CRTC To Allow Usage-Based Billing

Idiomatick writes "The CRTC ruled in favor this week for usage-based billing. Bell Canada was given a monopoly on lines in Canada, and in exchange they were made to resell to competitors at cost in order to have a functional market. The new CRTC ruling will allow Bell to charge their competitors more money based on individual customer usage. They are now able to implement a 60GB cap on a competitor's highest speed lines (charging $1.12/GB for overages). The effect on the market seems clear."

Comments

60GB is nothing

[Murdoch5]

Why not make the cap reasonable, 60 GB is literally nothing for an average consumer. I often use up to an exceeding 100GB / month. 60GB is fine if your a light user and thats all you are if your using 60GB, but start some servers, host some web pages and even a little downloading and you'll quickly get up and see 100GB/month.

So what I'm really say is why not make the cap reasonable and move it to 100GB, that will fit all users, past 100GB and your not being to legit on what your downloading.

Re:60GB is nothing

[matazar]

Hell, even for light users it's already a problem.

We have a family of 6, every one of us has our own computers. Factor in Steam games from me, netflix from everyone else plus every day usage and 60GB is nothing. We already have 2 connections for this exact reason.

Why they seem to think a 14mbps connection should have a 60GB limit is beyond me. That's Cogeco though, not Bell, but it's the same shit.

Re:60GB is nothing

[hipp5]

Why not make the cap reasonable, 60 GB is literally nothing for an average consumer... but start some servers... and you'll quickly get up and see 100GB/month.

Ahh yes, server hosting, well-known pastime for many the average consumer.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

I have yet to see any analysis of actual usage by internet users, let alone one that breaks an aggergate down to service types like VOIP, video, gaming, etc.

Do you all pick figures from the air or just your noses?

Re:60GB is nothing

[MichaelSmith]

My cap is 20G per month and I never go near that amount. There are three of us using the connection including my wife's architectural practice and I regularly torrent and seed Linux and BSD ISO files.

Maybe if you do a lot of commercial video streaming you would transfer a lot of data but I don't see why people who do that should not pay for the resources they use.

I buy my fuel by the litre, do you pay a fixed monthly charge for unlimited supply?

Re:60GB is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Normally I wouldn't say anything, but Jesus Christ man, learn the word "you're."

Re:60GB is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

1 HD netlfix movie = 5GB.

When I seed, I upload at about 80% of my cap nonstop. That'd be something like another 5GB a day on my comparatively slow 60KBps upload speed. Are you sure you have your firewall set correctly, etc.. for seeding? Or do you actually not do it that much?

Re:60GB is nothing

[danny_lehman]

For any Canadians reading today:

There are two petitions you should sign if you don't feel like this is right.

http://stopubb.ca/ - A petition to stop forced usage based billing.

and if you dont like the fact that the CRTC appears to bend to the will of the telcos without regard for the consumer, there is a petition to dissolve the CRTC here - http://dissolvethecrtc.ca/

Re:60GB is nothing

[js3]

30gig wasn't enough and all I do is watch youtube videos. I was using about a gig per day on average just watching youtube videos, occasionally downloading a patch or a demo game and 30gigs wasn't enough. 20gig is pitiful for the 50$ or so they charge you a month.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it takes a large amount of money to extract the fuel, process it, transport it, etc while the internet doesn't work like that. The internet is bits travelling over wires. Upgrading hardware doesn't cost anywhere near with the transportation of fuel. Saying you torrent and download ISOs and use less then 20gb a month means nothing. Your usage will increase in the future like it or not. HD video and HD photos with very high resolution will be a new standard. Loading up a page could be a few mb by itself.

When that time comes you are going to be one of the people screaming at your provider for having such a low cap. People use the internet every day for many different tasks many stream video like my grandparents who like seeing live TV from back home. You have no idea how easily it would be for my grandparents to go through 20gb a month. The thing is people adapt online technologies at different rates maybe right now you don't stream video or use the internet to upload 10mb HD pictures to show friends and families but others do maybe one day you will too. The fact remains it doesn't cost service providers anything like $1 a gb or more to provide unlimited service to me. When I was with Teksavvy I was downloading 100s of gb a month and believe me neither Teksavvy or Bell were loosing money because of me and I was paying $40 a month so even if I had only used 200gb in a month the cost per gb for me would be $0.20 and two individual companies would still be making a profit off that. So don't tell me that because I use more data then you that I should pay more because in the end even if I use more data then you we cost our service providers pretty much the same thing.

Re:60GB is nothing

[KiloByte]

I'd say there should be a law that in all advertising they need to include the long-term connection rate as well. Toss in the up rate if it's different (and with those lying shits, it always is).

That 14mbps connection would have to be labelled: 14/0.5mbps, 22kbps sustained -- since 60GB monthly is just that.

Re:60GB is nothing

[ls671]

> Christ man, learn the word "you're."

I thought that "you're." was actually two words resulting from the contraction of "you" and "are".

Re:60GB is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

The meaning has been lost to time but we do know that you're is a contraction of a contraction of a contraction of a contraction of a contraction of a word. The original word was over 40 letters long!

Re:60GB is nothing

[Mashiki]

I hit 60gb in 15 days this last month because of WoW and all the "patches", a normal month in my household is nearly 60 as it is with 3 people. Really this whole change to UBB is arbitrary bullshit, especially since the CRTC just said you have to allow competition on the networks built by tax dollars(aka last mile). Then they pulled this. I'm seriously suspecting that the CRTC wants to find the best way to screw everyone over, then again for an entity which is supposed to exist for the consumer, it sure does a lot to screw them over.

Re:60GB is nothing

[cgenman]

My router says we average about 80 GB per month. Most of that is Netflix streaming and keeping large school files in sync. A single game full-game download hits about 10GB, and demos are about 4GB each.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Dunbal]

It makes sense (for the government) to keep the cap low. After all they WANT you to spend money because it's just another tax. Plus you'll get sales tax on top of that.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Have some knowledge before you make these assertions. Do you have any idea about how much it costs your ISP for bandwidth? Par, since around 2007, has been about 0.1/gb for planned bandwidth and 0.15/gb for unplanned bandwidth right at the tier 1 providers, the costs would realistically be higher depending on how many networks your packets need to cross to get to their destination. Now, your ISP is also responsible for running support, sales, and maintenance. Do you honestly believe that 0.2/gb covers that? You were a liability to your isp.

Nonetheless, a 60GB cap is draconian when most packages are $50/month. At almost a dollar per gigabyte? WHAT A FUCKING RIP OFF.

I can understand a 150GB cap at 50/month, but more than that is a rip off. Currently, an abhorrant rip off.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Pingmaster]

Do you also pay the gas station a monthly rate for the privilege of using the pumps?

Re:60GB is nothing

[aristotle-dude]

Online petitions do nothing. Send letters to the CRTC, your local MPs and the Prime Ministers office.

Another idea would be for a lot of people to protest this by requesting your payroll people to stop deducting your income tax, setup an interest bearing account to deposit what you would normally have deducted for tax, sending a letter to the tax people indicating your reason for doing this (as a protest) and paying your taxes at the end of the year instead of every pay period.

It is legal to not pay your income tax until the end of the year.

Re:60GB is nothing

[realityimpaired]

Bell's own numbers show that 99% of their userbase uses 2GB or less every month.

60GB is plenty for the average user. It's not a lot for a power user who does a lot of downloading, but it's more than enough for most of us.

Re:60GB is nothing

[realityimpaired]

You're confusing your contractions of yore.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Murdoch5]

I don't believe that for one second. You can blow 2 GB from leaving your computer on with a browser open. I'm not calling you a liar but Bell should re run the numbers. I know many many many families who use 60GB + a month and 1/2 of the people in them are so dumb with computers they can't find the any key.

Re:60GB is nothing

[TeraCo]

The 'tax people' don't care about when they get their money or what it is spent on as long as you are in full compliance with the laws regarding tax. Paying tax at the end of the financial year is completely legal and the 'tax people' prefer it because it reduces the amount of administrivia they have to deal with.

I can assure you, the 'tax people' won't lose any sleep over the money they 'lost'.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Rasperin]

WRONG.ABSOLUTELY WRONG! Ok caps off, what do you think they do when they get the biweekly amount of cash? Throw it in a bank for next year, that's a joke! They invest it in attempts to raise their profits, typically in the US dollar or as loans to the US. Either way if a lot of people did it, it would make a (very) substantial impact on the government. On a plus note, you could put that tax money into an interest bearing CD and come out ahead.

Re:60GB is nothing

[GiveBenADollar]

99% of users seems a little high, but I do know a lot of people that only have broadband because dialup is too slow for web browsing. Same kinda folks who used or possibly still use AOL. You know 12:00 flashers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be3alRoxkOo

Re:60GB is nothing

[MichaelSmith]

I would if I was continually attached to one pump.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone is downloading here a game via Steam. 15 GB. $10 purchase.... Fortunately I'm nowhere near my 120GB/mo cap on business DSL from MTS (manitoba). But then I don't have any choice here anyway.

20G/mo? I participated in a torrent for a free game video for about 30h... 8G transfer. So either your linux ISOs are not very popular at all, or there is something wrong with your bandwidth meter. You know, 32-bit /sbin/ifconfig counters overflow at 4G?

