Before you sign for fibre, read the exit clause

If you have an @nrtco.net email address, read this first. NRTC’s email system transmits your password across the internet unencrypted — not just on the webmail page, but on every way of accessing your mail that exists. I reported this to them on April 27, offered to fix it for free, and re-checked it this morning: unchanged, 109 days later. Change any password you have reused anywhere else, starting with your bank. The details, and what you can and can’t do about it, are in the part that actually worries me. Everything below that is about contracts, and can wait.

This is long, because it’s the documentation as much as the story. A word on the order: I noticed the email problem first, back in April, and told them about it then — but at that point I only knew that their website and webmail login weren’t protected. It was months later, while all the contract business below was going on, that I looked properly and found how far it actually went. So it’s covered last here, in full, even though it’s where this started. Three findings:

The exit clause, and why nothing stops it. Cancelling a 3-year business contract with NRTC early means paying every remaining month in full — about $3,300 at month six, for service you no longer receive. Their residential customers paid a flat $100 for the same thing, until that figure was removed from the contract in July. Neither side has a stated ceiling now. Getting anyone to confirm in writing that this clause even applied to me took five days and an escalation through their entire complaints process. And the CRTC’s new fee rules, which I assumed protected me, turn out not to cover small business Internet customers or providers this size at all. → What that sentence costs, It took five days

They amended the Terms while I was asking about them. That document had not changed in eight years — the Internet Archive confirms it. Between July 23 and July 27, while I was asking what the commercial exit clause meant, it was edited. The residential half of that clause was brought into line with the CRTC’s new fee rules. The commercial half, the uncapped one, was left untouched — sitting directly between the only two edits made anywhere in the document. In the same window, their general manager told me the CRTC’s rules “don’t apply to us.” → They amended those Terms that week

The email system, which is the part that matters most. Covered above, and in full below. I’ve filed on the fee question with the CRTC, on the public record; the Privacy Commissioner declined to look at the email one, on a technicality I’ll come to. → The part that actually worries me

The offer

In July I asked NRTC Communications (North Renfrew Telephone Company Limited, Beachburg, Ontario) about gigabit fibre for my software business. The quote: $109.95/month on a 3-year term, with a $129.95 installation charge “waived with the completion of the 3-year term.” Same speed month-to-month: $199.95.

Reasonable-looking numbers. Then I read NRTC’s published Terms of Service, which at the time carried the footer “TOS Revised June 2018,” and found this in the early-termination section:

“Commercial customers agree to pay the remaining charges for their commitment period.”

What that sentence costs

That one sentence means the cancellation fee is everything you would have paid anyway, for service you no longer receive:

Cancel at	Remaining months	You owe
Month 6	30	~$3,300
Month 12	24	~$2,640
Month 24	12	~$1,320
Month 35	1	~$110

Nobody plans to cancel. But life happens — you move, the business changes, a better option arrives. A clause like this means the “discounted” term rate is priced with a lock on the exit door.

For contrast, under the Terms in force when I was quoted: NRTC’s residential early-termination fee was a flat $100 per service. Same fibre, same speed, same $109.95 — the business version simply carried thirty times the exit liability. Hold that comparison in mind. It gets worse, and I’ll come back to it.

Which raises a fair question: if the speed and the price are identical, what does the business tier actually buy? I asked. The answer:

“Response time to service interruptions, equipment replacements and customer-premise repairs are prioritized for businesses, including weekends.”

Priority in the repair queue — a genuine benefit, and I don’t want to be sniffy about it. When your income depends on the connection, a same-day fix is worth paying for, and I’d have paid gladly. But look at the trade whole: same fibre, same monthly price, and what distinguishes the business product is queue position. For that you accept a three-year lock and an exit liability roughly thirty times larger.

And it has an edge worth naming. There is cable out here — I’m on it — so nobody is trapped, exactly. But a residential customer sitting in NRTC’s repair queue can’t buy their way up it, and the only alternative on offer is switching to a different technology from a different company, which is a rather larger decision than wanting today’s outage fixed sooner. I’m not going to pretend tiered response is unusual; it’s how the entire industry works, and NRTC would be odd for not doing it. I’d only observe that a priority queue means more where the alternatives are thin, and that the people at the back of it tend to be the ones with the fewest of them.

The second trap: the renewal cliff

I also asked what happens at month 37. Answer, confirmed by the general manager: the rate goes to the $199.95 month-to-month price — unless you sign another 3-year contract. There is no neutral outcome. Forget to renegotiate in the right window and your bill jumps more than 80%; remember, and you’re locked for another three years. Put a calendar reminder at month 33 on any contract like this.

The installation fee and the CRTC’s new rules

Here’s where it stops being just a hard bargain and becomes a regulatory question — though not the one I thought I was asking.

As of June 12, 2026, the CRTC prohibits fees for activating or modifying a service plan (Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2026-43, implementing s. 27.04 of the Telecommunications Act). The only exception is “reasonable fees related to the physical installation of a telecommunications service at a customer’s premises.” That exception is the whole ballgame, so hold onto it.

The installation charge I was quoted, in the sales office’s own written words, “is not only for the site visit but also includes the cost of administration, network programming and equipment programming.” Administration and network programming are activation costs by any ordinary reading of those words — and, as I’ll come to, my premises already had a live fibre terminal bolted to the wall.

When I raised the CRTC policy in writing — three times — it was never addressed. When I finally spoke with the general manager, NRTC’s position was stated directly:

“We’re well aware of what the CRTC is doing all the time, and we believe that this doesn’t apply to us … It does in the wireless industry. You know, I’m gonna stand by that.”

When he said that, I thought he was simply wrong. The policy is titled “Prohibition of fees that are a barrier to switching cellphone and Internet plans,” and I said so.

He was right. I was wrong. It took me until today, checking the policy line by line before publishing this, to see it.

Read what 2026-43 actually says about who it covers:

“…the new consumer protections will apply to: individual and small business customers of mobile wireless services offered by all wireless service providers; and individual customers of home Internet services offered by Internet service providers that are subject to the Internet Code.”

Two limbs, and they are not the same size. For mobile wireless: every provider, and small businesses included. For home Internet: only providers already bound by the Internet Code — the ten named when it was made in 2019: Bell, Rogers, Shaw, TELUS, Cogeco, Eastlink, Videotron, SaskTel, Northwestel and Xplornet, now nine since Rogers absorbed Shaw — and only individual customers.

