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CRTC Approves Usage Based Billing In Canada
qvatch writes with this from CBC News: "The CRTC has approved Bell Canada's request to bill Internet customers, both retail and wholesale, based on how much they download each month. The plan, known as usage-based billing, will apply to people who buy their Internet connection from Bell, or from smaller service providers that rent lines from the company, such as Teksavvy or Acanac. ... Customers using the fastest connections of five megabits per second, for example, will have a monthly allotment of 60 gigabytes, beyond which Bell will charge $1.12 per GB to a maximum of $22.50. If a customer uses more than 300 GB a month, Bell will also be able to implement an additional charge of 75 cents per gigabyte."
net neutrality means "treat the ISP like a utility", and guess what???
Most utilities (even some PPTs) sell metered service: the more you use, the more you pay.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
actually it's 60+(22.5/1.12)GB, or about 80GB.
From 0-60GB, you pay a set amount X.
Between 60-80GB, you pay an amount between X and X+22.50
From 80-300GB, you pay X+22.50
Over 300GB, you pay more.
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My new TiVo box streams Netflix in HD when available. It seems to average around 5mbit/s for the duration of the program. That works out to ~2.2 gigabytes per hour of programming.
It's not really all that hard to exceed 20GB in this day and age. Looking back at my Cacti logs I seem to average around 55GB per month. And no, I don't download stuff for the sake of downloading it.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Usage billing was already being done by most ISPs.
This move just let Bell (completely ridiculous) lets bell impose bandwidth charges on the competitors who get their local loop from Bell.
These guys generally are paying for their own backbone to the internet so it is ridiculous that they have to pay bell again for that bandwidth.
Anyway more monopoly supporting moves from the CRTC, not a real surprise.
The structure of all this is hidden from consumers so it's pretty difficult for the average user to understand but this scheme amounts to double billing.
These charges are for WHOLESALE clients.
So Bell is selling ADSL access services to ISPs. Those ISPs are required to pay for a high capacity link to the Bell backbone in order to receive the traffic generated by their customers. That link between the ISP and Bell is the point where Bell used to be billing for usage. A lower volume ISP would pay for a link that could burst up to a certain speed, they would pay for the loop charge and the would pay for BANDWIDTH usage. A larger ISP may decided to pay for a dedicated link which allows full time 100% usage of the link they have paid for. They could saturate their link 24/7 and they would pay a higher price for their bandwidth fee to Bell. That is where the billing of bandwidth on a wholesale basis has occurred for years. This link is 100% dedicated to the transport of ADSL customer traffic between Bell and the ISP. It doesn't get used for any other purpose.
Now on TOP of the fee the ISP's have already been paying to Bell for bandwidth on their dedicated link to the ADSL aggregation backbone they now want to bill the customers directly for the traffic they inject into the ADSL backbone. So they now collect a toll at the entrance to their network and the exit of the network effectively billing twice for the same ISP to customer traffic.
If Bell feels they are not charging their wholesale ISP's enough for the bulk pipe they bought well then who's fault is that? Those pipes are on contracts and when those contracts expire they can renegotiate those rates.
I don't understand why the CRTC is going to allow this.
Actually I do understand why they made the decision to allow it, if you look at the makeup of the CRTC boards they are stuffed full of big telecom ex executives. The majority of power at the CRTC comes from people who used to hold jobs at the old monopoly telecoms providers. I just don't understand how they can defend their decision as their explanations seem to defy the facts.
Ignoring for the moment the fact that apparently TFA is about wholesale rather than retail pricing ...
Based on the experience in New Zealand (which faced this problem earlier than elsewhere, due to the high cost of sending data underwater) most consumers prefer a fixed bill. Nowadays, after some initial thrashing around, most ISPs offer plans where if you exceed your data cap your bandwidth is cut down to a little better than modem speed, but you don't incur any extra charges. My ISP allows you to choose to pay an extra charge to increase your cap on a given month.
I expect eventually the rest of the world will catch up and offer similar schemes.
In France, everything goes through the Internet line. I have a white box at home with SFR written on it; I plug my TV into it, my phone and my computers. I pay about 35 Euros a month for unlimited national phone calls, about 40 channels and unlimited Internet, basically as fast as my line will allow it (which comes to about 8Mbit/s). There are no download quotas, no surprises, nothing. You pay to get connected, and that is how it goes. I can only imagine how much data gets transferred, between normal use, uploading/downloading files for work, listening to icecast all day long, downloading games via Impulse or Steam, watching the TV, listening to the gf spend hours on the phone with her sister and parents... No-one in France is charging additional fees, except for 3G Internet access, and even then, some of them are unlimited.
The urgent is done, the impossible is on the way, for miracles expect a small delay.