Re:60GB is nothing

[twidarkling]

Dissolving the CRTC is a really bad idea, and if you think just because they appear to bend to the telcos all the time that they're useless, you're a moron.

But you're advocating online petitions, so I'm being Captain Obvious.

Re:60GB is nothing

[twidarkling]

Play WoW? Congratulations, you're next-best-thing to running a server. And yes, playing WoW *is* a well-known pastime for the average consumer.

Re:60GB is nothing

[twidarkling]

Bell's cellular division is full of lying sacks of shit who will say anything to sell a phone and a contract. Why the fuck should I believe any part of the company about anything else they ever say?

Re:60GB is nothing

[rickb928]

I think 60GB/month comes out to about 1.3MB/min, 24x7.

Sure. Leaving your computer on with a browser open day and night will get you 1.3MB every minute all day all month. I wonder if my iGoogle home page would do that. Maybe CNN. Maybe not Yahoo.

More BS. If they set their cap at 600GB, some of you (many I suspect) would still be claiming this is achievable by your average nitwit user. Just accept the fact that there is a limit that will satisfy 99% of all users, and the remaining 1% will be faced with paying more for their excess.

Re:60GB is nothing

[mariushm]

I just bought a couple of days ago Frontlines Fuel of War from Steam.... paid about 2-3$ for it and the download size is 12 GB.

If you want to, I guess you can really reach the limit of those accounts, spending 10-15$ a month. And I'm paying 20$ a month for 25/4 unrestricted connection.

Re:60GB is nothing

[mariushm]

In both US and Europe, prices are as long as 1$ or 1euro per megabit for large commitments - meaning 1000mbs or more. Tier 1, premium bandwidth... anything between 3 and 10$ per megabit, depending on how smart you are and what account manager you discuss with. Even if we go the middle and say it's 5$ per megabit, that's 5$ for 330 GB of data flowing through the wires.

Re:60GB is nothing

[rtfa-troll]

Ahh yes, server hosting, well-known pastime for many the average consumer.

Your comment makes sense until you think about why server hosting is not a standard pastime.

There are now lots of little router appliances that could easily be little servers for individual consumers. It makes complete sense since communication media is more or less symmetric and even if you use the cheapest possible components on the uplink you normally end up with plenty of spare capacity. File sharing software has shown that the consumers are able and willing to use this.

The thing which blocks these servers in the market is a largely implicit but partly deliberate conspiracy between consumer ISPs and the media industry to try to make them difficult so that they get to control and reduce communication from consumer to consumer whilst increasing the amount of media sales (==things like IPTV or even YouTube which are effective television).

Show me another industry which willingly reports it's customers (the consumer) to people who want to sue them (the media industry) when it has no obligation to do so. If it weren't the media industry they were reporting to, this would be in the newspapers every day and those ISPs would be out of business in weeks.

Re:60GB is nothing

[clydemaxwell]

this doesn't seem like a fact worth accepting.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Khyber]

"past 100GB and your not being to legit on what your downloading."

I can dump 1TB halfway through a month with a Camfrog server. That's just live streaming video chat ALONE, let me not get into my seeding linux distros, uploading tons of research data and photographs, plus receiving similar amounts that I sent out back from two other sources (about 250GB monthly,) Not including Skype calls, skype video chats, various free wallpaper sites, GrooveShark, etc.

Still using content-limited AOL, are we?

Re:60GB is nothing

[Bert64]

Or 22kbps, burstable to 14mbit...
Most of these isps consider traffic in both directions to count towards your cap too.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Feyr]

it's not legal to do that over a certain (ridiculously low) amount of taxes due. check out provisional accounts

Re:60GB is nothing

[commodore64_love]

>>>There are two petitions you should sign if you don't feel like this is right.

But it is right. You pay your electricity by the unit. Your long distance calls by the unit. Your natural gas, water, and gasoline by the unit. Even your food. Why should internet be any different? Let the high users pay more, while the less users pay less. It encourages conservation.

Re:60GB is nothing

[commodore64_love]

>>>paying your taxes at the end of the year instead of every pay period.

Interesting. This isn't allowed in the U.S. You MUST have your taxes deducted every week. You can set your deductions very high, say 15, to limit the amount taken off but even then most employers will refuse to cooperate and only let you list 5 maximum.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Murdoch5]

Your right, thats a fair statement, but in general if a house is using 100GB a month your probably downloading torrents alot. Not guaranteed but it's probable.

Re:60GB is nothing

[TeraCo]

It might have an impact on the government, but I assure you the head of the tax office (a career civil servant) won't give a damn.

Re:60GB is nothing

[cluedweasel]

Our local cable ISP instituted a 30Gb cap. After a big outcry they bumped it to 100Gb. Part of their argument was that 98% of their subscribers used less than 5Gb in a month. I ended up switching to DSL instead. The connection quality isn't as good but I couldn't manage on the 100Gb a month, or afford the $1.50 a Gb overage charge.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Khyber]

"in general if a house is using 100GB a month your probably downloading torrents alot."

Steam, WoW, Any overly-complicated Flash site, Youtube, botnets, etc. I can think of an easy couple of hundred ways a typical household would chew through 500GB in a month.

Plenty of ways a typical household can use WAY more than 100GB a month. The only way to NOT use that much is to physically restrict the speed to a maximum throughput that will not allow that to happen.

Re:60GB is nothing

[shugah]

Because you certainly don't want to use up those bits.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Yvan256]

You're right that the average user might not need 600GB per month, however with things like iTunes rentals and Netflix, 60GB is way too low. This is Bell's attempts at using their monopoly (there's practically no region where Bell, Rogers, Videotron and Cogeco are in competition with each other) to block competitors (currently iTunes and Netflix) to their own TV services (Bell Expressvu).

Re:60GB is nothing

[Yvan256]

YouTube. iTunes. Netflix. FaceTime. Skype. Music streaming. Steam/WoW/etc.

Still think 60GB is enough?

The problem here is that Bell, Rogers, Videotron and Cogeco are all content providers on top of being internet providers. Things like iTunes and Netflix are competitors to their content services, so they try to lower their internet services to screw their competitors instead of upping their content provider game. It's all backwards and proof that the CRTC isn't doing its damn job.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor America. In Europe prices are much lower. I have a dedicated server with 5000 GB allowance per month for EUR 80 (USD 111). Another 1000 GB of traffic is charged with EUR 7 (USD 10). That is only 1 US-Cent per GB!

Re:60GB is nothing

[commodore64_love]

You're right. Bits use-up electricity which needs to be conserved.

Re:60GB is nothing

[commodore64_love]

>>>14/0.5mbps, 22kbps sustained -- since 60GB monthly is just that.

This isn't really a useful metric because few consumers run their computers 24 hours a day. Just saying "14/0.5 Mbps with 60 GB cap" is enough information. However I would also add the average throughput since many services like "Comcast Burst" drop to 5 Mbit/s after the first minute of a download. So for example:

Comcast ISP: 14/2 Mbps peak. 5 Mbit/s typical. 250 GB cap
Verizon DSL: 7/2 Mps peak. 7 Mbit/s typical. No cap.

Re:60GB is nothing

[tzanger]

Instead of just spewing your opinion, why not back it up? While I agree that the CRTC has done some good in the past, the recent string of decisions coming out of the commission is making me wonder what the hell good they're for, because they sure as hell aren't looking out for the consumer, which is their mandate. Ok, they recently required cell carriers to unlock your devices once the contract's up, but that just allows you to use your 3yo phone on someone else's network. We have some of the highest costing cellular plans on the globe, but hey we can carry our old devices over. Yay, CRTC.

So how about it? Why do you feel that dissolving the CRTC's a bad idea? What have they done in the area of the internet or cellular telephony that have actually really done GOOD for the consumer? Or are you just someone who wants to call people morons on the internet (like we're running out of those kinds of people)?

Re:60GB is nothing

[rickb928]

Seeing that we have the very samme complaints in the U.S., where most of the complainers are in areas where there is at least cable and DSL service competing, I'm not sure you can lay it soley at the foot of monopoly.

In some areas, cable operators cap usage at 60GB and do not bill overages - they either cut your service, or cripple it to dialup speeds. And almost always they do not even advertise this, and deny it publicly while enforcing it.

My provider, Cox, does actually state the limits, from 30GB 50 400GB combined down/up per month, depending on your service plan.

The problem of iTunes is of great significance to me. No, actually, it isn't by itself, since I don't use iTunes, but it does expose the real purpose of these caps.

If you want to stream a movie a week from Netflix, some sources claim a movie is typically 3.6GB. So 20 or so movies, and you hit the Rogers limit, while my Cox limit would allow at least 60 I think. I don't have time to watch two a day.

The reality is, the cable cos. see Internet streaming as competition, directly with Netflix, almost with iTunes. They have no incentive to allow me to ditch video service and get my shows from Hulu, etc. And they wish they could give you a music service, but instead they know they got you by the short & curlies (aka your teenage daughter) when they have an iPod or iPhone, as that is a captive market - captive to Internet access to do ANYTHING with their favorite toy.

