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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."
So the majority of canadians don't want this but the government goes the other way... nobody listens, oh joy
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
What is the CRTC thinking? Bell should be split into two companies: one responsible for the internet infrastructure, another for selling internet service to end-customers. It makes absolutely no sense for Bell to be able to rent its lines to Teksavvy, then tell it how to run its business. Bell is abusing its monopoly power!
What can we do about this?
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.
I guess everybody should start getting a little more worried about their open wifi connections.
Hopefully Cogeco will continue to charge overage fees to residential customers only. Us "Business" on commercial accounts aren't subject to such fees, yet.
I think Bell needs to work harder on providing Broadband to all Canadians rather than ripping off those who already have 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".
I'm a computer geek and I only use about 30 gigs a month (on a different provider). I don't really see what the problem is.
A friend works at a local ISP and he tells me that 0.1% of the customers use as much bandwidth as I do. That's a very tiny percentage.
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.
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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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..
How is this new? This is already being done in Canada - I have a 60gb limit with my Rogers internet service.
I say if they want to do this the capped rate has to be stated before any peak rate in advertisements
IE 60GBytes/month cap == 0.185Mbits/sec
Or they can state how long you can connect at your peak rate.
IE 5Mb/sec with a 60GB cap == 1.11 days of actual usage per month
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.
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.
The CRTC has approved Bell Canada's request to bill internet customers, both retail and wholesale, based on how much they download each month.
I think Bell needs to work harder on providing Broadband to all Canadians rather than ripping off those who already have it.
CRTC = Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
In other words, the Government regulators approved this.
You have a problem with it, take it up with them
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
That's a cute idea, but it is wrong.
With utilities, you are using consumable resources. Water costs per gallon. Gas costs per cubic foot. Electricity costs per ton of coal. If you don't use these resources in your home, then the utility doesn't burn up these resources at their end.
With the internet, the "utility" uses bits whether customers data are in those packets or not. As a second goes by, X number of Mbits are used and gone forever. You CANNOT save them like the other utilities I mentioned. It doesn't matter if anyone was using the network then or not, the resource is available and then gone forever.
That's why I think you should pay for a data RATE. Not a data QUANTITY.
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.
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.
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.
Australia and South Africa aren't part of the 'modernized' world?
Besides, I wasn't condoning this pricing practice. I was just pointing out the fact that the "I have a family, we need to use more" justification really wouldn't fly under a metered billing system for any other product, why should it fly for data?
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.
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.
The problem isn't that they are charging regular users on a scale, it's that they are charging their wholesale customers this way. All of the ISP's in Canada are required to sell their pipes to other companies, this is to create competition, as many of the companies are working off former legal monopolies, (crown corporations), and competition is few and far between. What this means is that competition is going to be COMPLETELY shot in the ISP world.
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.
The situation isn't the same. Rogers doesn't sell its bandwidth to resellers. Bell does.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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...
Remember: you can download tons of games, music, and movies each month not only legally, but with the blessing of the industry behind it (e.g., iTunes or other such online music store, NetFlix or other such video streaming service, etc.). And those aren't the only big things you can download. For a while, especially early in the release cycles, I was grabbing regular snapshots of KDE. That's about 300MB per snapshot. And I could be getting two, sometimes even three, a week. That doesn't take long to chew up real bandwidth. (I just downloaded and compiled 4.4.3 today.) And then, if a new release of OpenOffice comes out in a given month, that's another ~540MB.
Ok, so downloading KDE and OOo aren't normal-user activities. iTunes and NetFlix probably are.
I'm not sure if RIAA/MPAA are cheering on Bell's charges, or are opposed because it'll impact NetFlix's royalties among Bell customers. And in such a fight, who do we cheer for?
If you live in Canada and this didn't piss you off enough then there's always this you can use to fuel your rage.
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.
Do you watch TV online? (Hulu/Netflix/etc?) Because in my family, we do, and we'll blow past your 30 GB in a week or so.
