[High prices for substandard services have made Canadian telcos one of the most profitable in the world, second to Portugal.]
[One way to create more access is to take advantage of unused fiber-optic infrastructure known as "dark fiber" that already exists in municipal buildings.]
[A communications scholar proposed merging the postal service and the public broadcaster to create a "communications corporation" that advances open access, public Wi-Fi, rural broadband, funding for public art and culture.]
[Chatanooga's electricity company incorporated fiber optic communications into their power grid and transformed themselves into an ISP that delivered faster speeds at half the cost of private companies, with the added benefit of generating revenue for the city and providing discounts to low-income residents.]
[After rapidly obtaining nearly half the marketshare in the area, their competitive offerings forced the other telcos to upgrade their infrastructure and lower costs.]
[Provincially-owned telecoms company SaskTel provides such competitive rates on mobile data in Saskatchewan that there is actually a black market in Ontario for plans from that province.]
[A group of carriers operating in the same way essentially functions as a monopoly, and should be dealt with as such.]
[Canada has] some of the highest levels of wireless investment coupled with the shabbiest coverage.
[When oligopolies control the industry, there is little pressure for them to innovate and develop the network. The UK has addressed this problem by regulating a separation between infrastructure providers and retail vendors, thereby enabling competition and more access.]
[Telus, Bell, and Vidéotron originated from publicly-owned telcos or large government investment.]
[Monopolistic actors like Google and Facebook provide insufficient control over how your personal data is collected, used and accessed. A regulated version of either would, for example, provide controls for data sharing to disallow military-related analysis and allow broadcasting one's location to improve public transport.]
[Neighbourhoods and cities should be able to set defaults for centralized services to better serve the interests of their communities.]
[There should be user-friendly tools that enable ordinary people to charge for or profit from the sharing of their data when it is used in for-profit applications.]
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