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Bell Wants to Dump Third-Party ISP's Entirely
phorm writes "Not only is Bell interfering with third-party traffic, but — according to CBC — they want third-party ISP and phone carriers off their network entirely. Bell is lobbying to have lease-conditions on their networks removed, stating that enough competition exists that they should not longer be required to lease infrastructure to third-parties. Perhaps throttling is just the beginning?"
I'd be surprised if the Bells in the USA didn't start making this same argument here soon. After all, they have to compete with cable and satellite. Why would anyone need more choices than that?
Canada has the Competition Act and also a common law framework that provides the legal basis.
Why shouldn't they be forced by the government to lease their last mile? The infrastructure that Bell uses for delivery of their service was paid for by Canadian tax dollars, and supported by a government provided monopoly.
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
I've thought for quite a while that forcing telecoms to lease bandwidth to 3rd party providers has been a bad idea. Look at Qwest's leasing options with MSN. MSN has a contract that states they MUST be the lowest-priced Qwest-backed ISP! This is, of course, only BAD for competition. It's just supporting the huge MS monopoly.
Enlightenment is the elimination of that which is unnecessary.
Essentially the tax payers are the ones who created and funded the company. It has served its purpose.
As with any government agency, once the services it provided are done by private industry, it is time to cut out the public funding. The government should sell back all the hardware to all the companies involved and use the funds generated to cut taxes.
Doubtless this seems unfair to Bell, but the government was unfair to everyone when it created an intentional monopoly. When they whine, and they will whine, they should be told to join the competition that they felt was healthy enough.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
I know, government regulation of telecoms is so crazy considering that all we taxpayers have done is pay for much of the infrastructure, granted them monopolies, and gave up our property for their right of way. I mean, we should just cancel all our deals with them and let them do whatever they like.
I'd love to see a couple dozen telephone lines coming to my house so I can lease from the company I like, rather than having only one. And I'd also like a couple dozen sewer lines, water lines, and road networks I can choose from, too. As well as competing fire departments, police departments, and sanitation.
I mean, why should I pay for garbage removal when I have no sense of smell. My property, my rules. If I don't want to pay for fire protection, I shouldn't have to. If my house burns down, who else could that possibly hurt?
All these government regulations of private industry do nothing but hurt us. Competition will always ensure we have the best possible services available, and there is nothing government can do that corporations can't do better.
The scary thing is, there are people who actually believe that crap, and want to force those beliefs on us rather than just opting out of the system and making one of their own.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Here's the issue: Bell and the other Stentor consortium members were essentially granted a monopoly--and were given government support--to build the telecommunications network in Canada.
When high-speed internet came to the forefront, Bell utterly failed to deliver a competitive product and was basically going to fall back a the "gentleman's agreement" with the cable- and phone companies that would have allowed a maximum amount of profit for the providers with a minimum amount of service on lines that we, the consumer, subsidized.
The CRTC, deciding that the existing Bell/Stentor cartel had done little except gouge customers and that forcing leased lines had done wonders for the long-distance market, hit Bell with the same thing. The result is that Canada has one of the best broadband adoption rates in the world, despite a fairly unfriendly geography.
Yes, they own the last mile, yes, and pay for it, but it's not like they didn't get a free ride from the CRTC and the Canadian public for years. Revoking this will result in a broadband market that looks like the Canadian wireless market: something like the "gentleman's agreement" mentioned above that keeps prices uncompetitively high.
On that note, I personally think the CRTC hasn't gone far enough: they need to force the incumbent providers to open their wireless networks ("System Access fee" my ass) as well. The wireless market in this country is abysmal (as in "worse than the US, by a large margin") and the reason is that the incumbents maintain a cartel and buy or destroy competition.
Heck, Canadian content rules have actually kept foriegn competition out of the market, which means that all Bell et al have had to compete with are small fish and bottom-feeders, which is what Bell wants to squash. I don't like T-Mobile or Verizon much, but I'd like to see them slap some respect into Bell, Telus and Rogers
--srj/mmv
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Ma Bell is alive and well, and living under the name "AT&T" these days, which is technically what she was known as before the whole "Ma Bell" thing...but the current company is technically SBC (Southwest Bell), which happened to be the nastiest and most voracious of the little bells. They switched their name to AT&T inc after they bought the "original" AT&T co which was the chunk of the original company that was allowed to keep the name after the divesture.
(I know the preceding paragraph is nearly incoherent. The business relationships are completely incestuous.)
