Though I don’t know the details, the Canadian government seems to require internet service providers to allow other vendors to resell access on their networks. For example, here on Prince Edward Island, Bell and Eastlink have the infrastructure to get internet access to homes in the form of actual cable and fiber-optic lines. There are other ISPs that sell home internet access, but under the surface, they’re just relabelling service on Bell or Eastlink networks.

I had been using Eastlink for home internet, mostly for historical reasons. As of January 2021, Eastlink’s least expensive home internet plan is $100.95/month before tax (100Mbps down, ~10mbps up).

City Wide Communications resells this same level of service (on the same infrastructure) for $54.95/month. A savings of $46/month

It is worth noting that Eastlink offers this $100.95/month service at a rate of $79.95/month for the first 12 months. I try to ignore any kind of “introductory offers”, as I end up with services like this for many years. Also, the City Wide service is still $25/month less than this introductory rate.

I was a bit skeptical of switching, as the inconvenience of any administrative overhead or the headache of switching just isn’t worth it for me. That said, saving over $500/year was enough for me to try it out.

It has been four months since I switched from Eastlink to City Wide. I’m happy to report that the switch was easy, and the level of service has remained the same.

On another note, I also switched our ‘landline’ home phone from Eastlink to City Wide. This was also much cheaper, but with the caveat that with Eastlink, it’s an actual wired home phone setup, while City Wide offers a voice-over-IP service over the internet. In theory, they should work identically, but the ye-olde phone network feels more stable to me.

I did run into issues with my VOIP service on City Wide were a few times when the VOIP home phone box would disconnect and fail silently. We wouldn’t notice until we tried to make a call, and then we’d realize no one could call us for who-knows-how-long. This happened on-and-off for a few weeks, but just before I got annoyed enough to contact their customer service, the issue went away and has been stable for several months now.

I hope more people learn about these resellers, if only to drive down the rates of the established providers. I’d be happy to be a customer of Eastlink or Bell, but I’m not going to pay double for it.