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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."
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 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.