NRTC is not on that list. I was asking as a small business. I was outside the protection twice over, and the general manager’s answer was not evasion. It was an accurate statement of where the rules stop. “It does in the wireless industry” is, if anything, an unusually precise description of the split.

So the honest version of this story is not that NRTC broke a rule. It’s that the rule doesn’t reach them, and it doesn’t reach me, and a company can therefore quote a small business an uncapped exit clause and a fee that includes admin and network programming and be entirely within its rights — six weeks after Canada banned exactly that everywhere the rules happen to reach.

That’s a worse story than the one I set out to write.

What the exemption actually permits

If you want to see the size of the gap, don’t look at my business quote. Look at what NRTC advertises to households, on the page where it sells the service, today:

“Installation and activation is currently waived with a 24-month contract ($349.00 savings)”

Read that against the rule. It’s a charge for “installation and activation” — the second word being the exact thing 2026-43 prohibits. It isn’t waived at installation; it’s waived against a 24-month commitment. And it’s aimed at residential customers — individual customers of home Internet, precisely the class the Internet rules protect.

What happens to that $349 if you cancel at month eight? The advertisement doesn’t say. What the Terms say — in the version published today, and hold onto that qualifier — is that on early termination you owe “an early termination fee for any promotion you accepted, plus any discounts that were credited under the initial agreement,” reversed and charged on a prorated basis. A waived $349 looks to me like a promotion accepted, or a discount credited, or both — in which case the waiver is recoverable, and the charge is really a sum that falls due when you leave rather than one forgiven at signing. I’d flag that as my reading of two documents put together, not something NRTC has stated. Nobody has asked them.

If NRTC were one of the nine, I don’t see how that sentence could stand. It’s an activation fee, conditioned on a term, charged to the protected class. Because NRTC isn’t one of the nine, it stands, and has stood every day the rules have been in force. The same words on the same kind of page would be unlawful at Bell and are unremarkable here.

Two things about it are worth sitting with.

The residential figure is $349 — nearly three times the $129.95 I was quoted as a business. The exemption isn’t sheltering some nominal sum, and it’s the household customer facing the bigger number. Waived, yes, if you sign for 24 months. Payable if you don’t — and, on the reading above, recoverable if you go early.

And I did ask about this at the time. On July 23 I asked, in writing, whether anything prevented me from simply taking the residential service at its listed price, and whether that price carried a term commitment. Like the self-install request, that got no answer at all.

I can’t tell you what would have happened if I’d pushed the residential route, and I want to be careful not to pretend I can — I never signed anything, so this is inference rather than evidence. But I’d note the shape of it. I offered to make the installation unnecessary, on the business side, by pointing at equipment already bolted to my house, and could not get the $129.95 discussed at all. A residential customer at this same address, with the same terminal on the same wall, would be looking at $349 and, on the evidence of my own exchange, the same silence. The equipment doesn’t get less installed because the customer changed category.

Here’s the part I find hardest to get past. When the Commission drew that line in 2019, it wasn’t arbitrary — it was reasoned. Large providers were covered because they were “more likely to offer bundles of services… offer fixed-term contracts… impose early cancellation fees, higher installation fees,” and to run “time-limited promotional offers.” Smaller providers were left out on the opposite premise. Their own industry association told the Commission that smaller ISPs “permit their customers to cancel service at any time without penalty” and have “very simple plans and pricing, with no promotional offers at any time.”

Go back and read that $349 sentence again. It is a time-limited promotional offer, conditioned on a term, from a provider whose cancellation terms are the harshest in this article. Whatever the exemption was granted to protect, it wasn’t this.

I filed anyway, on July 27, in the CRTC’s open enforcement proceeding on these rules (Telecom Notice of Consultation 2026-155, public record 1011-NOC2026-0155, cases 337859 and 337863), with NRTC’s pricing page and Terms of Service attached as exhibits.

That proceeding was paused for a fortnight while the Commission ruled on procedural requests — TELUS wanted it split in two and wanted certain Commission staff excluded; consumer groups wanted an oral hearing. On August 14 the Commission denied all of them and set new dates: interventions are open until August 31, 2026, with the companies’ final replies due in September. My filings went in before the pause and remain on the record. When the public record posts, I’ll link them here.

But that proceeding is aimed at Bell, Rogers and TELUS — the three companies the rules already bind. It is enforcement against the covered, which is necessary and is not my problem.

My problem is the gap, and it turns out the Commission already knows it’s there. In the same policy, immediately after setting out that narrow Internet scope, it wrote:

“The Commission intends to examine whether to expand the application of the Codes to other service providers as part of the Commission’s future proceeding to harmonize the Codes.”

That future proceeding exists. It is Broadcasting and Telecom Notice of Consultation 2026-134, it is running right now, and it asks — in as many words — whether Internet protections should apply to all providers including small ones, and whether they should extend to small business contracts. There is a public hearing in Gatineau on November 30.

So I’ve filed there too, today, on the last day interventions are open — not to allege a breach, but to put one documented case in front of the Commission of what the exemption produces when it meets an actual customer: a provider outside the code, a customer outside the code, and a complaints body that couldn’t take the file because I hadn’t signed the contract I was asking about.

If you have your own version of that story, from any provider, that particular door has now closed — but the enforcement proceeding above, 2026-155, takes interventions until August 31, 2026, and anyone can file in it. You don’t need a lawyer and you don’t need to be anybody’s customer. I wasn’t.

It took five days and an escalation to the end of their complaints process to get a yes-or-no answer

This is the part I’d most want a prospective customer to know, and it’s the part that’s hardest to convey from a table of numbers.

Having found that clause in their published Terms of Service, I asked the obvious question in writing on July 22. And because the Terms were dated June 2018 — eight years old, written long before the rules I was asking about existed — I offered them the charitable explanation myself, before asking:

“I suspect NRTC’s published terms simply predate the new rules — your residential fibre page still advertises installation and activation waived with a 24-month contract, and the Terms of Service on your site are dated June 2018.”

Then the question:

“Your Terms of Service state that commercial customers who cancel early ‘agree to pay the remaining charges for their commitment period.’ On a 3-year term that’s potentially over $3,000 of exposure — a lot to accept in exchange for a $129.95 waiver. Is that the clause that would apply to my agreement, and if so, is there flexibility on it or on the term length?”

I want to be clear about what I was handing them. I had given them an open door: your terms are old, I assume this is just stale, please tell me it doesn’t work the way it reads. The easiest reply in the world was available — “that clause is out of date,” or “that’s not how we apply it.” A single sentence would have closed the whole thing, kept a customer, and cost them nothing.