So welcome to the age where Internet service pricing rises to the level the market will bear. The government will not influence that much I suspect, though they could perhaps slow the increase artificially.

If, however, you subscribe to the Tragedy of the Commons, then let the government get in and preserve low-cost Internet as a common carrier service. You can expect service commensurate with the price you pay, and in the U.S. this is discounted by the mediocre effort a government service would deliver.

We can't easily win this. Internet is becoming our TV, radio, telephone. It's worth a lot if we make it so useful.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

you are so right...

Re:60GB is nothing

[Eivind]

Yeah, the ratio is nuts.

With 14 megabits, you can slurp 1.5MB/second, or 90MB/minute. A single hour of full-throttle-use can be over 5GB.

In short, the cap says, you can use your connection to the limit 12 hours a month, or 20 minutes a day.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a moron who will defend corporations at any cost, aren't you? Have you ever considered seeing a psychiatrist? Electricity costs derived from data usage are negligible you moron.

Re:60GB is nothing

[GeckoX]

You are missing the crux of the problem. If these costs were indeed what the market would bear, and here's the key point, _given an open and competitive market_, then so be it.

At the immediate moment you don't have to go with Rogers or Bell in Canada. You can pay a lot less for a whole lot more from one of the other smaller players.

This removes the competition allowing the big boys who already have a monopoly on the infrastructure to _force_ all their competition to charge a certain price point. No more free and open competition. _That_ is the problem here, and it is a very big problem.

Re:60GB is nothing

[pnutjam]

I download alot, run a personal server w/ NX and access it often. I don't watch much video.

I have never gone over 20 or 30 GB a month according to my comcast meter.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot agree more with you! I've written a paper on ISP that oversell their pipes some months ago: http://patrickroy.ca/en/2010/08/black-white-or-grey/

I've also ask the question of what exactly fits into a quota? routing protocol query's? DHCP traffic?... with rate as high as 1.12$/GB there's a lot of money on the table and regulations should be made to allow them to billed us only for traffic that really reach the Internet, not to your neighbor or to your ISP local equipment. you can read my tough on that here: http://patrickroy.ca/en/2010/09/internet-service-providers-are-stealing-us/

Re:60GB is nothing

[commodore64_love]

>>>You're a moron...

Strawman argument. MY IQ's well above the "moron" level of 70.

>>>who will defend corporations at any cost, aren't you?

False. I hate corporations almost as much as I hate government.
.

>>>Have you ever considered seeing a psychiatrist?

Sometimes but I'm pretty good as solving my own problems, even when I'm depressed or times are bad.

>>>Electricity costs derived from data usage are negligible

No they are not. Servers generate a lot of heat, due to the high electricity usage of moving that data around. It is not negligible, but quite significant, and also a key reason why Google and others are moving their Internet Servers to cool places like Buffalo or Toronto.

>>>you moron.

Strawman argument again. Please talk to ME, not your imaginary scarecrow. Thanks.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the same AC, but...

Protip, it's not the ISPs running those servers, Troll64.

And how is calling you what you are a "strawman argument"? You may disagree with it, but strawman does not mean "anything I disagree with".

Re:60GB is nothing

[aristotle-dude]

It might have an impact on the government, but I assure you the head of the tax office (a career civil servant) won't give a damn.

Which is why you send the letter the the Prime Minister's office and the Minister of Finance.

Re:60GB is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

If your taxes aren't deducted as source, you don't actually have to pay them until you get an assessment. The government wants you to pay in installments, but it's only a guess what you have to pay until you file your tax return. Then you know what installments you should have paid, and you have to pay interest on the unpaid installments. The interest is waived if you have paid the amounts the government thought you would have to pay on time, even if the actual amount owing turns out to be higher.

This is, of course, the way Canadian taxes work, which is what's relevant here.

Re:60GB is nothing

[TeraCo]

And they will talk to the tax office, and the tax office will say "They are in full compliance with the law. If you want them to do more you should change the law."

And that will be the end of the conversation. Unless they change the law, which they probably won't.

the begining of the dark age

[Anonymous Coward]

Us Canadians have 90 days to appeal the dissiion. lets hope something gets done. our MP want nothing to do with it http://twitter.com/TonyClement_MP "Thx for the input, but as there is a 90 day appeal period it would be inappropriate for me to comment further. Be well.Thx for the input, but as there is a 90 day appeal period it would be inappropriate for me to comment further. Be well."

Quick Canada Lesson

[EmperorOfCanada]

In Canada we have no competition for apparently 6 reasons:
- Previous governments gave a monopoly to friends who supported them. Where these monopolies have collided they don't compete.
- We have no working anti-monopoly laws in Canada preventing collusion and other anti-competitive behavior. Technically we do but please tell me the last time a company was fined and how little they might have been fined.
- The CRTC (our FCC) is the tool that previous governments used to give their friends these monopolies and thus the CRTC will enforce the monopolies behavior not prevent it.
- Any competition that poses an actual threat will be bought out.
- The present government is a minority government and thus is focused on other fish that need frying such as keeping power and maybe finagling a majority. How many bytes people can download is not on their radar for now.
- Many of the telco monopolies also are media giants thus they control what the pubic thinks about this stuff.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

also, running copper to every house is hugely expensive and it doesn't make sense to do it more than once.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[Nerdfest]

With this, bot Bell and Rogers (the cable internet provider) have now both put steps in place to discourage people using Netflix, etc. NetFlix of course announced around September that they would be providing service in Canada. It's much reduced service from what's available in the US, but the available content will increase as time goes on. Rogers cut their bandwidth limits in half, and now Bell has gotten usage based billing, specifically to discourage people using TekSavvy et al, which used to have un-shaped, unlimited downloads.

You can run through the current bandwidth limits pretty quickly watching HD content.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[CohibaVancouver]

Also, we have amongst the lowest population densitites in the world, so the barrier to entry in the market is huge, due to the large capital costs.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[sarhjinian]

Most of that population lives in three cities, and 90% of it within a few kilometers of the American border. The capital costs are really not that high.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[stanlyb]

Not true, but anyway, the problem is that all the cables are OUR PROPERTY. Build and paid with our taxes, and after that they were lend to all the sharks.....who later very conveniently forgot that simple fact, and started to act as they are, and always were their sole property..... And also, a friend of mine once told me that an ISP with only 1000 customer is fully capable of building optic lines, and have them paid in one year........

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia has a far lower population density than Canada (6.4 people/ square mile compared to Canda's 9.3) and we are rolling out a FTTH network at this very minute......

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[Pokey.Clyde]

While I don't have the numbers, Netflix streaming really doesn't kill much of your cap. You'd have to be using Netflix as a replacement for CATV to have to worry about going over your cap.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[shovas]

You'd have to be using Netflix as a replacement for CATV to have to worry about going over your cap.

Something I and many others would like to do but *shock* all avenues of attempting to access competition to the majors results in finding out no one is particularly better than another, no matter what metric you use.

Cable TV is getting very hard to justify these days when, day after day, you keep noticing "500 channels and nothing's on." I would love to have an alternative but there's no competition.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[skine]

Australia may have a lower population density than Canada, but Australia has a much higher urban population percentage.

That is, about 8% of Australians are said to live in rural areas, while 19% of Canadians do.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[Pharmboy]

Cable TV is getting very hard to justify these days when, day after day, you keep noticing "500 channels and nothing's on." I would love to have an alternative but there's no competition.

Sure there is: Bittorrent and Hulu for TV shows and Netflix for movies. I'm still waiting for networks to "get it" and start offering TV shows from their own bittorrent servers, with a few commercials already embedded in the video, but public (illegal) servers exist now and TV shows are always easy to get. Of course, the networks will likely start out by having a dedicated player that is a POS when users want to use MPC, but it would be nice start in the right direction.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

A reader by the name of DigitEL on the CBC's "MarketPlace" tv show blog on this subject posted a very insightful comment:

Strikes me as sort of double taxation. ISPs already set speed governors on upload/download speeds and charge tier level fees based on speed, broadband, T1, T3, etc. Typical residential broadband is something like 1,500 download and 500 megabits per second upload. So if they want to take the speed governors off and charge by volume maybe that would be better service because the internet is always slow around here!

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[profplump]

I've been saying this for years -- would you rather download the known-good episode at high quality directly from the virus-free source immediately when the episode is broadcast via traditional channels, with a few commercials, or download a possibly fake, possible virus-ridden, unknown-quality/language/subtitles copy 2-12 hours later without commercials?

I'm sure some people would still pirate things, but if you gave people an "ABC.com downloader" app that did bittorrent from your own commercial-filled seeds 90% of users would never try anything else. I'd certainly be willing to hit "30 second skip" a few times per episode to have known-good, on-time releases.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[shovas]

Er, I was replying mainly to the OP's point about caps. It is the caps that prevent what you're talking about.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[Yvan256]

Just FYI, there's no such thing as Hulu in Canada.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[hldn]

would you rather download the known-good episode at high quality directly from the virus-free source immediately when the episode is broadcast via traditional channels, with a few commercials, or download a possibly fake, possible virus-ridden, unknown-quality/language/subtitles copy 2-12 hours later without commercials?

huh? when i download shows via bittorrent, they are available immediately after airing. maybe a bit longer for HD stuff, but i just grab SD releases. also, if you're worrying about fakes/viruses, you need to find a new tracker.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[hldn]

I'm sure some people would still pirate things, but if you gave people an "ABC.com downloader" app that did bittorrent from your own commercial-filled seeds 90% of users would never try anything else.

forgot to mention it, but i'd be more worried about spyware in an "abc.com downloader" app than anything from a reputable release group.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

- The present government is a minority government and thus is focused on other fish that need frying such as keeping power and maybe finagling a majority. How many bytes people can download is not on their radar for now.