Today, few people are watching TV online, but that figure is growing rapidly. My own habits have spread to my 5 employees and my business partners, due in part to my endorsements. Add in online gaming, video chats, working from home via VPN and remote-desktop, and perfectly legit, normal usage suddenly passes your threshold for "reasonable".
But why? Bandwidth is one of the few things which has no unit cost! Think about it...
In the garage at my house is a router. Currently, it's an "N" router with a 1Gb wired hub. Let's look at its history, roughly:
15 years ago, it was a 1.5 Mbit Lantastic network.
10 years ago, it was a 10 Mbit switching hub.
5 years ago, it was a 100 Mbit switching hub.
Today, it's a 1000 Mbit switching hub.
My point? the 1.5 Mbit Lantastic network used about the same amount of power as the Gbit switching hub - less than 1 amp of power, a la power brick. And yet, there are 3 orders of magnitude in useful performance, from the top to the bottom. That's from 1, to 10, to 100, to 1000 units.
BAD CAR ANALOGY: Can you imagine having a car when you are 16, that goes 20 MPH?
Can you imagine having a car when you are 21, that goes 200 MPH?
Can you imagine having a car when you are 26, that goes 2000 MPH?
Can you imagine having a car when you are 31, that goes 20,000 MPH?
See how silly this becomes? Bandwidth has no effective unit cost. Charging by the unit is counterproductive and is a detriment to social progress, and works to impede social advancements like watching the TV show you want, when you want to, and video chatting with Aunt Gladys before her Hysterectomy.
It's not just irritating, it's just a very bad idea founded in bad physics.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The major ISP's seem to disagree with you. Time Warner's COO Landel Hobbs has said himself that heavy users pose no threat to their profits. "If you are getting feedback that there is an immediate problem, nothing could be further from the truth," http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/time-warner-cable-profits-on-broadband-are-great-and-will-grow-because-of-caps/ Time Warner just reported a 30% increase in earnings http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704302304575213750225569156.html On top of that their bandwidth costs have been steadily decreasing. Seems pretty viable to me
What if grandma watches TV all day, does she pay more than me since I never watch tv? Since most tv connections are digital now then this is only fair, she is using more bandwidth than I am.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
What is the most impressive is that they managed to charge more for the same old 5Mbps ADSL service! + now they throttle P2P connection between 5PM and 2AM.
Clearly, this is an abused of their monopoly.
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With the new proposed rates, Bell would be charging reseller 18.20$/month just to get a ADSL line to a customers. This is about the same as before. What changes is that they now charge for the data going through the pipe. They couldn't charge 2$/month to lease a copper line because it cost much more than that to maintains! In fact, the most expensive thing an ISP has to do is to run copper wire to every house, and pay for the nice tech that plug you in when you rent their service.
Actually, data is pretty cheap to move around. You can get rate at 4/GB in large datacenter to move data anywhere in the world. Bell will be making a large profit with their 112.5/GB overcharge. Plus, Bell don't even have to move your data to the Internet, they only have to get it to your reseller which have to provide Internet connectivity. I don't believe it cost them more than 1/GB to move data to the reseller which is often local.
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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.
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.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I recently downgraded from traffic shaped 20 mbit virgin coax cable to 8 mbit post office adsl... so let's do the math.
On virgin I could get 20 mbit for 90 minutes, and then hit the cap, which cut me back to 5 mbit, so, doing the math at 3,600 seconds to the hour...
20 x 3600 x 1.5 = 108,000 mbit before the cap
5 x 3600 x 22.5 = 405,000 mbit after the cap
for a total maximum of 513,000 mbit or (/8) 64.125 gigabytes in 24 hours.
This was UK£ 35 a month so 1.15 a day, therefore 55.76 gigabyte per UK£
On the ADSL I actually get 7.2 mbit, no traffic shaping, no cap.
7.2 x 3600 x 24 = 622,080 mbit or (/8) 77.76 gigabytes in 24 hours.