The reply did not say yes, and did not say no. It said:

“We offer the option of month-to-month service. The installation fee of $129.95 would be charged to the account along with a monthly rate of $199.95 for 1Gbps service. There would be no commitment period with this option and you could discontinue service at any time.”

Read that carefully. It’s a real answer to a question I hadn’t asked — here is a different product without that problem — offered in place of an answer to the one I did ask. If you’re skimming, it feels responsive. It isn’t.

That turned out to be the pattern rather than a one-off. I asked what the $129.95 installation fee actually covered, given that fibre already ran to my address; I got a description of the two general phases of fibre installation and the statement that the fee “relates to the full scope of the installation process.”

The self-install request is the one that still puzzles me, because of how it ended.

There is a fibre terminal on the outside wall of my house — a Calix ONT, installed for a previous occupant, powered, status lights on. On July 21 I asked whether, given that, I could activate the existing equipment rather than pay for a technician to come and install what was already installed. That question got a reasonable answer:

“Because service was originally installed then disconnected several years ago, we would need to confirm what equipment is present in the house at the demarcation point so I cannot confirm if a self-install would be possible.”

Fair enough. They needed to know what was on the wall. So on July 23 I told them: photographs of the unit, the model, and both serial numbers, including the FSAN serial that identifies it on their own fibre network. Those numbers are queryable from their end. Somebody could have looked up that serial and known within a minute whether the thing was provisionable.

Nothing came back. Not a yes, not a no, not “that model is too old,” not an explanation of what physical work the $129.95 covered that the powered terminal on my wall did not already represent. They asked me what equipment was present, I told them precisely, and the conversation simply stopped there. It is the only question in the whole exchange that was answered with a request for information and then abandoned once the information arrived.

The price guarantee is the one I’d single out, though, because it shows how completely a non-answer can be dressed as an answer.

I had been told the price was guaranteed for the life of the contract. Reading the Terms, I could see two provisions that appeared to undo that, so I named both and asked for the obvious fix:

“You mentioned prices are guaranteed for the life of the contract, but the Terms of Service reserve the right to change monthly charges on 30 days’ notice, and include an entire-agreement clause. Could the price guarantee be written into the service agreement itself?”

The answer:

“The term rate of $109.95/month would be guaranteed for the duration of the contract period.”

Which is another email. That is the entire problem, and it’s the problem I had just described to them.

Here is what their Terms say, and both provisions are still live today. On changing the price:

“NRTC may adjust any charges pertaining to the Services on providing no less than thirty (30) days prior written notice.”

And on what happens to promises made outside the contract:

“These Terms, and any service-specific Agreement, together with the subscription, order form or registration, where applicable, supersedes all oral or written arrangements made between the Customer and NRTC pertaining to the matters covered by this Agreement.”

Put those together. An email from the sales office saying your rate is guaranteed is an “oral or written arrangement… pertaining to the matters covered by this Agreement” — which the contract you sign expressly supersedes. Meanwhile the contract lets them change any charge on thirty days’ notice. So on a three-year commitment with a ~$3,300 exit, the price guarantee I’d been given was, by the plain operation of the document I’d be signing, worth nothing. I could have been paying more in month four with no recourse and no way out.

I want to be precise: I’m not saying NRTC intended to raise the price, and I’ve no reason to think they would have. I’m saying I asked for the one thing that would have made the promise enforceable — put it in the agreement — and was given the unenforceable version instead, twice, after explaining why it was unenforceable.

That’s worse than being told no. Being told no is information. This looked like reassurance right up until you read the contract underneath it.

On July 23 I re-asked the unanswered questions and, following NRTC’s own published customer-service escalation steps, asked to be connected with a Customer Service Manager.

On July 27 — five days after the original question — I received this:

“I believe your questions have been answered regarding our service, pricing, installation process and contract options.”

The escalation request was not actioned or mentioned. The same email suggested that “our current service offering may not align with what you’re looking for,” which is a polite way of ending a sales conversation with someone who has been trying for two weeks to give the company money.

I replied within twenty minutes, asking a second time for a manager:

“Unfortunately it seems you’re unwilling to directly answer my questions, and I’m unsure why. I have directly asked you a number of questions without a response that actually answers the question.”

That got no response either. So that afternoon I looked up the general manager’s email address and wrote to him directly. He telephoned me within hours — to his credit, promptly and without being chased — and I finally put the question to a person who would answer it. His first response was not an answer but a question back:

“Are you planning on cancelling?”

I said no, that wasn’t the point: I wanted to know what leaving would cost before committing three years, because life happens. And then, at last, plainly:

“If you cancelled before the end of the term, you’re expected to pay the contract.”

Fifteen words. That was the whole answer, and it was available on July 22.

I also made the staleness point to him, since he was the one who could act on it: that the terms were written in 2018 and were quite old, that the clause was anti-consumer — charging somebody the entire remaining price of a contract because life forced them to cancel is neither consumer-friendly nor business-friendly — and that I wasn’t asking for anything except that the company look at its own terms and consider why they were written that way. His answer, in full:

“We’ll take that under advisement.”

So the point was made twice, in writing on July 22 and by voice on July 27, to the last person their own process offers you.

He also offered a framing for the whole exchange:

“You know what our terms are, and if you’d like to come to our service, we’d be glad to have you, but we don’t let customers dictate our service to us.”

I’d been asking them to put a promise they had already volunteered into the document they wanted me to sign. That isn’t dictating terms. It’s asking them to mean the thing they’d said.

It’s worth being clear about what I had actually asked for across the whole exchange, because “dictate” covers a lot of ground. Most of my questions asked what their own published terms meant: does this clause apply to me, what does this fee cover, what happens to my rate when the term ends, can I self-install given the equipment already on my wall. None of that asks a company to change anything. It asks a company to explain a document it publishes and expects you to sign.

Where I did ask for a change, there were three, and I want to put the weakest of them first because it’s the one they were entitled to refuse. I asked whether there was any flexibility on the cancellation clause or the term length. That is a straightforward request to vary standard terms for one customer, and a company can turn it down flat without owing anyone an explanation. They did, and they were within their rights. I put it to him again on the call, by which point the sale was plainly dead, and it was theirs to refuse both times. If refusing it had been the whole story, I’d have shrugged and stayed on cable, and none of this would be written down.