Oh *please*. Stop your crocodile tears. Kind Harper has run current government as a majority. If CRTC was *anywhere near* important to him, he would have acted. Yet, it is his government that allows this to continue.

CAPTCHA: Cogent

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[CarboRobo]

That's a valid excuse only for not improving the infrastructure for that 19%. It's no excuse for not improving things for the other 81% (Australia's new fibre network is only for 93% of the population - ie the urban population)

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[twidarkling]

Hulu doesn't allow access outside the US, this decision pretty much slaughters the ability to use Netflix (10 HD movies at 6 GB uses up ALL your bandwidth), and so that just leaves the illegal method that's still going to burn through your bandwidth. How is this an alternative to cable, again?

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[Shark]

We're an ISP with at least twice as many customers. It'd be wonderful if what your friend said was true, but it definitely isn't. Just to hook a cable onto a telephone pole costs a substantial rental fee, per post. Never mind underground fibres.

It's okay if your 1000 customers are all in the same 3-4 square kilometres but we span about 200km. Bandwidth itself is cheap, we could afford to give them a fair bit more than they get now if they all were able to move within a few kilometres of our main links. We certainly would be happy to do so. Transporting it to them is what costs a bundle.

In areas where you have the kind of density that makes running your own fibre economical, you usually also have 2-3 huge telcos very eager to crush any hopes you have of making a profit.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[BlueWaterBaboonFarm]

I have the opposite experience.

I download my favorite shows 2 hours earlier then they are on TV. Granted I'm on the west coast and they are popular shows, but they're ready for me when I get home from work (fully automated), 720p, and commercial free. I really wouldn't mind paying for a similar service from one of these cable companies, but nothing exists and apparently I can finagle something much better myself.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[Bert64]

Torrents are usually available immediately after the first airing of the show, so if you live in a region that doesn't get the show immediately then you actually get it *before* it would be shown on tv where you are.

I have never received a virus by downloading a tv show from a torrent, just how would you embed a virus into a video file anyway? And aside from that, i use a linux box to download and an embedded linux box attached to the tv to play the files.

If there was an abc.com downloader app, you can guarantee this app would include a built in player which would prevent you from skipping the commercials, would only allow you to play on certain types of devices and not let you transcode the video to work on other devices either.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[profplump]

First, some of use consider "SD" to be similar to the web from 1996 -- if that's all you an do I guess it's okay, but it's not the preferred format.

Second, while it's possible to get many show from reliable trackers/release groups it's not possible to get *all* shows from those sorts or sources. Pretending that fakes/viruses/low-quality/missing-subtitles/etc. aren't a problem with the general torrent population is like pretending that the problems don't exist on the web at large -- yes, they can be avoided, but unless you're willing to greatly restrict your intake the average person would have trouble getting what the want without running into at least some undesirable files.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[profplump]

Spyware, maybe, depending on your definition. They'd definitely track your downloads and/or viewing depending what you do in the program. Most people would consider that fairly reasonable tracking. It's possible they'd try to track other things, but I'd be surprised that if that was greater risk than spyware/virus/etc. from the average torrent source.

And if they were running torrents you wouldn't be required to use their program to grab the files, it would just be an option that 90% of the population would use and that would benefit even the 10% who wanted to avoid the official app.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[profplump]

Even assuming that release groups are capturing an east-coast feed and encoding in near real time and release a high-def rip as the first available version, you'd be hard-pressed to get a copy downloaded less than an hour after it aired. The fact the you live on the west coast might be handy in that respect, but it's hardly the rule -- the people who live on the east coast are still waiting at least a couple of hours to get their show, and they won't know if it's a decent copy until they've downloaded a significant portion.

You're also missing the main point -- wouldn't you accept commercials in the stream and/or some reasonable payment for the episode to get it 2+ hours earlier from an official source of known good quality?

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[profplump]

"Immediately after first airing" assumes near real-time encoding and 0 download time. In my experience neither of those are true. If you want and SD rip it might pop up shortly after the episode airs, but HD rips are rarely that fast. And even if it's available 30 seconds after the episode airs it's still likely an hour or better before you can actually watch it since at the end of airing there are exactly 0 bytes on the network for that torrent.

The fact that networks broadcast at different times in different regions is merely an artifact of traditional broadcast technologies. Given the Internet that fact is irrelevant -- there's no reason for the official download to delay for different regions.

I agree that, given today's attitude toward video sharing, it's unlikely for any network to release a useful, torrent-based video distribution system. My point was they *could*, without any DRM/etc., and most people would still watch (or at least have to intentionally skip) the ads even in spite of a player that forces such things, which would be more or less the same as what they get with traditional broadcast/cable TV.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[Bert64]

Depending on the broadcast method (eg digital satellite), it might already be encoded and you can upload on the fly.
Also if you download the first segments first, you can start watching before the download has completed.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[hldn]

you're wrong on all points.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

You're also missing the main point -- wouldn't you accept commercials in the stream and/or some reasonable payment for the episode to get it 2+ hours earlier from an official source of known good quality?

If the world you described could possibly exist, then, yes.. some people would be fine with that. However, it's very unlikely that any studio would release high quality works without charging for them (and even then, still leaving the commercials in) since they'd lose out on the potential DVD/BluRay sales.

Both you and the grandparent are correct about the shows, though. Popular shows can be acquired almost immediately after they air, but some programs (mostly news or hour-long daily episodes) are harder to find.

On a related note, Comcast has recently decided they want to switch to digital only. My parents have far too many TVs to attach a digital box to each, and are very likely going to drop cable-TV service next month. They just built an 8TB RAID-5 file server to hold all the shows they would normally have watched over-the-air. I don't know if they'd ever pay per show.. but it doesn't matter either way. The video exists commercial free and is easy enough for my elderly parents to acquire. The media industry seems completely clueless about this sort of thing, and I have no faith they will "get it" before they are replaced by newer/subversive technology.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point, Rogers changes their download caps the day Netflix announced they were coming to Canada. Now this? I don't know what to do, Bell and Rogers own this country and the CRTC never ever ever does anything for Joe Taxpayer. I tried to complain once to Rogers because they weren't letting me call a toll free number (a Bell calling card) because of disagreements between the two. The body that you complain to.... well it's a branch under the CRTC called CCTS (CRTC website link http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/info_sht/t12.htm ). Well the CCTS is a body that takes complaints but it's run by... you guessed it! Bell and Rogers and all those telcos. So my situation is that Bell won't pay Rogers the connection fee so Rogers won't let me call a toll free number and if i want to complain to somebody I complain to the CCTS which covers complains for BOTH companies???? Did they just outright buy the government side of regulation or what?

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[ryantmer]

It's not for the 90% that the capital costs are high. Further north, NorthwesTel has to cover the entirety of the Yukon, NWT and Nunavut with these services. Many, if not the majority, of the communities in these territories have no all-year road access. The capital costs for these places is huge. Everything is run through satellite connections (phone, TV, internet), and all the infrastructure must either be brought in by barge or by air. In addition, due to mandates about allowed downtime per year, maintenance costs are very high (imagine flying in technicians and supplies every time internet service goes down). While I'm not saying the costs of these is comparable to the cost of the infrastructure required for the millions living along the borders, the cost per individual is higher by several orders of magnitude.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

Quicker Canadian Lesson:

Stephen Harper = George Bush Jr., Jr.

Right down to stimulating housing instead of the real economy (Vancouver BC is now more expensive than Beverly Hills thanks to the low, low price liquidity hammered into the market by our CMHC and his PROACTIVE government buying all those MBSs from banks), Harper is an econ-religious whack job intent on implementing every failed policy from south of the border on principle. He already tried to push through DMHC x 2 laws on behest of Hollywood, in his Canada the only citizenry who counts are business owners.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[stanlyb]

Exactly my point. The problem is that our pretty government is killing the middle class. Imagine, just for a second, GTA instead of having 2-3 monsters but having 100-200 ISP, everyone of which working in his area (literally), providing you with the best internet (price and bandwidth), using fibre cables, and paying his taxes in GTA, and spending his money there too.......Just imagine, what a wonderful world it will be.....

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

But come on, Ryan Thomas Mahler (ryantmer), there is some hope with NTNet. They're going to be supplying many smaller communities such as Fort Providence and Fort Liard with internet. The problem is that NorthwesTel and SSI Micro are ripping them off.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[sonicmerlin]

Um, no. Most of Canada's populace is in three major cities, or within a few kilometers of the American border.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[pnutjam]

30 second skip is why this will never happen, they need some mechanism to force or try to force you to watch the commercials. If they could send a guy to your house to hold your chin and force you to stare at the TV, they would.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[skine]

Neither of your facts refutes mine, or even disagrees with mine.