Half of the original Bells are owned by AT&T these days, and with buyouts like Cingular, it's arguably nastier than before.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The question is - how do you build an open-access infrastructure without having to completely rip and replace all the last mile infrastructure in the United States and Canada? Not that I doubt its possible, but from a business standpoint, they like the current infrastructure. They make money no matter what - either by charging competitors to allow them access to the system or by charging customers. And they don't have to invest capital in updating the network (which everyone but Verizon seems to be avoiding). Now...I'd love to see more municipal networks that lease access to the telcos, but I don't see that happening.
My Sysadmin Blog
You're going to be modded up by people who don't get to your last sentence o_o Also I was using "insane" as one of those cool kid words, not like how you 4-digit-uid geezers think it means.. highly regulated not unfairly regulated
I can't believe they could actually get away with this. There goes VoIP. This basically leaves us with Rogers and Bell to choose from. Period. Since Bell is still mainly a telephone company, I can't imagine Bell being too happy with customers switching to VoIP providers either (same with Rogers, they also offer a home phone service. ). If they can get away with throttling their internet provider competition or flat out lobby against their existence, what's to say they won't plain out choke out VoIP as well? Or Skype? Or "Youtube" - because they "compete" against their sat service. Where does this stop.
We, citizens, need to light a fire up the government's ass to step in on this one.
[alk]
If I was in government, I'd say yes to Bell, but with the caveat that they would now to have rent the right-of-ways they were effectively given all those years ago.
The Telcos have forgotten that their networks, both in Canada and the US, were built, one way or the other, with the good graces and money of the taxpayers. Those right-of-ways were essentially a gift, with the understanding that they would be used to make communications near-universal.
If the Telcos want to end that universality, then I think their automatic right to those right-of-ways should be removed. We can either go to an open bid, or we can do annual leases, the rates dependent on how nicely the Telcos behave. If they don't like it, they can go buy their own right-of-ways. Might be a bit problematic in major cities, but oh well, I don't think these bastards deserve an ounce of consideration any more.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
See through the politics and bullshit, this is a "red herring" they say they don't want the extra revenue from the 3rd party ISPs, but in reality they are just asking for a concession from the 3rd parties ("OK we'll accept the throttling, just don't drop us")
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
Until this all hit the fan in recent weeks (after the CRTC affirmed their policy to force Bell to continue to lease its lines) I had no idea there was a problem. Just looking at the math on paper, it seems relatively clear that Bell is still making decent money maintaining the network, as $20 of my $29.99 internet service is going directly to Bell, and I am also paying $9.10 extra for a dry loop to my house as well. So, of my monthly internet cost, $29.10 is for Bell to provide the connection, and roughly $10 is for my ISP to provide a service over that connection. For that small portion of the cost, they provide a generous cap, do not throttle, have excellent customer service and provide a very reliable internet connection.
Bell gets the lion's share of the monthly fee, and my ISP gets the smaller chunk, and does not complain at all about the service they provide vs. its cost.
I would have to say though that my preference would be that Bell should be broken up into one company that maintains the network, and another company that sells the service. That way, Bell's Sympatico service would have to compete on equal footing with any other DSL provider.
I think, in those early days, it was a wise investment on the part of government. Within a few decades, phones reached just about every house in the US and Canada. The government (really the people) knew that no company could raise the capital required for such a massive infrastructure program, so they popped in the right-of-ways and the like and granted the companies an effective monopoly, but with some rather important understandings.
What's happened is that the telcos have forgotten that the taxpayer subsidized and continues to subsidize their networks.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There is no government imposed system access fee. Every provider in Canada that I've seen charges it, and nobody has to. It was originally intorduced to help expand the network but that day has passed, and now there are no requirements for it, but that didn't stop anybody (including Rogers) from charging it.
Unfortunately, there is no OPT OUT available for these "public services" or "utilities"
Its take it or move to BFE Midwest and live like a fricken hermit.
That being said the Telecoms and Cable Cos seem to forget they pretty much asked to be a utility to get the (semi)monopoly status, and now don't want to act like one.
And don't get me started on the whole net nutrality subject~!!!! (/sarcasm (for those who do not get the new ~=sarcasm meme))
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
You're correct. The problem with the System Access fee is that the providers and their resellers have implicitly (and occasionally explicitly) said that it's government mandated. The CRTC has expressed some interest in forcing them to clarify it, which, of course, they're fighting.
I've personally had a "discussion" with a Rogers Enterprise Wireless rep (and his sales engineer) on this point when negotiating our contract. He and several of his colleagues were under the impression that it was CRTC-mandated.