The other two were not that. Write the price guarantee into the agreement — which asks them to commit to something they had already told me. And bring the installation fee into line with the rules that took effect in June — which asks them to follow a regulation. Neither is a customer dictating anything. The second is a strange thing to treat as impertinence at all, and it is, as it turns out, something they were themselves doing that very week for their residential customers.

Businesses discuss their terms. That is most of what commercial contracting is, and it is entirely ordinary for a prospective customer to ask a supplier to stand behind a clause, or to update one that has stopped matching the rules. A company is of course free to sell on standard terms and to decline a bespoke deal for one small buyer — I never expected otherwise. I would have signed the standard deal happily. All it needed was for somebody to explain it plainly when asked, and to stand behind it, instead of treating the asking as the problem. But “we have standard terms” is not an answer to what do your standard terms mean, and it is not an answer to do your standard terms still comply with the law.

I can’t tell you where the general manager sits in the company — NRTC publishes no officers, no board, no president I can find. What it does publish is an escalation ladder: agent, then customer service manager, then general manager, after which the page stops offering you anyone at NRTC and hands you the phone numbers for the CRTC and the CCTS. So he isn’t necessarily the top. He is the end of the road they lay out, and by July 27 I’d walked all of it.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Nothing about that answer was confidential, complicated, or discretionary. It’s a standard clause, in a document they publish on their own website, applied uniformly to every commercial customer — as they told me themselves when they explained that they don’t negotiate individual terms. There was no reason not to say it on day one. The only thing that changed between July 22 and July 27 was how far up the company I had escalated.

There is also a simpler reading available, and I think it’s the right one. A contract term that is comfortable to explain gets explained. When a company would sooner redirect you to a different product than tell you plainly what one of its own published clauses does to you, that reluctance is information about the clause. Terms that are easy to defend get defended.

I have a control for that, as it happens.

While this was going on I was also talking to my current provider, Cogeco, about staying. So I asked them the same class of question: what does it cost me to leave early? The answer came back immediately, in the first conversation, without my having to ask twice or escalate to anyone. Their business early-cancellation charge is 60% of the outstanding value of the contract — which is published in their Terms and Conditions – Business Solutions, where anyone can read it. And the agent told me, unprompted, that the charge is waived if you move to an area where Cogeco is unable to provide service.

I want to be careful with that second part: it’s what an agent told me on a call, not something I’ve located in their published terms, and anyone relying on it should get it in writing for their own contract. But note what the exception actually is. It isn’t “you moved” — it’s we can’t follow you. That is precisely the case where charging a penalty is indefensible, because the customer isn’t defecting to a competitor; the provider simply can’t deliver. Cogeco has thought about the situation where the fee would be least justifiable and carved it out.

Understand that I am not holding Cogeco up as the hero of this story. Sixty percent of a remaining contract is still a serious sum, and I was talking to NRTC in the first place because I was considering leaving Cogeco — some recent outages, and the upload speeds cable gives you, which constrain what I can run from my own office. But their charge is capped, it’s proportional, it has a carve-out for the one scenario where it would be plainly unfair, and — crucially — somebody was willing to say all of that out loud, first time asked, to a customer who might not like hearing it.

That’s what a defensible term looks like when you ask about it. You get an answer.

I’d gently suggest that’s worth weighing on its own, separately from the dollar figures. How a company handles a straightforward question while it is still trying to win your business is the single best preview you will get of how it will handle a harder one after you’ve signed for three years.

To be fair to the person I was corresponding with: I don’t think any of this was personal, and I’d guess she was answering within the latitude she had. Standardized terms and no authority to discuss them is a policy, not a personality. But that’s rather the point — the policy is what you’d be buying.

That was where I thought this story ended. Then, checking my facts before publishing, I found that NRTC had in fact taken something under advisement that week. I just didn’t know it at the time.

They amended those Terms that week — and changed the other half of the sentence

I only found this while fact-checking this post, hours before publishing it, and I nearly shipped without noticing. What makes it worth the space isn’t when it happened — I’ll come to why the timing proves nothing — but which half of the sentence moved and which half didn’t.

On July 23 I saved a copy of NRTC’s Terms of Service. It was footed: “TOS Revised June 2018.” That is the document I had been quoting at them all week.

On July 27 at 4:32 p.m., I captured the same page again as an exhibit for my CRTC filing. By then the footer read: “TOS Revised July 2026.”

Those two timestamps are the whole of what I can establish. The Internet Archive has no capture of that page between May 14 and today, and the server sends no meaningful last-modified date, so the edit lands somewhere in a four-day window and I can’t place it more precisely than that. Note in particular that my 4:32 p.m. capture came after the general manager’s call that afternoon — I’d emailed him at 3:44 and he rang back within the hour. So I can’t tell you whether the Terms were amended before that conversation or after it, and I’m not going to imply an order I can’t demonstrate.

Somewhere in that four-day window — the same four days in which I was re-asking my unanswered questions, requesting a manager twice, being told my questions had been answered, and finally writing to the general manager, who telephoned me back — NRTC amended its Terms of Service.

So I compared the two versions in full — not just the section I cared about, the whole document, all nine thousand-odd words of it. Three things changed. One of them was the date stamp itself. Here is the one that matters. Before, as it stood on July 23:

“For all residential services an early termination fee of $100.00/service, plus any discounts that were credited under the initial agreement will be reversed and charged to the account. Commercial customers agree to pay the remaining charges for their commitment period.”

And the after, live as I write this:

“For all residential services an early termination fee for any promotion you accepted, plus any discounts that were credited under the initial agreement, will be reversed and charged to the account on a prorated basis. Commercial customers agree to pay the remaining charges for their commitment period.”

The flat $100 residential early-termination fee is gone. In its place: a prorated reversal of discounts actually received.

At first glance that looks like compliance — but with what, exactly? Not with 2026-43. I assumed for some time that it was, and it isn’t. That policy’s ban on cancellation fees where no device is subsidised was written into section G.3.i of the Wireless Code. The Internet Code has no G.3. Its early-cancellation rule is G.1, and 2026-43 did not touch it. On a fibre contract with no subsidised device, G.1 still permits an early cancellation fee — it requires only that the amount be set out in the contract, be charged for no more than 24 months, and be reduced to $0 by the end of that period.

Which makes the edit more legible, not less. A flat $100 that never declines does not fit G.1. A charge assessed “on a prorated basis” does. The sentence moved into the shape the Internet Code has required since 2020 — of a Code that, like everything else in this story, does not bind NRTC.