Re:Quick Canada Lesson

[afidel]

Netflix HD is up to 1MBps which means you get ~1/2 hour per day of HD content, no exactly a lot.

This is going to be hellish in 5 years

[assemblerex]

This is like charging $1 per 1.44mb , very soon this arbitrary measurement will hamper innovation and Canada as a whole will suffer.

Re:This is going to be hellish in 5 years

[MoonBuggy]

Yup. The fact that they didn't implement some kind of scale based on percentage use of the total capacity or the like strongly suggests they're either incompetent or there's a conflict of interests. In either case, the wrong people are doing the job.

Re:This is going to be hellish in 5 years

[Anonymous Coward]

I calculated what a Canadian friend's new bill is going to be. Currently he pays the base rate of $40, P2P is throttled, both upload and download count towards the new cap, and three people in the house do routine netflix streaming. They use about 350 GB a month. Under the new billing it's going to be $100 (per GB charges start up again at the 300 GB mark). Likely anyone that does any streaming at all will hit the intermediate price cap and thus their bills will go directly from $40 to $62.50. (We looked up streaming stats and apparently an hour of streaming is about 1.6-1.7 GB. Doing the math, even if we round the numbers down to 1.5 GB/hour, any household that averages over an hour and 47 minutes a day is going to hit the middle price cap. Not hard at all for just two people who follow a few different shows each and watch a few movies together on the weekends. Googling up some stats, apparently the average american spends 2.8 hours per day watching TV...)

So a company that's already making a profit now just got permission to jack the rates up 50% for a whole lot of normal people.

Re:This is going to be hellish in 5 years

[Mashiki]

Conflict of interest. The CRTC has been hand picked for the last 15 years by the liberal party as a place to reward their friends. Not to forget that the liberal party and Chretien were involved in a massive scandal where the primeminister's 'agency' was handing out money, and covering up for people when they got caught. Only cost us several billion dollars.

Re:This is going to be hellish in 5 years

[Daltorak]

This is like charging $1 per 1.44mb , very soon this arbitrary measurement will hamper innovation and Canada as a whole will suffer.

So if I understand your exaggeration correctly, you think Canada, as a country, will suffer "as a whole" because customers who download between 81 and 300 GB a month will be billed $22.50 extra a month?

(That's what TFA says, but the Slashdot summary didn't)

$22.50 is lunch money at Harvey's for a couple of days, or one hour of pay for a halfway-decent engineer. It also buys you 300GB of consumer-grade DSL bandwidth, which is a sustained 21 megabytes of transfer per minute for the whole month. That's 340 kilobytes per second -- two-thirds of what is physically possible on Bell Canada's 5 megabit maximum DSL connections.

How many people do you really think are out there pushing their consumer-grade DSL connections around that hard, and are in the business of R&D and innovation (as opposed to, say, downloading movie torrents), but can't afford to pay for it? And how will their being forced to pay a tiiiiny bit more every month make the country "suffer"? Do you really, honestly believe that people are going to give up pursuing interesting projects in Canada just because their heavily-utilised 5 megabit consumer-grade DSL service got more expensive?

Dude, seriously, get a grip.

Re:This is going to be hellish in 5 years

[Anonymous Coward]

I can think of about 300,000 with Teksavvy that will be affected not including the multitude of other GAS companies.

"$22.50 is lunch money at Harvey's for a couple of days, or one hour of pay for a halfway-decent engineer"

And for those making minimum wage, barely able to pay for the necessities let alone take-out? $22.50 represents a 50% increase in my bill - it puts it at the same level as a week of food for 2 people. Total for a cell plan + internet it will be over $150. At minimum wage that's 25% of their yearly income on being able to stay in touch with the world? It's ridiculous.

Re:This is going to be hellish in 5 years

[edjs]

$150 of cel+internet is not a necessity and more than what's needed just to stay in touch. Plans for $50 or less are available if one can barely pay for the necessities.

Re:This is going to be hellish in 5 years

[hawguy]

Uhh, you might want to check your math.

300GB / 30 days/mon / 24 hours/day / 3600 seconds/hour = 115KB/second, only around 20% of a 5Mbit DSL line..

You can check my math here:

http://www.google.com/search?q=300000000000+%2F+30+%2F+24+%2F+3600

Re:This is going to be hellish in 5 years

[Anonymous Coward]

oh sure there's cheaper available but the cheap end has insanely low caps (2gb/month) and overages are $5/gb so by the time you pay for your data transfer you're back over $50/month. 2gb isn't even enough for my grandmother - she had to be upgraded to the 60gb/month to avoid overages.

Re:This is going to be hellish in 5 years

[Mashiki]

Useful tip to liberals in Canada. Just because someone points out that your party is mired in corruption so deep that they gave away a diplomat posting in order to try and hide it, doesn't mean it's not true.

Re:This is going to be hellish in 5 years

[hebertrich]

It is already hellish !
We got the highest telecom rates in the world.
They squeeze us like lemons and there's f'all we can do about it.
Same with cell , same with phone.
There is no REAL competition and we pay through the nose for an inferior product.

Really nice.

Re:This is going to be hellish in 5 years

[noidentity]

This is like charging $1 per 1.44mb , very soon this arbitrary measurement will hamper innovation and Canada as a whole will suffer.

1.44mb you say? Perhaps they're using floppy disks to transfer this data, which would explain the high cost.

Re:This is going to be hellish in 5 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention Steam and all their gaming greatness. Games are getting huge these days and downloading takes forever on a 3mb connection. Even still, I just downloaded 24Gb worth of 3 games over the last 2 days. I also have a Netflix account. If I had a 60gb monthly cap I'd be screwed. If my ISP changes from unlimited to 60gb cap my monthly bill could double.

Re:This is going to be hellish in 5 years

[Anonymous Coward]

In 5 years? Its hellish now! My mobile phone is over 100 a month!

Re:This is going to be hellish in 5 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Offtopic, but you know google is a better calculator than that right?
http://www.google.com/search?q=300GB%20/%201%20month

Id - 10 - T error

[Anonymous Coward]

WOW this is a horrible idea. I hit 60Gb a week easy. This is really going to crush the tech/internet market.

Morons

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is the worst company in Canada given a monopoly on lines? This is ridiculous... and a 60GB cap? You can probably exceed that just checking email nowadays

that makes comcasts 250gb cap and higher business

[Joe The Dragon]

that makes comcasts 250gb cap and I think it's higher on business planes look real good.

But not as good as fios and att no caps.

Next Election

[the_other_one]

Do Not vote for the Conservative Reform Alliance Party!

Re:Next Election

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course we won't vote for those bastards, everyone knows the Alliance for Conservative Reform Party is the best!

Re:Next Election

[Anonymous Coward]

Pardon me for intruding, but um,

Whoosh!

Re:Next Election

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not? Two of those groups sound like they'd support more of an open market, rather than a government sanctioned monopoly.

Re:Next Election

[Mashiki]

Why? ~15 years of the liberal party raping you in the face at every turn wasn't enough?

Re:Next Election

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? ~15 years of the liberal party raping you in the face at every turn wasn't enough?

If you'd ever really been raped, you wouldn't throw that term around so casually, you insensitive clod!

Re:Next Election

[Tim MacDonald]

Judean People's Front vs. the People's Front of Judea. It's a Life of Brian reference, blockhead.

Re:Next Election

[twidarkling]

Yeah, because Harper's doing so much better. Oh wait, he's not. And yeah, I voted Conservative. Unfortunately, there's a couple issues I chose to hold in slightly higher priority that lined up more with them than with the Liberal party. Too bad they haven't done shit about those issues, either. Maybe I'll just vote Labour.

Re:Next Election

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, and do we have to let the conservatives take their turn now?

Re:Next Election

[Anonymous Coward]

Just vote green. They're for open tech and are the most transparent mainstream group out there in politics.

Re:Next Election

[Mashiki]

You might have noticed that minorities generally get nothing done. As it stands, this could become the new 'norm' in Canadian politics. Minority, followed by minority, and nothing getting done, while we get screwed over.

Re:Next Election

[Anonymous Coward]

True but 10 years of Bush policies in Canada will be far worse. They are already starting to block science reporting and census taking.
Keep people dumb. Republican style.

Re:Next Election

[Anonymous Coward]

The ruling party won't make a difference on the CRTC's day-to-day. No party I've seen has any tangible platform for communications issues (except maybe NDP, but it's not very high on their priorities). And it's not like Bell was on a short leash in the days of Liberal rule.

It was the Conservatives, actually, who overruled the CRTC when we were auctioning wireless spectrum. The CRTC ruled Wind Mobile could not operate in Canada because they're 'foreign owned'. The govt decided otherwise. Wind is now in business, and in my opinion is the only appealling alternative to the Big Three, as they're known around here.

I'd vote out the Conservatives for other reasons, but it's worth saying: Hands-off government is actually a good policy when the government is a corporate puppet.

Re:Next Election

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad it was the previous liberal terms that allowed the CRTC to become what it is now.

