Where your $90 internet bill actually goes
63 cents of every retail dollar never stays with the company you pay.
Take an ordinary internet bill from a wholesale-based provider and pull it apart, and a strange fact appears: most of it never stays with the company you pay.
Of every retail dollar on that bill, roughly 63 cents flows straight through to the company that owns the physical network, as regulated wholesale access. Around 17 cents goes to equipment, provisioning, and operations. About 12 covers support and billing. What remains for the provider whose name is on the envelope is roughly 8 cents.
Once you see that split, a lot of Canadian internet pricing stops being mysterious.
- On a typical wholesale-based internet bill, roughly 63% is network rent paid to the infrastructure owner, 17% equipment and operations, 12% support and billing, and 8% the reseller's gross margin.
- Your internet bill is mostly rent on a wire someone else owns, at rates the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) regulates.
- The thin 8% slice is the entire space a reseller competes in, which is why their prices cluster low and tight.
- The incumbent's own retail bill has no wholesale line, which is where the room for the big regular-rate margin lives.
- Real leverage, therefore, is not squeezing one thin margin. It is making many bills negotiable at once.
The anatomy of a 100 Mbps internet bill
Standardise on an ordinary 100 Mbps connection from a wholesale-based provider and follow the dollar. The largest share, roughly 63 cents, is the regulated wholesale fee for access to the incumbent's last-mile network: the cable or fibre physically reaching your home. About 17 cents covers the modem, provisioning, and network operations that turn raw access into a working service. Around 12 cents pays for the humans and systems that answer your calls and issue your bills. The final 8 cents, roughly, is the reseller's gross margin, out of which comes marketing, overhead, and any profit.
These proportions are a compiled industry breakdown from our market research rather than any single company's audited statement, and individual providers vary. But the shape is the story, and the shape is stable: the bill is mostly the wire.
| ('n', 'Share') | Where it goes |
|---|---|
| 63% | Wholesale network access: rent paid to the infrastructure owner |
| 17% | Equipment, provisioning, and network operations |
| 12% | Customer support and billing |
| 8% | The reseller’s entire gross margin |
Your internet bill is mostly rent on a wire. Everything else is negotiation.
Why the biggest slice explains the prices
The 63% wholesale floor explains why independent providers' prices cluster where they do: they can only compete inside the 37 cents that is not network rent, and most of that is real cost. It also explains why they can still undercut incumbents so sharply. The incumbent's retail arm pays no wholesale fee to itself, so its regular rate contains room that a reseller's price structurally cannot, and inertia is what lets that room go unclaimed. When you see a big-provider regular rate of $75 to $90 beside a reseller at $36 on the same line, you are looking at that room, priced.
Where the negotiable room actually sits
Follow the logic one step further and the negotiating map draws itself. The wholesale layer is regulated: not negotiable by you. The reseller's 8 cents is thin: squeezing it harder is not where meaningful savings live. The room is in the incumbent regular-rate margin and in the acquisition budgets every provider spends to win customers, which is exactly the money that surfaces as promo rates, win-back offers, and retention discounts the moment a customer becomes contestable.
Which is why the single most effective thing a household can do is become contestable on purpose: know your renewal date, know the same-line alternative, and be genuinely willing to move.
What this means for how you shop
Three practical rules fall out of the anatomy. Compare 24-month totals, never advertised monthly rates, because the promo is acquisition spend with an expiry. Treat same-line resellers as the honest benchmark for what your connection costs without the brand premium. And remember that the one layer of the bill you cannot negotiate alone, the structure itself, is negotiable in aggregate: a pooled cohort makes providers bid their acquisition budget openly instead of spending it one doorstep at a time. That is the layer Whollar works on.
Now read your own bill the same way.
The checkup takes two minutes and tells you whether there is room in your bill worth acting on. And when your region's cohort opens, the structural layer, the one no single caller can move, gets negotiated for the whole group at once.
Free for households · nothing to buy today · you only act if a bid comes back that you want.
Frequently asked questions
How much does internet cost in Ontario?
A typical 100 Mbps plan from a major provider runs roughly $75 to $90 a month at regular rates, while wholesale-based independents on the same lines start around $36 to $60. Promo rates sit lower for 12 to 24 months before reverting. Your exact options depend on which networks reach your address.
Why is my internet bill so high if the margin is only 8%?
The 8% margin belongs to wholesale-based resellers, whose prices are correspondingly low. If your bill is high, you are most likely on an incumbent's regular rate, where there is no wholesale line item and considerably more margin room, or your promotional rate has expired. Comparing your bill against a same-line reseller's price shows the gap directly.
Does the network owner still get paid if I use a reseller?
Yes. Roughly 63 cents of each dollar you pay a wholesale-based provider flows to the network owner as regulated access fees. The infrastructure is funded either way; what changes is the retail margin on top and whose brand handles your service.
Is a cheaper bill just worse internet?
Not at the line level. A reseller on the incumbent's cable delivers the same physical connection at the same speed tier. Differences are in plan selection, equipment, policies, and support quality, which vary company by company rather than tracking price.