Read the replacement more slowly, though. The old clause named a number: an early termination fee of $100.00/service. The new one still says the words “an early termination fee” — it simply no longer says how much. What was removed was not unambiguously the fee. What was removed, for certain, was the cap.

Worse, look at what the new sentence actually joins together. The clause is “an early termination fee for any promotion you accepted, plus any discounts that were credited under the initial agreement.” That’s two things, not one. A fee, plus a clawback of discounts. The preceding sentence in the same provision sets it up: “you agree to pay NRTC an Early Termination Fee for any contract and/or promotion you accepted.”

So on the natural reading, a residential customer who cancels early now owes a fee of unstated size and repayment of their discounts — where before they owed $100 and repayment of their discounts.

Notice what’s happened to the person the clause applies to. Under the old terms a residential customer could work out what leaving cost: $100 per service, plus the discounts they’d received. Under the new terms they cannot, because the number is no longer in the contract. They’d find out when the final bill arrived.

Ambiguity in a consumer contract is normally construed against the party who drafted it — but that principle only helps you in a dispute you’ve already had to start, after the charge is on your bill.

None of that needs to be litigated to be fixed. If NRTC means something narrower — if that phrase is meant to describe the clawback rather than a charge on top of it — then the fix is to say so in the Terms themselves, in plain language, where the people it applies to can read it.

Which is the price-guarantee lesson again, running the other way. A customer who rings to ask what that clause means and is told not to worry has been told nothing that binds anyone, and the sentence will still be there on the day they cancel. That generalises well beyond this company: if you are ever unsure what a clause in your contract means, the only answer worth having is the one written into the contract. Everything else is a conversation you will not be able to prove.

There’s a further question I can’t answer, and I want to be careful not to imply I can. I don’t know whether existing residential customers were told any of this. What I can tell you is what the contract promises on that score, which is remarkably little: the Terms say NRTC “reserves the right to revise, amend, or modify TOS… at any time and in any manner,” and that notice of a revision “will be posted in accordance with our TOS” — a sentence that points at itself and never says how notice is actually given. Elsewhere the same document requires thirty days’ prior written notice to adjust “any charges pertaining to the Services,” which you might think covers an early termination fee. Whether the two provisions sit comfortably together is not for me to say. I raise it because a customer whose exit cost changed in July has a reasonable interest in knowing when they were told, and by what means.

Now the second half of each quotation.

“Commercial customers agree to pay the remaining charges for their commitment period.”

Identical. Word for word, comma for comma.

The third change is a single word, in the very next sentence: “any fees or charges ~~the~~ that NRTC requires upon termination of service.” Someone tidied a stray article.

So the sentence above the commercial clause was rewritten to track the new rules. The sentence below it was corrected for grammar. The commercial clause itself — the uncapped one, the ~$3,300 one, the one I had spent five days asking about in writing — was left exactly as it was. Whatever else is true, that paragraph was not overlooked. It was bracketed by edits.

And then, on July 27, NRTC’s general manager told me this about the CRTC’s fee rules:

“…we believe that this doesn’t apply to us … It does in the wireless industry.”

I want to be careful about what I’m claiming, because this is the point where it would be easy to overreach. I do not know who made that edit, or when in those four days, or why. I cannot show that my emails prompted it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise — a company can revise its terms for a dozen reasons that have nothing to do with one customer. Nor can I tell you what NRTC believes about which rules bind it.

What I can show you is the document, and one more thing about it: how long it had sat still.

The Internet Archive has been capturing that page since 2012, so I pulled twelve captures spanning August 2018 to May 14, 2026 — the last one before any of this began — and diffed them against each other. You can do this yourself; the captures are public.

The result is unambiguous. Across those eight years, the text of the Terms is identical in every capture. Not similar: identical. The commercial clause is there in all twelve, word for word. The residential fee reads $100.00/service in all twelve.

The site around it kept moving the whole time. The copyright year advances each January. A COVID-19 notice appears in 2021 and is gone by 2022. Menu items get added — Accessibility in 2024, “Legal & Regulatory” and “Share a Concern” in 2025, a fibre application form as recently as May 2026. This was a live, maintained website, not an abandoned one. And the text a customer is actually bound by sat inside it, unchanged, through the arrival of the Internet Code and everything after it, for eight years.

Then it changed, in the four days I spent asking what one of its sentences meant.

A coincidence of timing proves nothing by itself, and there is an obvious innocent explanation: the CRTC’s new fee rules took effect on June 12, 2026, and a company reviewing its terms against them might well land on that paragraph. I’d think that the likeliest explanation, in fact.

Which is worth pausing on. NRTC is not bound by those rules — I’ve spent several paragraphs establishing it, and their general manager said so himself, correctly, that same week. Nothing obliged them to touch that clause. And yet, on the likeliest explanation, they aligned it anyway, with a policy they had just told a prospective customer did not apply to them — and the alignment followed the Code’s shape exactly. The Internet Code protects individual customers of ten named providers. The residential sentence moved. The commercial sentence, covering precisely the customers that Code leaves out, did not. Voluntary compliance, stopping where the obligation would have stopped had there been one.

So: three edits, in a document untouched since 2018, made during the week I was asking what the commercial clause meant — and the commercial clause sits between two of them.

Which returns us to the comparison I asked you to hold. The story was a residential customer paying $100 to leave and a business customer paying everything — a thirty-fold gap. The current Terms are stranger. On the natural reading, a residential customer’s exit is now prorated discounts plus a fee nobody has quantified, which is not obviously an improvement and is certainly harder to plan around. The commercial customer still owes every remaining month in full, and that sentence didn’t move by a comma.

That’s the finding, and it’s worth stating precisely, because I’ve spent this section being careful not to overclaim and I don’t want to spend the last paragraph doing it. NRTC broke no rule. I’ve said so and I meant it. What happened is that something moved them to bring one half of that provision into line with the new rules — and it moved them exactly as far as the rules themselves go. To the individual customers the Internet Code protects, and not one sentence further. The business customer, whom that Code does not protect, was left holding the harshest clause in the document.

The gap in the rules and the gap in the amendment are the same shape. That’s what I’d like the Commission to look at.

The part that actually worries me

There’s a second thread to this story, and it has nothing to do with contracts.

On April 27, 2026 — three months before any of the above — I emailed NRTC’s technical support address to tell them their webmail login sends customer passwords in plaintext. I was polite, specific, and I offered to help them fix it for free. I got no response, and nothing changed. I raised it again on July 22, July 23, and July 27 during the fibre discussion. NRTC’s reply, on July 27: the comments had been “passed along to our technical team,” and a new website is coming in the fall.