Re:Next Election

[Anonymous Coward]

The CRTC isn't directly controlled by the government, and a lot of the issues with it come from previous governments.

(There's other reasons to not vote CPC, such as their treatment of Science, but this isn't one)

You WANT usage based billing

[SuperKendall]

As long as you are allowed to purchase some higher level of service in addition to base, usage based billing is better because if you are a higher paying customer you can get better support. Annoyed that you have to pay a little more for huge bandwidth use every month? Well cry me a river freeloader, you were benefitting from all the people that paid a lot for bandwidth when they were using an order of magnitude less bandwidth than you were and that time is over (for Canada anyway).

Usage based billing means more people can afford internet service, it means more choice for what kinds of packages make sense for you. It also brings to light the simple fact that you cannot give away unlimited amounts of something for a fixed price forever, eventually any system that tries will come crashing down.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

it means they can rape us up the ass even more as they have eliminated competition UBB is the worst idea I pay 40$ a month and get 2mb/down 800k up and am limited to 42gb a month

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[MoonBuggy]

Reasonable points, but you overlook the fact that at wholesale, $1.12/GB is overpriced by about an order of magnitude.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[king neckbeard]

You might have a point if telecoms were competitive markets, usage was the biggest cost factor, and prices were in any way representative of costs. These are monopolies, peak capacity and running the lines are the real cost last time I checked and it'll probably result in virtually everyone paying more.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

It also brings to light the simple fact that you cannot give away unlimited amounts of something for a fixed price forever, eventually any system that tries will come crashing down.

This would be true if they were selling infinite Internet usage, but even "unlimited" is very finite: (connection speed)*(time).

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[destroyer661]

Peak capacity? There's more people in California than ALL of Canada, and no one is complaining there. How the hell are we anywhere NEAR peak capacity? Our urban centres in all of our provinces are a joke compared to the urban sprawl of most US cities.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

I WANT to continue using my unlimited 10/10mbit DSL that I have for ten eurobucks a month, thank you very much.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd agree if there were reasonable competition.

As it is now, there are two gas stations to choose from and the price of gas is $100 per liter. I don't care that the guy pumping gas cleans my windshield and smiles at me. I know there's people that only buy 1-2 liters a month and enjoy having their ego stroked. Great! Give me a competing no-frills gas station down the road charging a reasonable price for gas.

Let me pay $15 a month for internet access and $0.15 per gig of usage and I'm there.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[king neckbeard]

I mean peak bandwidth capacity for the network. If the peak traffic time is 5:30 PM, then the thing that costs them money is ensuring that the needs for 5:30 are met. Let's say for the sake of example that the total traffic going over their network is 1 tbps. If doesn't matter much if the rest of the day is 0.99 tbps or 1gbps, because the actual costs go into assuring that the network can handle 5:30's traffic.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet $1.12/GB is still almost half of what Rogers overage charges are right now ($2/GB with caps of 60GB, 80GB, 125G and 175GB though the higher plans get ridiculously expensive at $100/month). Rogers and Bell are for all intents and purposes the same monopoly, they don't compete they just do what the other one does. Add into that the fact that both of them are media corporations means that Canada will never get competitive broadband till the government (Yea right) or a big company like Google steps in to fill the void.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing with usage-based billing is that we pay X amount for up Y gigs a month and if we only use a tiny bit of that bandwidth then we don't get a discount. The price for that base bandwidth, along with the ridiculous price they want for overages makes this a raw deal for all Canadians.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

If you thing usage based billing will bring down prices you are simply an idiot. Bell will not decrease there prices unless they have a need to compete and as things stand now they have no reason to compete customers simply have nowhere to go. All usage based billing is going to do is make people download less and every time they go over charge them like there is no tomorrow.

In the future you will be downloading more and more too. Online tv, very high resolution photos, and even just web pages could by themselves be a few mb and you are going to be the one complaining that you are going over your cap. The internet isn't like electricity. It doesn't cost anything to make bits and bits what costs are the wires on which they travel. The cost of this is equal to all customers. If you think about it we cost cost our service providers the same even if I use more data then you. Stop listening to all the crap Bell tells you travel a little go to Europe try out and see what's available there. Don't have the mentality that Bell and Businesses want you to have because Bell doesn't want to give you a deal they just want to rip off the customer (thats what happens when they have a monopoly) and they have now found a way to rip people off who use a larger amount of data. The service providers are smart they have put a cap on you internet usage because they know in the future you will use more data and they will be able to charge you overage fees.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite so reasonable points. There is nothing in Canada to make the internet cheaper in Canada to the citizens. In fact there's no real talk about lowering the cost at all - just capping what's there and charging more. As such, there's not going to be more people who can afford to jump online when this finally comes in. If they couldn't afford it before, they won't be able to afford it now and in fact if they accidently go over then it's actually less affordable than before.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[SuperKendall]

If you thing usage based billing will bring down prices you are simply an idiot

It already has for mobile, my iPhone bill is $5/month cheaper than it was and potentially could be $15/month cheaper if I went with the lower plan (my usage is right at the cusp).

It might (MIGHT) not bring down prices right away in Canada's case, but more than likely it will eventually.

The internet isn't like electricity. It doesn't cost anything to make bits and bits what costs are the wires on which they travel.

I'd be careful about using that idiot tag when you write stuff like that. Bandwidth has a very real cost - it cost nothing to make bits, there is in fact a cost to maintain equipment that sends said bits and in the end SOMEONE gets charged per bit.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Chryana]

Are you a shill, or some sort of moron? I live in Canada. I am directly affected by this. In France for the price I pay monthly, I could get a line which is 10 times faster than mine is along with unlimited phone calls to a bunch of places and HDTV. The speed of my internet line, 3 Mbps, has not increased in the past 7 years I have lived in downtown Montreal, which is about as urban as it gets in Canada. The price I pay for that same service, though, has increased quite significantly (at least 20%). Why was Bell able to offer unlimited access plans 5 years ago, and now they can't? Should they not have upgraded their lines since then? Everyone I know that uses the services of Bell hates their guts because they are complete scumbags.

Usage based billing means more people can afford internet service,

Have you bothered checking the pricing schemes Bell offers? Check their lowest offering. It says it's 20$/month in Quebec, but it's 25 if you don't have a phone or satellite service deal with them already. Oh, and the speed is 500 kbps with a 1G data cap. They were able to offer unlimited at 3 Mbps 6 or 7 years ago for 30$ a month. I guess poor people don't do much but change their status on Facebook.

Please go back under the rock you came from. For same money that I pay, people in Europe and Asia are getting unlimited data plans with speeds that approach the speed of my LAN.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

No you are an idiot and this has absolutely nothing to do with costs associated with bandwidth.

This ruling means now that companies like Teksavvy, that have purchased a specific amount of bandwidth, can no longer divide it among their customers as they see fit.
This ruling means that if any individual uses more bandwidth than what Bell's package provides, they have to be charged extra fees. It doesn't matter that 6 other Teksavvy customers use very little and their aggregate bandwidth is lower than the amount Teksavvy purchased from Bell.

There is ZERO chance this will bring prices down as wholesalers like Teksavvy have no areas to differentiate their services as now prices are effectively set by Bell. (No companies is going to survive selling at a loss)

The problem is we have service providers that are also content providers. The internet is obviously becoming a real threat to traditional content providers and companies like Bell can now manipulate the market how they see fit. How's gonna use Bell VoD or Cogeco VoD at $x.xx a movie when Netflix offers a compelling choice at $7.99/month, not many. So service providers like Rogers, Bell move to be competitive is to slash bandwidth limits and charge more overages. So basically eliminate or restrict competition. The CRTC was set up to prevent this but again they are the ones enabling it.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work tech support for an ISP. We serviced business only. Less ignorant support calls. We charged 1/4 the price for our lines than the major telco we bought the lines from. Our lines ran full speed as compared to the telco. The telco's ALL oversell their bandwidth and make you compete with your neighbor. And we made a profit. And you actually believe the telco's when they tell you that we are downloading too much???? You DO not get what they advertise they sell you. They screw you over and lie to you to get more $$.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

I WANT to continue using my unlimited 10/10mbit DSL that I have for ten eurobucks a month, thank you very much.

10/10 = 1. 1 millibit isn't very much data, especially for a whole month.

Oh, and you're an idiot.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the anon who doesn't understand internet speeds.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[canajin56]

Bell already HAD usage base fees. This isn't about what Bell is allowed to do to their own customers. This is about what Bell is allowed to do to people who are NOT their customers. Bell is now allowed to demand bandwidth usage from third parties that use their lines, and tax those third parties. That is, TekSavvy connects their modem to a Bell copper line, and then wires that modem to their backbone. And Bell gets to hold a gun to your head and say you cannot download more GB than WE allow our customers or else it's not fair to us! Please at least read the summary.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Pokey.Clyde]

Well, you started out fairly well reasoned, but once you called high bandwidth users "freeloaders", you lost any credibility you had. They are not "freeloading", they are using what they paid for. Just because they use more than most does not make them "freeloaders".

