CRTC Final Fibre Rates End Independent Internet Competition for Consumers in Canada

The Competitive Network Operators of Canada (CNOC) today said the CRTC’s final wholesale fibre-to-the-premises rates, released this morning in Telecom Order CRTC 2026-77, will end meaningful consumer Internet competition in Canada. The decision closes out a five-year decline that has already cost Canadian households half of their independent Internet choices.

According to the CRTC’s own Canadian Telecommunications Market Report 2025, independent wholesale-based Internet providers saw their share of the Canadian market fall from 8.4 per cent in 2020 to 4.2 per cent in 2024 — a halving in four years. Over the same period, Bell acquired EBOX and Distributel (with its Primus and Acanac brands); TELUS acquired Start.ca and Altima Telecom; Videotron acquired VMedia. The wholesale rates finalized today, CNOC said, will not reverse that trajectory. They will complete it.

“These rates end independent competition in Canada’s consumer Internet market. Bell and TELUS now face no serious pressure on price — and every Canadian household will feel that on every monthly bill, for years to come. The government asked the CRTC for affordable competition. It delivered the opposite.” — Paul Andersen, President and Chair, CNOC

Andersen noted that the federal government’s 2023 Policy Direction required the CRTC to reduce barriers to entry for new, regional and smaller Internet providers. The Commission has spent the years since overseeing the halving of that sector, and today’s rates continue the trajectory.

The CRTC claims today’s rates will deliver new choices for up to 8.5 million Canadian households. But its own order shows that figure rests almost entirely on Bell and TELUS entering each other’s out-of-territory markets — not on independent competitors gaining ground. Since the framework took effect, TELUS has used wholesale access to sell fibre Internet on a limited basis on Bell’s network in Ontario and Quebec, and Bell has indicated it intends to do the same on TELUS’s network in Alberta and British Columbia. The only competition it enables between Bell and TELUS is out-of-territory — two of the country’s largest carriers reshuffling the same concentrated market between themselves. And at the rates released today, it is not clear either company will find the business case to sustain even the limited activity the Commission has been relying on as evidence its framework is working.

The Commission’s entire framework is a gamble on two incumbents — while ignoring the independent providers that those same incumbents have acknowledged, on the record, as the source of pricing pressure in the market.

CNOC is disappointed that the Commission did not test its rates against market costs. Incumbent flanker brands like Bell’s eBox already sell fibre Internet at retail prices nearly 40 per cent below what the CRTC’s final wholesale rate alone would cost an independent provider — before an independent provider adds a single dollar of its own costs. Canadian households already struggling with the cost of groceries, housing and energy cannot afford to lose the only competitive pressure that keeps Internet prices in check.

Telecom Order CRTC 2026-77 is the third attempt in a decade by the CRTC to establish a workable wholesale rate regime for consumer Internet competition. The first two never produced meaningful subscribers. The current proceeding took three years, more than 300 participants and a week-long public hearing. The CRTC’s own news release describes today’s final rates as “similar to” the interim rates already in use — rates under which independent market share continued to fall. The wholesale access rate for Bell Canada in Ontario and Quebec — the country’s largest fibre footprint — moves by less than one per cent from the interim rate set in October 2024. At the same time, independents face a shrinking addressable market as cable companies roll out their own fibre — and numerous other wholesale rates remain outstanding. Three regulatory attempts in ten years have failed to deliver competition. Canadians will now be paying the price.