--srj/mmv
In 1996 my family signed up as beta-testers for cable internet with Videotron. We were given a 5/5 connection, as beta-testers at the time it was free but once the service was mainline it was only 40 dollars a month. Not bad, keep in mind that Telus wasn't even offering DSL at this point... Shaw then buys out Videotron in Alberta and creates the "powersurfr" brand... prices go up and speeds fall to 2/768! Now, for a lovely 60 dollars a month I can get a 10/1 connection that has a cap... it used to be unlimited! Oh, did I mention that anything meaningful is throttled? I think the Canadian telecoms saw Australia's clusterfuck and wanted to be just like them. Okay, maybe not. Even though Telstra may be a constant thorn in the side of every Aussie, there are a lot of third party providers leasing their lines. The ACCC requires Telstra to lease the last-mile out and I doubt this will ever change.If Bell gets their way, the caps that Rogers are starting to put into place out East are going to look like amazing deals in mere hours. I can't tell you how much I hate to side with the CRTC but they'd be morons to let this happen (that said they've done everything they can to prop up CTV and ExpressVu).
However, I don't think that the government should force them to lease infrastructure to competitors.
When the government gives businesses billions of dollars, taxpayer dollars, in subsidies the government better attach strings to the money. Such as open access. And actually building the infrastructure the money was given to them to do.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Would someone please tell me where I can an ISP in Ottawa (Canada's Capital of all places) that doesn't have a downstream cap, or throttling/traffic shaping and has (god formid) decent customer service.
I'm looking for a new ISP because just this week I got a notice from Rogers that they've decided to change the definition of 'unlimited' to 95Gigs + $1.50/Gig after that. While I understand that Rogers is utterly incompetent, once my services and billing were properly set up, they required very little maintenance once they were up and running (it took me almost two years for their 'system' to properly bill me automatically and send me a paper invoice). Because of this I haven't had a reason to switch. ***Attention Shareholders*** Now I do.
I've been looking at CIA.com (www.cia.com) recently as they come highly recommended, but I'm waiting until I can get some more concrete numbers before signing up.
And yes, I will be cancelling my Rogers account now (After nine years), and have no plans to switch over to Bell.
I think that's starting to change. Rogers says it relatively clearly on their site when you're looking at plans "A $6.95 monthly System Access Fee (non-government fee), ", and I believe others do as well.
That's one of the reasons I do prepaid service. Its about the only way to avoid these fees. We'll be getting a second phone soon and doing the same thing. I was thinking about a couples' package for ~$35/month, until you realize that its actually over $50/month once you total up all the extra fees.
I feel this provides for a fairly open access network. Competitors can hook into just about any area of our network. We have more than enough bandwidth to our DSLAMs to handle 10 meg connections to every port. The only "competitors" that I feel are completely useless are the rebilling kind, the ones who will charge you for our service, which we provide the whole way, just front line tech support is provided by the rebiller.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Except this is Bell Canada we're talking about, which was split off from the whole bunch about 60 or 70 years ago. They have nothing to do with AT&T or any of the Bells you mention, except that they share a common name, and that's because they were all incorporated by Alexander Graham Bell.
I do know that here in Atlanta AT&T has been making it very difficult for third-party ISPs to operate. With AT&T trying to hard to kick Comcast in the ass, they are now giving priority to AT&T's on demand video, I often get disconnected or get smacked with high latency at peak times. My neighbors who use AT&T's own dsl, don't have these issues. I'm just waiting for the day when AT&T says enough and just boots them. I really don't know what I would do. Comcast filters, AT&T plays mean kid on the block lol. Besides, my third-party ISP actually has employees who answer the phone, speak english, live in the same town as me and KNOW WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT!!
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume that you genuinely don't know what's wrong with your suggestion.
There's plenty of competition in high speed internet, but there is *NOT* plenty of competition in terms of technologies in use. Bell Nexxia owns 100% of the copper to the house. Likewise for cable TV lines... in Ottawa, where I live, for example, 100% of the cable TV lines (and that includes cable Internet) are owned by either Rogers (on the Ontario side), or Videotron (on the Quebec side). There is exactly one provider of wireless Internet services.
That means that if Bell's argument is accepted by the CRTC, the Ottawa market will go from having about 50 options for high speed Internet to having exactly 3, each with a monopoly on their respective technology.
To make matters worse, not one of those three providers offers a service that is suitable for technologies like VPN, or running your own server. All three of them filter access on those ports, and won't allow their users any incoming connections. It's also in their service agreements that they can terminate your service if they catch you running a server.