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[jenningsthecat]

The problem IS NOT usage-based billing per se. The problem is that Bell can now apply usage-based billing to third-party ISP's such as TekSavvy, WITHOUT APPLYING IT TO THEIR OWN DIRECT CUSTOMERS! It's no longer even close to a level playing field; the CRTC has effectively destroyed competition in this market, with one stroke of a poisoned pen. So now I have a choice between staying with TekSavvy, enjoying their superior service and tech expertise but having to pay UBB, or going back to Bell Sympatico and putting up with arrogant jerks in customer service, and know-nothing f**ktards in 'tech support' who couldn't tell the difference between Linux the OS and Linus the Charlie Brown comic strip character. The CRTC has sold Canadians down the river with this move, and I'd like to know how much Bell paid some snivel serpents for this favourable legislation. Arrogant, whining, incompetent Bell fancies that it owns the infrastructure on which land line calls and DSL service take place. I'm sure that as far as the law is concerned they do, however in reality Canadians own the infrastructure. We've paid for it several times over with decades of tax breaks, government-enforced monopoly, public rights-of-way, putting up with crap service, etcetera. The CRTC ought to be dismantled and its functionaries jailed, and Bell ought to be nationalized. Free enterprise is one thing; government-sanctioned raping and pillaging of the population by actively suppressing competition is quite another.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Interoperable]

That's absolutely right, if the market determines the going rate for bandwidth. Bandwidth is, after all, a finite resource; however, there is no competition and hence there are no market forces at play in this situation. That's where this whole can of worms came from in the first place. The whole industry is regulated because of the excessively high barriers to entry for new competitors. It's not going to be an ideal situation but it would be less bad if it was regulated well instead of being regulated by the CRTC.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

It also brings to light the simple fact that you cannot give away unlimited amounts of something for a fixed price forever, eventually any system that tries will come crashing down.

Bandwith IS unlimited. The flow of information should not be measured the same way you measure water, electricity or petrol.

You know, if the companies were in really big financial trouble, or had they paid for the infrastructure themselves (they didn't, we the people did) or would they fix prices to a new, low price, it might make sense that they charge in this draconian way.
They are just money mongrels. And you are either ignorant of how things work, a sellout, or both.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

No, 10/10mbit is 1 mbit^-1.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you like some fries with those assburgers?

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[SuperKendall]

Are you a shill, or some sort of moron?

I'm not a shill, but you accusing me of being one automatically makes you a stooge. Sorry about that, out of my hands.

In France [arstechnica.com] for the price I pay monthly, I could get a line which is 10 times faster than mine is along with unlimited phone calls to a bunch of places and HDTV.

Look at a map sometime ignorant stooge. France is roughly the size of one of your Canadian shopping malls. You in the city are paying prices that subsidize rural coverage.

And have you ever travelled internationally? I have found most of europe to SUCK for bandwidth, in hotels or rented residences. I have yet to ever encounter these high-speed meccas people like you regularly tout. If bandwidth there was so amazingly cheap every hotel would have amazing service. And when you say "asia" you are of course talking about Japan, Korea (also very tiny) and isolated pockets (read: Hong Kong) in China.

Why was Bell able to offer unlimited access plans 5 years ago, and now they can't?

Go back and read the last sentence of my post. If something cannot continue, it will not.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

The Difference is the Price of service will NEVER GO DOWN EVER , the did away with unlimited plans, they are shrinking the plans download limits and are increasing the cost.... HOW AND THE HELL IS THIS RIGHT

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're a shill...

The size of country (and it's population density) does not matter in this case.
Because no one is even talking about covering the WHOLE Canada.
Why can't people of Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and many other major Canadian cities obtain the same speeds and bandwidth that people living in _rural_ areas of France, Japan, and many other countries can get for fraction of what we, as Canadians, pay for a crappier service?

And that is the question that pretty much destroys your area and population density argument.

Speaking as a Canadian, who lives in a major metropolitan area and had the same connection and plan for the past 6 years (with no price drops, no increases in speed/bandwith) and wondering wtf, I say:
  GO F*CK YOURSELF, EH?

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Heed00]

I just moved back to Canada after living the past 10 years in England -- when I first got there internet speeds, data rates, etc. were far behind what was available in Canada for a lot more money. 10 years later and I return to find that Canada seems like some sort of internet backwater with these severely limiting caps and astronomical prices -- the near monopolies have gamed the system well over the past 10 years. I paid the equivalent of $30 a month for a 10 meg down/1 meg up line with no total data cap. You would get shaped down to 3 meg download speed for 4 hours if you moved more than a couple of gigs over a 4 hour period which I found to be a fair system -- but that was it -- not protocol throttling, no monthly caps plus charges, etc. And that was the lowest tier package available -- the higher packages included 50 meg down with much more higher data movement before being temporarily shaped. And I always got my maximum line speed when it should have been available -- no doubt not everyone had perfect service, but I can only say that for myself it was a rock solid and reliable line.

In short, Canadians have been hosed severely over the last 10 years when it comes to internet services -- and we just got more hosed.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent as troll
(you can read it before if you don't believe me)

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[janline]

Finland, Sweden and Norway are much more suitable comparisons to Canada. Sparsely populated and all with a tax financed internet infrastructure. Monopolies like Bells exists or did exist in all of these three countries as well. These three nordic countries has internet offers that are faster and cheaper than the Canadian market offers. None of them allows for the wholesaler to charge $1.83 per gigabyte.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

Please Super Ken Doll... like all technology it gets cheaper to do things as time goes on. We are looking at a monopoly leveraging their monopoly position to abuse the people of Canada. These corporations are making it so that they have less competition. If you consider that 95% of the people of Canada live within 200kms of the US border it puts our population density equivalent to that of South Korea. In SK they have 100mbit or gigabit plans for a fraction of our cost and with unlimited transfers. You seem to not understand that the hardware is the major cost for the unlimited transfers. The problem for these short sighted companies is that they oversell their bandwidth and havent built any new infrastructure in years. Quit defending companies that are abusing their monopolies. Bell and Rogers think they are more than just dumb pipes... but they are wrong and they need to have the government take away the lines since the people of Canada paid for them... they would be better run by our municipalities as opposed to the abuse we get from these horrid corporations.

Usage based billing is just another abuse these horrid companies are heaping onto the Canadian public.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Gr8Apes]

Interestingly enough, I have a friend that just moved to England, just outside of London. His connection is 512K up / 6M down, and he has an 8GB/month cap. He didn't mention what it costs, just that he missed his 5/15 FIOS connection a lot. It was the only broadband option he could get.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[NovaHorizon]

There is a simple problem you run into. Usage based billing only works in the following idea.

--------
-company charges $x for unlimited plans because their network costs are high due to a few people using a LOT of bandwidth.
-company switches to usage based billing. Charges less as high bandwidth users now pay what they owe vs low bandwidth uses paying the difference.
-------

However, this is not the reason for usage based billing in this instance.

Instead Bell, the backbone company was forced to charge ISPs on it's backbone an "at cost" rate, meaning they couldn't charge more than it cost them to run the line. This allows the ISP to determine what pricing plan they want, including usage based to reduce overall costs.

During this time, an ISP going to usage based billing can potentially have lower costs for other clients.

Now, Bell is charging it's original rate, along with an extra $1.12/GB over a low 60GB limit. This artificially raises the rates of the smaller ISPs that are on Bell's backbone as they were paying all of Bell's costs for those lines to begin with, and now have to pay even more. Meaning that the ISPs were likely already at the lowest amount they could charge, and have to now pay a gigantic extra fee for simply moderate usage.

I am short on time right now, but the quick and simple is this. Usage based billing only works when it's the company that deals directly with the customer that determines it, not the backbone. The backbone company getting to charge extra only raises rates for it's competitors.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as you are allowed to purchase some higher level of service in addition to base, usage based billing is better because if you are a higher paying customer you can get better support.

So are you on the phone every week with customer support? Most people here know what they are doing. As long as they get an IP address lease over DHCP, and the ISP isn't doing any sneaky throttling or whatnot, they NEVER call support.

Well cry me a river freeloader, you were benefitting from all the people that paid a lot for bandwidth when they were using an order of magnitude less bandwidth than you were and that time is over (for Canada anyway).

So, I'll admit to it, Auntie Agatha and Granny Gertrude do not download a lot but they calls 2 or 3 times per week when their FarmVille isn't loading. Now, real live support agents that are based in North America, THAT costs a lot of money!

So to make a long story short: let's put in a 1-900 number for service calls, shall we?

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[cowwoc2001]

Well said!

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Pastis]

> If bandwidth there was so amazingly cheap every
> hotel would have amazing service.

Hotels don't have the same deals because
* customer and business market show a big price difference. Hotels are seen as ISP when they resell access.
* hotels don't see it necessary to have free/cheap internet to be attractive
* they outsource the infrastructure/service and the pricing is thus made by the third parties. Think telecom companies. And Telecom companies suck.

One reason Internet is cheap in France is that there was competition (in part thanks to Free). Mobile phone prices are high (because of price collusions during many years with the main actors - http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-139542623.html).