A new website will not fix it, because the problem isn’t the website. When I looked properly, here’s what NRTC’s mail platform offers — verified on July 27, 2026, and re-verified this morning, August 14, 2026, unchanged in every respect:

How you’d check your NRTC email	Encrypted?
Webmail (`webmail.nrtco.net`)	No — HTTPS connections are refused outright; the login form posts your password over plain HTTP
POP3 (port 110)	No — no STLS support offered
Mail submission (port 587)	No — accepts password authentication, no STARTTLS offered
IMAPS / POP3S / SMTPS (993 / 995 / 465)	Not available — all closed

Read that table again, because the conclusion is genuinely remarkable: on every access path I can find, checking your NRTC email means sending your password across the internet unencrypted, in readable text. Not “the website is a bit dated.” Anyone positioned along the network path can simply read those credentials. Concretely: check your NRTC email from the Wi-Fi at a coffee shop, a hotel, or an airport, and you have handed your password to anyone else on that network who cares to look, and to whoever operates it. The same is true of a compromised home router, or any hop in between. And because people reuse passwords, what leaks may not stop at the email account.

Let me be precise about the limits of what I can see from outside. NRTC publishes no mail-setup instructions, and there are no autoconfiguration records for their domain, so I can’t independently confirm what their staff tell customers to type into Outlook or a phone. What I can confirm: mail.nrtco.net and webmail.nrtco.net are one and the same server, it offers no encrypted port at all, and the plaintext webmail login form appears on two different pages of their site — including one buried at the bottom of a directory of 1990s web links. I’ve asked NRTC directly to correct me if their customers are pointed somewhere better, and I’ll update this post if they are.

An ISP is not just another business with a website. It is the pipe everything else runs through, and its customers extend it a level of trust they’d never extend their hardware store. Everyone who builds on the internet has some responsibility to do what they can to make it safer — internet service providers most of all. The minimum that trust buys is that the password protecting their email doesn’t travel in readable text.

This is not hard or expensive to fix. Certificates are free from Let’s Encrypt. The mail server they run supports TLS. Encrypting mail access and submission has been the published industry standard since RFC 8314 in January 2018 — right around the time NRTC’s Terms of Service were written. This is a few hours of work by someone who knows the system.

And here is the part I did not expect to find. Every certificate issued by a trusted authority is published to public Certificate Transparency logs, which anyone can search. I searched them for nrtco.net.

There has never been a certificate for www.nrtco.net. Not one, ever — which is consistent with a website that has never offered HTTPS in its life. There has never been one for webmail.nrtco.net either.

But there is one for mail.nrtco.net. It was issued on 27 October 2025, it runs to 27 November 2026, and it is not a free certificate — it’s an Extended Validation certificate from DigiCert, the expensive kind, the kind you buy deliberately after someone verifies your company exists.

It is currently valid. I checked thirteen ports on that server this morning looking for it — 443, 993, 995, 465, 587, 110, 143, 25, 2083, 2087, 2096, 4443 and 8443. TLS is not enabled on any of them.

I can’t tell you why. Perhaps it’s staged for the migration and waiting on the cutover. Perhaps it’s in use somewhere I can’t reach. What I can tell you is what it removes from the conversation: the most sympathetic explanation for all of this — small company, certificates cost money, nobody realised — does not survive contact with the evidence. Somebody at NRTC understood the problem well enough to go out and buy a premium certificate for the exact server that transmits customer passwords in the clear. That was ten months ago. The passwords are still in the clear.

What they said when I finally got their attention

On July 27 I sent NRTC’s general manager a formal written notice with the full findings, repeated the offer of help, and told him I was taking the matter to the Privacy Commissioner. He replied the next morning. It is the most useful document in this whole story, and I’d rather quote it than characterize it:

“I can confirm that we’re aware of the concerns you’ve raised regarding how our current email service handles credential transmission. The service is presently operated by a third-party provider. Earlier this year we began the process of moving email in-house, specifically so that we can address issues like these and have more direct control over how the service is configured and secured. We expect to complete the cutover to our in-house platform within the next few weeks.”

Read that middle sentence again. NRTC is not saying “thank you for telling us.” NRTC is saying they already knew — before my April email — and had started a project to deal with it.

That reframes everything. This was never an oversight nobody had noticed. It was a known condition, and the company’s chosen response was to wait for a platform migration. Two things were available during those months:

Turn on encryption. The software they run supports TLS. Certificates cost nothing. Their own mail provider, Nexicom, plainly knows how to configure TLS correctly — the spam-quarantine portal it runs for NRTC’s customers is served over HTTPS properly. Nobody had to wait for a migration to do this. It’s a certificate and a config change.
Tell the customers. Not a fix — saying it out loud changes nothing about the exposure itself. But people using NRTC webmail have been sending their password in readable form and cannot possibly know that unless somebody tells them, and a short notice — change your email password, and change it anywhere else you’ve reused it — would at least let them limit their own damage. It requires no technical work and was available on any day of those months, for free.

The first did not happen: the condition was left in place, and my April 27 report got no reply at all. On the second I have to be careful, because I can’t see inside their customer communications — I’m not a subscriber, so a notice sent directly to customers would never reach me. What I can say is where I looked and found none. Now add the follow-up. That “within the next few weeks” commitment was made on July 28. It is now August 14 — seventeen days — and I re-ran every check this morning. The webmail login still refuses HTTPS. Port 587 still advertises password authentication with no STARTTLS. Port 110 still offers no STLS. The server still identifies itself as the same version, so no migration has touched it. The plaintext login form is still published on two pages of their website, and I can find no notice to customers anywhere on it.

Where the privacy complaint went

I filed a complaint with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada on July 27 (file PIPEDA-054185). The OPC declined to investigate.

Not on the merits — it never reached the merits. Under section 12(1)(a) of PIPEDA the Commissioner can require a complainant to first exhaust “grievance or review procedures otherwise reasonably available,” and the OPC’s position is that I must write to NRTC’s Privacy Officer, by post, at the Beachburg address, and then wait 30 more days.

Here is the difficulty with that. I searched NRTC’s privacy policy, terms of service, contact page, accessibility page, corporate page, regulatory page, and its own published customer-service escalation steps. None of them names a Privacy Officer, or any individual accountable for privacy, or a privacy email address, or any grievance procedure at all. The postal address the OPC told me to write to is simply NRTC’s head office — the same address printed on the privacy policy, with no name attached. Meanwhile PIPEDA’s own Schedule 1 requires organizations to designate an accountable individual (Principle 4.1.2) and to make their privacy practices readily available (Principle 4.8).

