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TORONTO — The scuffle over wholesale high-speed Internet rates is heating up between big Internet providers and the indie providers who buy access to their networks and resell it to consumers at lower rates.

Major providers and consumer advocates waded into the fray this week after smaller providers demanded that Canada’s Internet regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, throw out the interim wholesale prices proposed by large providers last week.

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Smaller providers were baffled when the proposed wholesale rates went up almost across the board even though the CRTC indicated the existing rates were likely not just and reasonable. The Canadian Network Operators Consortium asked the CRTC not to approve the interim rates and to send the large companies back to the drawing board, as they deviated from the CRTC’s cost calculation formula.

Shaw and Cogeco, Internet providers who bucked the trend and proposed some lower prices, wrote to the CRTC to ask the regulator to ignore the consortium’s demand for a redo.