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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."
You're wrong. If Bell was a utility then it would sell the infrastructure, not the service. Bell sells its internet service at the same cost as its competitors, but then turns around and says "If you order extra services, your internet bill will drop by $10/month". This gives them an unfair advantage over smaller companies.
Bell should be split into two companies: one providing infrastructure and one selling services on that infrastructure. Bundling should not be allowed.
From the rumor is that the cap is set at 60 a month. You start your bill at 30$% and add to that by going over the cap, until it maxes out at 22.50. So there is no discount for anyone using less.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
What it is:
1st bit = $X, presumably $CAN
2nd bit through 60GB = free
60GB - 80GB = $1.12/GB
80GB-300GB = free
300GB+ = $0.75/GB
What it should be:
First bit = $X
2nd bit through 60GB = free
Each GB thereafter = less than $X/60.
In other words: consistent per-GB charge with a monthly minimum and possibly a small fixed charge, meaning your initial allowance per-GB cost is more than your per-GB cost for usage beyond your allowance.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If you look at bandwidth costs at most hosting facilities in North America it costs about $0.10/GB. The hosting providers undoubtedly make a nice profit selling bandwidth which means Bell Canada is charging over an order of magnitude more than the service costs. They also have no incentive to reduce the price.
Yeah, that's the real crux of the problem. Bell has a government-sanctioned monopoly over the lines that were largely paid for by taxpayers, and smaller ISPs have no choice but to bend over backward for Bell.
An ISP should definitely not be put in charge of leasing our lines to their competing ISPs, since that's a giant conflict of interest. To make it even worse, Bell sells satellite TV, so Internet streaming isn't in their best interest either. The CBC got screwed by this a while ago when they tried to broadcast a TV show via bittorrent, and Bell shaped the hell out of it.
The CRTC has tried to control this problem with regulation, but I think they're going about it the wrong way. Our lines are a shared resource, like roads. The government should buy them from Bell and lease them out to ISPs in a non-discriminatory way.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.