I put that to them, along with the fact that I’d already made four approaches over three months ending with a substantive reply from the general manager himself, and asked in the alternative that the Commissioner consider initiating a complaint on his own motion, which the Act allows. The reply of August 4 addressed none of it and closed with: “the OPC will not respond to further correspondence on this matter.”

I’m not going to spend another month mailing a letter to an unnamed person about other people’s passwords — a letter that, at that address, would most likely be opened by the general manager who had already replied to me in writing. My answer to the OPC was short: That’s unreasonable, as I absolutely have raised it with the parties responsible. But no worries. I’ve done my job here.

I want to be fair to the people who wrote to me. They applied a provision that exists, they applied it consistently, and I don’t think anyone there was being obstructive. My complaint isn’t with the officer who answered the letter. It’s with what the letter reveals about the machine behind it.

Consider where that provision leads. An organisation that follows PIPEDA’s own requirement to designate an accountable individual and publish who they are can be complained about. An organisation that ignores that requirement becomes harder to complain about, because the complainant cannot show they exhausted a channel that was never published. The rule intended to make organisations accountable, applied this way, rewards the ones that aren’t. I don’t think anyone designed that. It’s what the provision does when it meets a company that hasn’t bothered.

And it’s worth knowing what the good outcome would have been. Suppose the OPC had taken the file, investigated, and agreed with me entirely. Under PIPEDA the Commissioner cannot order a company to fix anything and cannot award damages. The finding would have been a recommendation, and recommendations are not binding. Enforcing one means the complainant going to Federal Court under section 14, at their own expense, to obtain an order.

So the best available result, at the end of a process that begins with posting a letter to an unnamed person and waiting thirty days, is a strongly worded suggestion — and then a lawsuit, funded by me, about somebody else’s passwords, against a company I have never been a customer of.

I don’t say that to be cynical about the office. I say it because it explains the shape of what happened. A regulator whose findings cannot bind anyone has every reason to ration the files it opens, and a provision like section 12(1)(a) is exactly how that rationing gets done. The people who lose are the ones the system is least likely to hear from anyway: subscribers who don’t know there’s anything to complain about.

And they’re the ones it ends badly for. Credentials that travel in the clear are collected eventually — that is what the people who collect credentials do — and the person at the other end never experiences it as a regulatory gap. They experience it as a bank login that stops working. An email account sending investment advice to everyone in their contacts. A card they didn’t use. Money that isn’t there.

Then they’ll blame themselves. That’s the part I find hardest. They’ll assume they clicked something, or reused a password they shouldn’t have, or got careless in some way they can’t quite reconstruct — because the alternative explanation, that their internet provider had been transmitting their password in readable text for years and nobody was obliged to mention it, is not one that occurs to a reasonable person. It didn’t occur to me either, and I went looking.

Nobody is going to tell them. NRTC hasn’t. The office that exists to make organisations tell them looked at the file and closed it. So the harm, when it lands, lands silently and on the wrong person’s conscience.

Which brings us to this post. It is the only avenue left that actually reaches the people affected.

If you have an NRTC email address

Assume your password has been transmitted unencrypted many times, in a form anyone on the network path could read. Then:

Change that password everywhere else you’ve used it, first. Your bank before anything else, then anything holding money or identity. This is the most urgent item on the list and the one people skip, because it doesn’t feel like the problem — the problem was the email account. But a leaked password is only worth stealing if it opens more than one door. Close the other doors first.
Then stop reusing passwords entirely, and use a password manager to do it. I realise that’s the advice everyone gives and nobody follows, so let me put it in terms of this specific situation. I have no evidence that any NRTC account has been broken into, and I’m not suggesting one has. What I can tell you is the size of the hole. One password has been crossing the internet in readable form. If that password only ever opened one mailbox, then the worst case stops at a mailbox. If it also opens your bank, your Amazon account and your Facebook, the worst case is four doors instead of one — and none of that would be your doing. Reuse is the thing that turns somebody else’s configuration error into your loss. A password manager — 1Password, Bitwarden, the one built into your browser, genuinely any of them — means every account gets its own password and you never have to remember one. That’s the whole trick. It’s the single highest-value hour you can spend on this, and it protects you from the next provider who does this too, whoever they turn out to be.
Turn on two-factor authentication wherever it’s offered, especially on your bank and your primary email. It’s the thing that holds when a password doesn’t.
Understand the catch on the email password itself. Changing it through the unencrypted webmail transmits the new password the same way the old one went. It’s still worth doing — it invalidates whatever leaked previously — but it isn’t a fix, and it can’t be until NRTC enables encryption. If you can, change it from a network you trust rather than public Wi-Fi.
There’s no “just use a secure mail client” workaround. I looked for one specifically. There is no encrypted port to point a client at.
Consider whether your NRTC address should still be your password-reset address for anything that matters — your bank, your email-of-record, your domain registrar. An email account is the master key to every account that recovers through it, and this one has a lock anybody on the network can read.
And the honest answer: while this is unfixed, the safest thing is not to use that mailbox. I’ve thought about whether to say that, because I know how much of an imposition it is. But there’s no way around it. There is nothing you can do at your end to make logging in safe — the password crosses in the clear every single time, and no setting on your computer changes that. Everything else on this list limits the damage. Only not logging in avoids it.

What that means in practice depends on you. If you’re in a position to move — a free account at Gmail, Outlook or Proton Mail takes ten minutes and all of them encrypt properly — then this is a good reason to, and you can set the old address to forward while you update it wherever you’ve used it. If you can’t move, or don’t want to, then use it as little as you can, do it from your home network rather than public Wi-Fi, and get everything that matters pointed somewhere else. Treat it as a mailbox for flyers, not for anything you’d mind a stranger reading.

I’m aware this is a service you’re paying for. NRTC lists “Webmail included” on every internet package it sells. Being told to stop using an included service because it isn’t safe to log into is a poor outcome, and I don’t offer it happily — it’s just the truthful advice while the situation stands.

I offered to help NRTC fix this for free. That offer was never taken up. I have no interest in being right about this. If it gets fixed, I’ll update the post and say so plainly — anyone at NRTC can tell me at [email protected], I’ll verify it and post the correction, and I’d genuinely like to write that paragraph. I’m not going to promise to keep testing their servers indefinitely, so if you’re reading this some months from now, check the update log below rather than assuming the state of things hasn’t changed.