In other words... not only will the variety of consumer-level services be cut down to 3 monopolies, the quality of services available to consumers will fall into the shitter. It's already fairly well known that if you need to run a VPN, you don't go with Bell, Rogers, or Storm in this city... you go with one of the 3rd parties that's leasing time through one of those three, to get unfettered access. If you want decent access to the Internet, you have to buy a corporate connection from these people... Bell's cheapest runs about $80/month, Rogers is the same, and Storm is $195/month. Just for the privilege of actually having a connection to the 'net which you can use for more than surfing and e-mail.
What's more, tax dollars paid for the establishment of Bell Nexxia. We paid for that copper which they own. So no. They should absolutely be required to continue leasing service. Actually, the Government should acquire Bell Nexxia and turn it back into a crown corporation, and make BCE, the phone/Internet company, lease time from Nexxia as well.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
and the sooner they pay back the differential between the monopolistic prices they received to subsidize their phone infrastructure for 100 years, and competitive prices, the better.
Those funds can be used to subsidize third party "last mile" networks, if Bell Canada is so suddenly keen on bringing competition to the market! And while we are at it, the cable carriers can do the same thing (albiet for a shorter time period). Lets see how they like it when there is more than a duopoly involved in the "last mile"
We have the Competition Act, which replaced the Combines Investigation Act back in 1986 ...
Also the CRTC.
Bell was able to build out their network thanks to their monopoly position for many decades. The network infrastructure, since it was paid for by the excess levies and guaranteed returns allowed under that monopoly, should be nationalized.
Kevin Smith on Prince
The most disconcerting message in the story is the interview Nowak had with Paul Geist. In it is mention of the fact that Minister of Industry Jim Prentice is AWOL on the issue. I mean, who would dare ask the Minister in charge of investigating anti-competitive offences - and they are serious offences - to look into what has to be one of the worst companies to do business with in Canada. I won't even mention that one of the most recent former Ministers of Industry had just been previously employed as ::cough:: head of regulatory affairs at ::cough:: Bell Canada.
While you might think that the CRTC is an old antequated fossil that needs to be put out of its misery, the Minsitry of Industry is on life support. What's left of it is being run by gutless bureaucrats more interested in their career path in private business post-federal brothel than protecting Canadians from scheming corporate predators, marketing fraud, advertising scams, artificially high gas prices, the list goes on and on...
Bell Canada is the least of our worries.
-- Karma whore? You betcha. --
The deal here in Hoser-Ville, is that the ISP's lease the bandwidth from Bell. They also pay around 20$ per user to bell. So I dont see how bell is loosing out here at all. If the independant wants more, they pay for it. It really dosent make any sense.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
The impression I got from Bell's argument is something like this:
What they said: The market was opened up for competition, but now there's enough competition so we shouldn't have to still hold their hands.
What they mean: People are competing with us, despite the fact that we own the network and fuck around so badly with our wholesale clients that their problems never get solved in a reasonable amoutn of time, and instead of fixing our ludicrously broken processes or continuing to lose out to people who use our network better than we do, we want our monopoly back.
Bell does have a point; a lot of companies (like one ISP I worked for for almost a week after my training ended) just keep reselling Bell's and Telus's services (despite getting dicked around all the time); they have essentially the same prices, plans, and service as Bell, but it takes longer to get anything done because you're one more step removed from the technicians.
An ISP a friend worked for, however, took the other route. After selling Bell's service in Montreal, they hired my friend to do their ADSL rollout. They bought their own bandwidth, installed their own DSLAMs, and started moving customers over, and you know what? Paying for bandwidth directly was cheaper for them than leasing an essentially unlimited line from Bell.
As a result, they started moving all of their customers over from Bell's per-customer charges to their third-party's per-megabit rates, and they're saving tons of money - enough to use to buy the new ADSL2+ equipment and move even more people over.
The lesson is: Don't wait for Bell to stop being dicks; do things right yourself and it pays off.
The thing is that while some things are very effective to run as a monopoly, it's very difficult to make a monopoly run effectively. The drive for margins tend to be lacking throughout the organization, and everyone is bloating their own needs to get a more comfortable budget. Ultimately the politicians granting money try to cut costs but it's like working for a company where only the CEO wants to save money. Also you have issues with workers intentionally slowing down and creating a backlog, it's very easy to lose to passive resistance because usually the solution is to recieve more money, not that the department is laid off because the company is bleeding.