This is UK£ 19.95 a month so 0.66 a day, therefore 117.81 gigabyte per UK£
This gives is the MAXIMUM cost to the ISP and the MINIMUM revenue.
It also gives us MAXIMUM daily traffic for the ISP (assuming no local content, cache, etc)
Say my actual usage is 10% of this theoretical maximum, then just divide the cost, eg "x" GB/UK£, by ten, so virgin cable would be 5.57 GB/UK£ and PO ADSL would be 11.78 GB/UK£
SO.. a lot of the packages are like the family sized toothpaste tube, yeah, the tube is twice the size of the normal one, but the diameter of the hole in the cap is much bigger too, since they know you put toothpaste on the brush by length, not by volume...
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
If it meant that I had a choice of internet service providers, yes, I would put up with this.
Of course the "ten companies tearing up the street" image is a straw man. In many locales they would be able to utilize existing telephone poles and/or wiring conduits. New construction could be built with the wiring conduits in mind for multiple service providers. Older construction might have to be torn up to accommodate the new infrastructure, that's a fact of life as technology advances, isn't it?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Mark Goldberg has a nice analysis of the decision. Note that Bell must first apply this usage based billing for all their existing retail customers before they are able to do so for third party ISPs leasing lines from them. This means they risk losing existing retail customers who have legacy unlimited plans, i.e. the ones who have been around the longest. In addition, their tariffs are actually being lowered, which will improve the profit margin of the independent ISPs. In other words, this isn't happening in the short term.
Side note: If you're a Teksavvy customer like me, they are also launching a cable-based service through leasing lines from Rogers as well. The details are up on their site, however I believe it's limited to the GTA only right now. You can get faster speeds, but lower caps. However, if the Bell usage-based plan eventually goes through, the caps will actually be about the same. I'm not affiliated with Teksavvy, I just happen to use them for Internet and home phone service and think they're awesome.
Amusing anecdote about how awesome they are: I have a Linksys WRT54GL router and flashed it with the Tomato/MLPPP firmware in order to bypass Bell's throttling when we signed up for Teksavvy. Eight months later, I convince my wife's parents to switch over (from Rogers, ironically) and they can now actually buy this same router along with the modem when they sign up for the service. So they do this, and I come over to set everything up along with the Tomato/MLPPP firmware on my USB stick so I can flash the router. After setting everything up, I discovered that they've already done exactly this. They've put the Tomato firmware on their, configured the modem for passthrough mode, set up all the login info on the router, and turned on single-link MLPPP to get around Bell's throttling. I literally had to do nothing but plug the wires in. Now that is what I call good customer service!
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
That's not the real issue. If you look at a datacenter, it typically has a dedicated connection to a backbone somewhere. With most consumer connections, the bottleneck is in the last mile. There may be, say, 200Mb/s available on particular segment. In typical usage, most customers won't be saturating their connection for more than a few minutes at a time, so the 200Mb/s will provide some head room for them. If one customer is using 100% of their 10Mb/s slice all of the time, then that means that there's a bit less for everyone else. Not really a problem.
Once a few customers are doing this, however, the entire segment experiences degraded performance unless the company upgrades the last mile infrastructure (expensive), shapes traffic for the heavy users (they complain), or charges the heavy users enough to discourage most people from falling into this category and to make enough to upgrade segments where a lot of people do.
Of course, this is assuming that they actually will invest in the infrastructure, which is not really certain with a regional monopoly.
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I have absolutely no idea why this was moderated up. TV is broadcast. The bandwidth is allocated in fixed channels, and it makes no difference whether one person or everyone on the network is watching (the network being everyone on the cable segment, within range of the transmitter, or under the satellite). If all of your network use is receiving packets sent to the segment's broadcast address, then you'd expect to pay a lot less than if it's receiving point-to-point packets.
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Not to mention the crossover cables at the equator, so that the electrons are spinning in the right direction.
If I started listing all the things that are shite about Belgium, I'd run out of paper before I got anywhere near internet transfer caps.
Get a sense of perspective.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."