In fairness

Three things worth saying plainly.

First, exit charges on business contracts are an industry-wide structure, not an NRTC invention. As above, Cogeco takes 60% of the outstanding contract value. Nobody in this market is handing small businesses a free exit, and I don’t want to leave the impression that NRTC invented an abuse the rest of the industry has renounced. What NRTC has is the uncapped version: 100%, no proportionality, no stated exception. Charging someone the entire price of service they will never receive is harsh by any measure, and set against what a company the size of Cogeco thinks defensible, it is considerably harsher.

Second, NRTC’s local service reputation appears genuinely good, and it’s why I wanted to be their customer in the first place. Local technicians who can be at your house the same day are a real advantage over a national carrier’s call centre, and I have nothing bad to say about the people who climb the poles. (I’d only repeat the caveat above: the fastest response is the business tier’s, by NRTC’s own account of what that tier is for.)

Third, on the email system: NRTC is right that a third party operates it, and I verified that — the mail server sits in Nexicom’s address space, not NRTC’s. But it’s NRTC’s name on the mailbox and NRTC’s customers whose passwords are moving. PIPEDA is explicit that handing personal information to a contractor doesn’t hand off the responsibility for protecting it. And the general manager did answer me, promptly and without spin, which is more than the previous three months produced. My criticism is not that NRTC was unaware. It’s that NRTC was aware, by its own account, and for months chose neither of the two things that would have protected its customers in the meantime.

Before you sign any internet contract

Five questions, in writing, before any term commitment. The first four are the ones I asked, and the answers took me two weeks and an escalation to obtain. The fifth is the one I’d add, having learned it the hard way:

“If I cancel early, exactly what do I owe?” Get the formula, not reassurance. “Are you planning on cancelling?” is not an answer.
“What happens to my rate the day the term ends?” If the answer is a cliff, diarize month 33.
“What exactly does the installation fee cover, and is any of it activation or administration?” Since June 12, 2026, activation and modification fees are prohibited — but check whether that protection reaches you. For home Internet it currently binds only nine large providers, and only individual customers; for mobile it binds everyone, small businesses included. If your provider isn’t one of the nine, or you’re buying as a business, the answer may be that nothing stops them. Worth knowing before you assume otherwise, as I did.
“Can I self-install?” If equipment is already present and working, ask what physical work the fee is actually for.
“Will you put that in the agreement?” This is the one I’d add having been through it. Check whether the contract contains an entire-agreement clause — the wording is usually that the agreement “supersedes all oral or written arrangements.” If it does, every promise made to you by email or on the phone is legally worth nothing the moment you sign, including the price. A guarantee that isn’t in the document you sign isn’t a guarantee. Ask for it in the document; the answer to that request tells you a great deal.

If the answers don’t come, or don’t add up: the provider’s own escalation process, then the CCTS (for existing customers), and the CRTC for the rules themselves. My complete correspondence with NRTC is documented and available; everything quoted above is verbatim.

Notes on method, since I’m making a security claim in public

Everything in the email section came from connecting to servers NRTC advertises publicly and reading what they volunteer to any client that connects — the same handshake your phone performs when you set up a mail account, which is precisely how a mail client discovers whether encryption is on offer. Specifically: an HTTP HEAD request, a TLS connection attempt that was refused, TCP connection checks against the standard mail ports, and one EHLO and one CAPA — the opening greetings of the SMTP and POP3 protocols.

The certificate search is a public database lookup and touches nothing of NRTC’s; the port checks are TLS handshake attempts that either find a certificate or don’t. I attempted no login. I submitted no credentials. I accessed no mailbox or account. I captured no traffic belonging to anyone. I have not tested for, and do not claim, any specific software vulnerability in NRTC’s systems — the finding is simply that encryption is not offered at all, which is not a bug to be exploited but a setting to be turned on. Every command I ran is recorded, and I’ll provide the full log to NRTC, to a regulator, or to any journalist who asks.

On the quotations. The written exchanges are quoted from the emails themselves and are exact; I have those documents.

The telephone quotations are different in kind and I want to be straight about it. They come from a machine transcription of the call, and machine transcription is imperfect — the raw text of this one is visibly rough in places. I found and corrected two recognition errors in passages I quote: the transcript rendered “you’re expected to pay the contract” as “you expected,” and truncated “CRTC” to “CRT.” Both are recorded in my file alongside the raw version.

I can’t promise there are no others. There may well be errors in the parts I don’t quote, and it’s possible a word has been mis-heard somewhere I didn’t catch. What I can say without qualification is that I have not knowingly added, removed or reordered anything in a way that changes a meaning, and that every omission inside a quotation is marked with an ellipsis. I’ve kept the raw transcription and will provide it, unedited, to anyone who wants to check my work against it — including NRTC. If anyone who was on that call believes a quotation misrepresents what was said, tell me and I will publish the correction.

On timing: the customary window a researcher waits before disclosing publicly is 90 days, and mine expired on July 26. When I gave NRTC formal notice on July 27, I undertook in writing to hold the technical details until August 10 anyway — past the deadline I was entitled to use — specifically to give their stated cutover a chance to land. It didn’t land. I held off another four days regardless, and re-ran every check this morning before writing this. I’m publishing on August 14.

Update log

August 14, 2026 — Published. All technical findings re-verified this morning; unchanged. Fact-checking on the day of publication turned up the Terms of Service revision described above — I hold dated captures of both versions and will provide either on request.
August 15, 2026 — Correction. This piece originally said that Telecom Regulatory Policy 2026-43 bars an early cancellation fee where no device is subsidised, and offered that as the reason NRTC’s residential exit fee changed. That was wrong. Reading 2026-43 in full, the ban was made to section G.3.i of the Wireless Code; the Internet Code’s early-cancellation rule, G.1, was not amended, and it permits such a fee where the amount is stated in the contract, charged for no more than 24 months, and reduced to $0 by the end. The section above has been rewritten to say so. The observation it supports — that the residential sentence moved and the commercial one did not — is unchanged. I have also corrected the Internet Code provider list: ten providers were named in 2019, not nine, the difference being Shaw, which Rogers has since absorbed. The error was mine and nobody pointed it out; I found it re-reading the source.

Matthew Marion is the owner of End of Line Software Inc. in Cobden, Ontario. He is, for now, still a cable internet customer. He can be reached at [email protected].