Access to affordable high-speed internet is foundational to Canada’s economy, innovation, and everyday life. When the CRTC issued Telecom Regulatory Policy 2024-180, extending wholesale access to incumbent fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) networks nationwide—allowing competitors to serve customers outside their traditional territories—it sparked debate about how the framework would affect prices, competition, and investment. The policy faces continued legal challenge and remains actively debated, making a rigorous economic analysis critical to informed policy discussions.

A NERA team led by Senior Managing Director Christian M. Dippon was retained by TELUS Communications Inc. to measure the causal effect of the CRTC’s FTTP wholesale access framework on consumer broadband prices. The analysis leveraged a natural experiment created by Telecom Decision 2023-358, which implemented interim wholesale FTTP access in Ontario and Quebec ahead of the policy’s national rollout. The NERA team, which included Senior Consultants Dirk van Leeuwen and Erdem Yenerdag, Consultant Shih-Wen Liu, researchers Casey Chong and Jason Sabatelle, applied advanced causal-inference techniques—a synthetic difference-in-differences approach—to Statistics Canada’s provincial Internet Access Services CPI. This method constructed counterfactual CPI paths that closely mirrored pre-policy trends for each affected province, allowing the team to isolate policy impacts from broader market forces.

The results showed the CRTC’s FTTP wholesale access framework reduced the broadband price levels from what they otherwise would have been by approximately 8% in Ontario and 11% in Quebec between ​​November 2023 and August 2024. These results are statistically significant, economically meaningful, robust across alternative specifications, and are corroborated by observed incumbent price reductions and service upgrades during the study window. Taken together, the findings provide clear empirical evidence that the CRTC’s FTTP wholesale access framework enhanced competition and improved affordability for consumers in Ontario and Quebec, offering a timely, fact-based contribution to the national policy discussion following Telecom Regulatory Policy 2024-180.

Beyond the telecommunication markets, the techniques developed for this study are broadly applicable to other sectors in which regulatory changes, market access, or competition policy are under review. They provide policymakers and industry participants with a rigorous framework to quantify causal impacts on pressing topics across the economy.