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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?"
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?
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.
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.
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.
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'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
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 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...
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I want to be a jerk and say Darfur, but...
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.