Wholesale-Based Internet & VoIP Reseller
The industry — Other telecommunications
Base industry report for 5179 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 3,019
- Under 10 employeesA
- 85%
- Establishments · USA
- 5,166
- Employment · USA
- 67,169
- Payroll · USA
- $6.0B
Of 3,019 Canadian establishments with employees, 85% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
One thing must be trueEntry turns on a single condition that can be named and tested before much is spent. Clear it and this becomes an execution question; fail it and no amount of operating skill helps.
Displace an incumbent the screen found well defended — payments attached to the workflow, data that does not leave, a contract that renews itself. Share here means giving a buyer a reason to break something that currently works, which is a higher bar than being better.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 5
The binding constraint — incumbent vulnerability
The pre-screen called this a genuine small-operator entry, and on the counts it is the most populated corner of telecom: 3,019 establishments, 2,554 of them with fewer than ten employees and none above 499 [A]. A reseller needs no network — it buys regulated wholesale access from the telephone or cable company, puts its own brand and support on top, and sells home internet or business voice. The screen tested that and the pre-screen does not survive. The reseller's largest cost is a tariff paid to the company it competes with at retail, and the record of the last five years is what happens under that arrangement. Reporting of the CRTC's 2025 market report puts independent wholesale-based providers' share of home internet at 8.4% in 2020, 8.0% in 2021, 6.1% in 2022, 5.0% in 2023 and 4.2% in 2024 — halved in four years [B]. Over the same period the larger independents stopped being independent: Bell bought EBOX and Distributel in 2022, and Quebecor, Videotron's parent, bought VMedia the same year [B]. The incumbent can discount its own flanker brand below the wholesale rate plus the reseller's costs, contest every rate decision for years, and then buy whoever is left; the reseller can do none of those things back. Hosted business voice is the same shape with a different supplier — the platform behind a white-label VoIP service also sells direct. An incumbent that sets your input price, competes for your customer and is the natural buyer of your business is not vulnerable. The 'all other telecommunications' tail of this group was not examined. Billing software for the sector is screened separately at 517.
A reseller can sell only where it has a wholesale arrangement, and those arrangements follow incumbent territories — a cable company's franchise area, a telephone company's operating region. It competes inside that footprint against the footprint's owner.
Sectors joined: Wireless/Antenna · Deeptech - Wireless Power
[UNVERIFIED] Sector-to-NAICS mapping is analyst judgment — see data/angel-sector-map.json. Counts are a per-record cross-reference and are not additive across records.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
The field
Every operator named on this record, and what each one discloses. A private single-site operator discloses nothing, which is the normal case — the listed consolidators are the only window in.
Competitor set · 4 named · 0 disclose revenue · 1 with a published share
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| BCE (Bell Canada)TSX: BCEC | not disclosed | — | The wholesale supplier, the retail competitor through its own and its flanker brands, and the acquirer of EBOX and Distributel in 2022. Its filings were not opened for this record; BCE's scale is sourced on the companion record at 5173 |
| Quebecor (Videotron) / Rogers / Telus / CogecoB | not disclosed | — | The other incumbent wholesale suppliers, each of which also sells retail in the same footprint. Quebecor acquired VMedia in 2022; no price was disclosed |
| TekSavvyC | not disclosed | — | The best-known surviving independent wholesale-based ISP. Privately held and publishes no revenue, so nothing is carried here |
| The independent wholesale-based tier as a wholeB | not disclosed | 4.2% | 4.2% of Canadian home internet in 2024, down from 8.4% in 2020 — the only published measure of what this entire competitive tier is worth, and it is a measure of it halving |
Nobody here publishes revenue. The market is not sized for that reason — an estimate built on nothing would only look like knowledge.
Evidence
Evidence. Counts are Statistics Canada (December 2023) and US Census County Business Patterns (2022) [A]. The market-share series is tier B: it is the CRTC's, but it was read in Cartt.ca's report of the CRTC publication because the CRTC site refused automated access; check it against the CRTC table before relying on it. The three acquisitions named were confirmed against reference sources giving the acquirer and the year [B]; no purchase price was disclosed for any of them, so none is given. Other reported consolidations in this market could not be confirmed within the time allowed and were left off. A subscriber-churn series carried in the same reporting could not be confirmed as specific to wholesale-based providers rather than to retail internet as a whole, so it was removed. Formally UNVERIFIED in the brief's sense — the only tier-A figures are business counts. Not established: reseller margins, the wholesale rate relative to incumbent flanker-brand prices, or anything about hosted-voice resale, which is argued by analogy only. The 1,258 establishments in the 5–9 band are an unusual bulge that may reflect dealers and installers classified here; that was not investigated. The cut factor is analyst judgment. Added in completion: the competitive field carries no new research. It reuses the CRTC share series and the three 2022 acquisitions already on this record, both tier B, and names the incumbent suppliers and TekSavvy without figures because none publishes anything usable at this level. TekSavvy is described as the best-known surviving independent, which is general knowledge and not a measured ranking; no subscriber count for it or for any other independent was found.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
The association of independent, mostly wholesale-based Canadian ISPs; represents members at the CRTC. Wikipedia gives 'over 30' members (secondary). Press current to July 2026.
Founded 2013 for independent wireless ISPs, renamed at its 2026 AGM; runs an annual conference and tradeshow (March 2026) and monthly training events. No member count published.
'Over 150 members' (cloud voice and UCaaS providers), per its home page; US-based peer association.
Subscription news site covering Canadian cable, telecom and CRTC decisions, including wholesale-access rulings; also runs a podcast.
CanWISP's annual conference and tradeshow day (2026 edition March 30) plus a Canadian ISP Virtual Forum (August 2026), per its events page.
cnoc.tech, an older CNOC domain, now serves an Indonesian gambling page and its ISP Summit pages (ispsummit.tech, canadianispsummit.ca) are dead; only cnoc.ca is live. DSLReports' forums return 503 and r/VOIP could not be opened.
Software serving this industry
Vertical software markets filed along the same branch of NAICS — who sells to these businesses, and who an entrant would have to displace.