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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."
For those of you just joining us, it may be easy to forget the days when consumer Internet access wasn't unlimited. Dial-up connections were called "56K" but actually around 40-53K in practical use, and services like AOL and Prodigy billed by the hour to look at your e-mail, post on limited message boards, and use their clunky early Web browsers.
Unlimited service isn't a right, it was just a trend that started when a price war broke out because there were far too many ISPs. There were even a few national ISPs back then that offered free access if you were willing to look at ads on your screen. Natural selection shut these companies down and a string of mergers leave us basically back where we started with the Bells dominant and their upstart competitors being the already-hated cable TV providers.
If this leads to a $20 a month 5 GB at 1 Mbps plan I'd have it installed at my grandmother's house where there's no computer and no cell phone service in an instant for the family to use while we're visiting. Right now, the cheapest non-dialup plan is an $35 for 1 Mbps DSL that isn't worth it.
Unsurprisingly no mention is made of reduced fees for people consuming less bandwidth. I guess "usage based pricing" sounded better than "we're capping monthly bandwidth and charging if you go over".
The problem is that you are a computer geek living by yourself. When you factor in the average family size of about 3 people, that 30GB usage of yours would be 90GB for a geeky family.
At 90GB, that hits the $22.50 mark which is about 70% increase at the fees with NO additional improvement in services. What else in the IT world has rates going up without major improvements/speeds/capacity?
will only lead me to block more advertising. They eat up most of the bandwidth..
Price it like a utility then.
$8 "connection fee" for 100amp err... 10Mbit service
$0.07 per GB.
But then people that just check email would only net them $8.07... can't have that, can we?
$1+ per GB is insane. In civilized countries you can get 3G internet for that sort of money.
Sent from my PDP-11
The problem is that you are a computer geek living by yourself. When you factor in the average family size of about 3 people, that 30GB usage of yours would be 90GB for a geeky family.
Well, if you buy into the notion that bits cost money, why shouldn't that family pay more? They pay for the increased electrical consumption of multiple people, why not the increased data consumption?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The real point of this is that Bell is allowed to impose this pricing on their wholesale customers, IE other ISPs that lease Bell's ADSL lines. For example my ISP is not Bell, however my ADSL line runs through a Bell DSLAM which then pushes the traffic to my ISP, thus my ISP will be forced to start billing me for usage because Bell will be billing them per GB instead of just for my line. Basically the CRTC just sounded the death knell for the smaller ISPs who stand next to no chance at competing against a giant company that already is allowed to throttle their traffic and limit bandwidth to 5Mbit, and now is allowed to set their bandwidth costs.
First "Grandma who checks her email once a day" should be getting the internet for $1.99 per month with a $50 install fee.
This is the problem. I think it makes sense that the people who use the most should pay the most, but the prices only go up, not down. So if you want a fast connection but only plan to download 1 GB of data per month, you still have to pay full price, but now the ISPs want to say "Well we'll keep charging everyone the same price as before, but now we'll charge certain people more". In other words, it costs more, but there's no benefit for consumers.
Bell Canada is imposing their caps and pricing scheme on customers of all independent ISPs selling DSL connections. So say an ISP is selling an account with a 200 gig limit for 30 bucks. Now Bell is saying that each ISP must pay them a $21 fee for leasing the DSL connection and a surcharge of $1.25 for every gig of usage above 60 gigs. The numbers are approximate but they're close enough.
But then people that just check email would only net them $8.07... can't have that, can we?
We should.
The powerco doesn't "rate limit" me depending on what I do with the electricity I use, and neither should my ISP.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The rest of the modernized world are flat rate. For the same $30 a month, people in Hong Kong have unlimited 1Gbps internet. So wise one, please explain to me how can they make money even assuming that 100% of that $30 goes into just transporting bits at 200X times faster and potential 200X usage than the 5Mbps of DSL in Canada that is under this decision?
CRTC's reasoning of approving UBB is it is an economic measure of "traffic management" and not so much as a cost recovery.
Population of Hong Kong: 7,038,000
Population of Toronto: 2.48 million people (5.5 million in the GTA - Greater Toronto Area)
Size of Hong Kong: 1,104 sq km
Size of GTA: 1,451.5 sq km
Conclusion? Higher population density for Hong Kong, which probably means it's cheaper to wire everyone up.
Sounds like a good conclusion too, but then:
Population of Sweden: 9,059,651
Size of Sweden: 410,335 sq km of land
So I don't get it either...
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
If people want to use the Internet to download massive amounts of p2p content, do they really expect they should pay the same as Grandma who checks her email once a day? Bandwidth is a finite resource, even if we don't believe it.
Yeah, totally. And because of this move, Bell will be cutting the price of grandma's connection by 90%!
Oh wait, it won't, because this really isn't "usage based billing", but both a money grab and an effort to cripple competition even further.
They're charging a dollar a gig, which is quite literally thousands of times the actual cost.
And they're allowed to cripple the speed of wholesale lines while they offer higher speeds to their direct customers.
Never mind that they have all this leverage (in terms of infrastructure and last mile copper) because they were a monopoly until '97.
And sadly, there are more than enough people like you out there to let the telecoms get away with pretty much anything.
This is why our cost for broadband is about twice as much (well, even more now) as it is for people in the USA.
http://gizmodo.com/5390014/internet-speeds-and-costs-around-the-world-shown-visually
No, the "Canada is less dense and they have to provide to these small villages" argument does not fly because our broadband coverage of rural areas is laughably pathetic and a significant portion of small communities can't get any decent internet access.
And it's just going to get worse, so thanks for being part of that.
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