They try various methods like regulation, bids and other things but none of them really work that well. Take bids for example, they usually deliver the minimum of the service requirements, the way the operation is driven is kept as a competitive secret and it's usually hard to get real competition against the incumbent that's already got the staff, the routines and the equipment in place. Regulation is trying to keep the squeeze on the company to simulate the market pressure, but it's really difficult to know how hard to squeeze because the regulated company will undoubtably say you're trying to squeeze blood from a rock. Set service requirements and you'll certainly get a too high claim of how much it'll cost to deliver and so on.
In the end, I understand perfectly well why people look to many of those poorly handled monopolies and say "Man, if only we could get private companies competing for that". I've only dealt closely with one such monopoly and there were simply so many excesses, the great location, the great offices, the fancy equipment in EVERY meeting room, the free beverages and snacks, the great cafeteria and a million other small things... it's all those things that show they got money to spend, and don't really care what the bill adds up to. They just need something that legitimately can be expensed as business cost, and it's fine. They're still on public salary levels and they can't raise those much, but it's no doubt the money was loose and the work pressure low...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Leave the country. Start your own. Go live in a cave or camp out in a national forest. I know some people who've opted out of the system and pay no taxes.
How would I opt out of a lassez-faire free market system where all the real estate was owned?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I know that's how it was traditionally done, but come on man, this is the twenty first century. Killing them all off is so inefficient when you can indenture them to you permanently through economic coercion. Huzzah for the owning class!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Still decades behind Europe, which has a more heavily regulated industry, but enjoys greater use, lower prices, more flexibility and better competition?
the other point is in Canada and the US, the cable-co and the Tele-co's don't really compete that much, they seem to do a dance around the borders but don't really enter the vital territory. The third party ISP on the other hand do compete when Bell-CA started filtering, they chopped the legs out from under the 3rd parties by eliminating one of the few ways they could offer a substantially better service by actualy delivering what was promised in the ads.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I want to be a jerk and say Darfur, but...
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I've used both Rogers and Bell.
They both have shitty service and behave like monopolies.
I finally switched to uniserve (ca.inter.net) a company based out of Montreal (I think).
I can highly recommend them. I was totally floored by their excellent service. $5 cheaper per month the first year (then the same price with modem rental), tech guys that speak English, support Mac OS X, windows, and even linux! Helpful friendly and polite.
They even walked me through how to configure my ADSL modem as a bridge so I could use my router behind it (its default configuration was as a router).
After every tech call to them, I received a follow up call 23-48 hrs later with them checking that the problem had been resolved to my satisfaction!
The only two problems I had were caused by Bell:
One was on start up. Bell "forgot" to activate the line. Uniserve explained honestly to me that their hands were tied for any Bell issue Bell "requires" 48hrs to fix it.
The second problem was an outage caused by Bell (Bell claimed a "snow storm" damaged system... which ironically happened two days earlier on the Saturday and my internet was fine the day after on Sunday. Monday it died. Personally I think Bell throttled my ISP to almost zero since the error was a time out error (modem live lights worked) so they could give Bell business customers access while I waited for them to fix other lines that had failed on the weekend and Bell had not bothered to fix them.
I take uniserve's word over Bell, their service an support any other time has been consistent and outstanding.
Where as all previous experiences with Bell have been well... lets say leaving a lot to be desired.
If the CRTC reinstates Bells monopoly ISP service will go to crap.
Rogers vs Bell. What kind of competition is that?
The truth is if Bell or Rogers actually listened to their customers and gave them the service they want then they wouldn't have to worry about competition.
I will be writing my MP.
Note: I do not work for uniserve, and no I wasn't halucinating they actually called me back!
----- "Profanity is the one language that all programmers understand."
I'm curious about something: What does 'BFE Midwest' stand for, or mean?
I moved out to the Minneapolis-St Paul area a couple years ago, and although I've always met great folks wherever I've, these Minnesotans are the nicest bunch of them all. Helpful, you can talk to young and old alike out in public without getting paranoid or 'WTF' reactions that are so common elsewhere in the States. And the State, itself, has this sort of conservative, yet very progressive 'tilt' to it. And of course a bunch of the greatest 80s bands came from here. I'm impressed... If Comcast could just drop dead, en masse, in a hurry, this place would be perfect!
BFE Bum F.ck Egypt. Middle of Nowhere... Just to the left of Nowhere. So far out from the city, the rural gives up.
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.
Wouldn't that be the last 1.6 kilometers?
Nah, Canadians are bilingual when it comes to measurement systems.