access mandates, you tend to see more infrastructure investment over the long run, not less, because competition forces everyone to keep up.
And third, honestly, these are not companies that need our sympathy. Rogers posted billions in profit in 2024. Bell has returned enormous value to shareholders while cutting thousands of jobs. Telus keeps raising residential prices while expanding into agriculture tech and home security. These aren't scrappy startups looking for capital to build out their networks. They're entrenched incumbents protecting margin.
I'm not saying the solution is simple. I'm saying "but what about their investment incentives" is not a persuasive reason to keep paying $90 a month for internet that costs half that in comparable markets.
Where This Leaves Us
My cousin is still on TekSavvy. She's stopped complaining about the price. Or rather, she's moved on to asking me about the Rogers-Shaw merger and what it means for competition in Ontario long-term, which is a longer conversation than I want to have on a weeknight.
Practically speaking: if you're on a plan from one of the Big Three, check what the indie ISPs in your area are charging. TekSavvy, Vmedia, Distributel: availability depends on where you live, but in most Ontario and Quebec markets there's something. You'll often get the same speeds on the same physical infrastructure for meaningfully less. The savings aren't dramatic in every case, but $29 a month adds up, and you're not getting anything extra by paying it to Rogers.
The systemic problem isn't going anywhere fast. The CRTC will keep being a battleground. The Big Three will keep funding the argument that they need protection to invest in Canada's future. The government will keep announcing broadband strategies that take longer to ship than promised.
I don't have a policy prescription here. I'm an IT project manager, not a regulator. But I do know that "this is just how things are in Canada" gets said about a lot of things that used to be different and could be different again. The internet is infrastructure. Most of us treat it that way in practice. We'd sooner give up cable TV than our home connection. It's past time the policy caught up.
It just hasn't yet.
This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience and observations. Telecom pricing, ISP availability, and regulatory decisions change frequently, so do your own research before switching providers.