This is hopefully going to change as Free enters the telecom market in ~2 years.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2010-10/13/c_13554298.htm

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Heed00]

That sounds like he can't get cable, but there should be better DSL options available. Even SKY t.v. has a pretty good plan compared to that -- truly unlimited and 20 Mb download speed, my sister and brother-in-law have it and are quite happy with it for their purposes. Downside is that it's Rupert Murdoch's outfit. http://www.sky.com/shop/broadband-talk/

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Heed00]

For completeness, here's beardy Branson's outfit: http://shop.virginmedia.com/broadband/compare-broadband-packages.html

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Ichijo]

there is no competition and hence there are no market forces at play in this situation.

Perfect competition isn't required for market forces to work. Even with one seller and many buyers, price can be used to efficiently allocate limited supplies and to be used as a price signal to make more supply available.

So the claim that there are no market forces at play is an overstatement.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Ichijo]

You might have a point if telecoms were competitive markets, usage was the biggest cost factor, and prices were in any way representative of costs.

Why must they all be true for the parent to have a point? What if just one of the above were true?

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Rockoon]

The whole industry is regulated because of the excessively high barriers to entry for new competitors.

More importantly, the industry is regulated in order to create such excessively high barriers.

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[king neckbeard]

One being true would put usage based billing in a stronger position, but without all of them being true, we are almost certainly better off with speed-based billing

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[gl4ss]

bandwidth is not a finite resource.
the longer a telco operates, the faster lines they should be able to afford.

now it seems they're going the other way, posing that they're just distributing a natural resource. it's a man made resource and as such not finite.

it's a bit stupid when a canadian can't dowload 60 gigs, but in Finland I can download 60 gigs over 3g on the same month for ten bucks. canada should be a much more potentially profitable market for bandwidth too(and much more people, and money, concentrated on the capital areas as well).

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[afidel]

I think the problem with your argument is that TekSawy is almost assuredly riding the same DSLAM and backhaul as Bell's customers, at least is the US very few CLEC's run their own infrastructure (and due to physical space and power limitations couldn't if they wanted to).

Re:You WANT usage based billing

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I put up with a 15GB/month cap (peak time, although I get 80GB/month with off-peak) with this crowd for £17.99 per month. And you can get much better caps/unlimited with other suppliers, but I prefer the smaller companies as they tend to be more reliable.

As for speed though, most broadband in the UK is supplied via BT's network, although increasingly people go with LLU (local loop unbundled) connections to get higher speeds. I believe in either case, the actual speeds you get largely depend on how far you are from your local exchange. And after that, it depends on what options are provided at that exchange.

You friend could enter their postcode or home telephone number here to find details on their local exchange and that'd help see what their options are. A 6GB/month cap is pretty tight though... but it depends on what you're paying I guess!

Attn : Canadian Politicians

[Anonymous Coward]

I could care less about most of the other issues and debate topics.

State publicly that your party is against usage based billing and you've got my vote.

It's that simple.

(For the record, I'm in the 30-35 year old male demograph, with above-median income.)

Such Bullshit!

[metrix007]

these caps are such arbitrary bullshit.

It's worse in Australia, where a cap is often effectively 10gb down(20gb combined).

The limits ISP's have are nowhere near the limits they artificially impose on customers.

It's crappy collaboration between big parties and should be stopped by regulatory government agencies.

Re:Such Bullshit!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure who your ISP is...!?
I'm Australian, and have a 120GB cap (which I use most of, every month), and most ISPs (Telstra, Optus, Internode, TPG, etc) now offer a 200GB cap, or larger (I've seen 350GB caps here).

I often complain about Australia's internet too, but compared to Canada's "fastest" 5Mbps (from the article linked) and per GB charges after just 60 GB, Australia is already an Internet paradise! - without even considering the 100GB FTTH network that's currently being built here.

I've actually recently been considering emigrating to Canada, but am having second thoughts now - curse you, /.! ;-)

Re:Such Bullshit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, fix my own typo, should be : "... 100Gbps FTTH ..."

Re:Such Bullshit!

[metrix007]

I've been away for a few years, but I thought things are nto so much better.

iinet has a 1tb quota plan, but that is broken down into 500gb peak and 500gb offpeak, and the 500gb limit is up and down....so its more like 250 peak and 250 offpeak.

And, that plan is rare. Why do we need such a limit imposed on us, at all when most countries don't?

Most central American countries despite being developing have better internet than Australia.

Re:Such Bullshit!

[p3anut]

I just churned to TPG. $79 a month, unlimited ADSL2, even on Telstra DSLAMs! So far so good :)

Re:Such Bullshit!

[metrix007]

Unlimited, or Unlimited*?

Only during off-peak?

Re:Such Bullshit!

[p3anut]

Unlimited** **Actual unlimited, all the time :P No mention in the terms of anything regarding throttling etc. So far as I can tell, I'm limited by the fact I only sync at 5.5mb.

Re:Such Bullshit!

[metrix007]

Wow, that's crazy. Why do they offer it if others don't? Don't they still buy their internet from Optus or Telstra?

CTRC=???

[Anonymous Coward]

CRTC: Continually reducing telecom competition

Countries favourable to Canadians?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like I'll be in the market for a new country - any recommendations?

Re:Countries favourable to Canadians?

[eplawless]

Well, the US is out; living in Canada gets you used to decent health care, and they're not much better off than we are in terms of ISPs. Someplace in Europe like Norway might be nice, if a tad quiet.

Re:You WANT usage based billing(MARKUP SUCKS!)

[Required Snark]

A markup of 6500% exists on texting in the USA. http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/news/1001/gallery.americas_biggest_ripoffs/index.html

But on a pay-per-text plan, the 160-character messages typically cost 20 cents outgoing and 10 cents incoming. That's a markup of as much as 6,500%. OMG!

...

Even if customers sign up for an unlimited texting plan for, say, $10 a month, carriers are still cashing in considering that their overhead is basically $0. That's a lot to pay for a few LOLs.

Wholesale vs Bell

[munky99999]

Wholesale: $1.12 per GB and then $0.75 per GB with no max overage. BUT Wholesales already pay for usage at the isp level. So 2x that. Bell: Max overage of $30 aka unlimited for $30. While if not hitting max it's $0.69/gig. Wholesales absolutely cant compete. GG Internet in Canada.

Re:Wholesale vs Bell

[canajin56]

It should be noted that Bell only charges $1.00 per GB to their own customers. So, somehow Bell is being given government force to be allowed to charge the customers of a third party MORE for using only their copper lines, than they charge their own customers for using their copper lines, their modems, and their internet backbone.

Re:You WANT usage based billing(MARKUP SUCKS!)

[Anonymous Coward]

we have the same shit here in canada

Slight correction of the summary

[kent_eh]

Bell Canada was given a monopoly on lines in Canada,

Bell Canada does not have a monopoly on lines in all of Canada.
They do not even operate a wireline business in the west. Here they are a reseller only.
However, this ruling probably does cause the same benefit to the ILECs in all provinces.

They have more control because of us

[bellsucks]

Maybe I am missing something but if you want the control back to the people don't support them.. Teksavvy is growing fast because of this. They are taking on cable also If everyone joined them (last time I called sounds like that is what is happening) then the balance of control would change. Bell/rogers has more suscribers cancel and suscribe to a provider that has there own backbone like teksavvy. (not just anouther bell reseller) Power to the people, don't buy it.. don't give me this excuse that its not available if bell sells dsl internet in your area you can get anouther dsl provider because its setup!

Re:They have more control because of us

[Anonymous Coward]

i use velcom, competition is good...

Re:They have more control because of us

[Dibdidit]

Teksavvy is a reseller, I don't know where you got that they had their own cable in the ground. For residential use in Quebec, you have 3 choice, Bell, videotron and cogeco backbone, the rest are reseller. If your in business, montreal and Quebec city have fiber access from other provider.

Re:They have more control because of us

[bellsucks]

no they do have there own backbone.. the majority on the canadianisp list are resellers.. I think 4-5 years ago there was at least 5-6 resellers of just teksavvy.

You should really call them .. they can explain it far more better

everyone goes through bells (tax payers funded infrastructure) and yes the majority are literly resellers of bells backbone internet connection runing from bell and literly just do there own support and sell modems.

Teksavvy has there own backbone (hence the 200GB and $0.50 per gb over)

Just because bell maintains the lines does not mean your internet comes from bell.

this is why Teksavvy is so important in this argument because they are being effected..

   

Re:They have more control because of us

[GeckoX]

Yes, Teksavvy does have their own backbone and have been growing as fast as possible in the past few years. I've been just waiting for them to come to my area so I could switch to them, they are a great company...er, were.

This decision kills Teksavvy. Teksavvy does use Bell's copper for last-mile. They have to. Bell has a granted monopoly on this. And now for this use of JUST that bit of copper, they will be forced to pay MORE than Bell's own customers do for overage fees over their entire network!

This is completely and utterly despicable. These small competitors in Canada have been fighting upstream without a paddle for a decade now against the big 3, and succeeding! And now in one fell swoop they are to be washed away. We'd be better off in Canada tomorrow across the board if the big 3 simply ceased to exist at the end of business today.

Frustrated

[mrops]

To be honest, I am so frustrated. What can we do. What can I do.

I have tried writing to my MP to no avail.

How can we tackle this absurd rulings coming out of CRTC. To be honest I am tired of the whole conservative bunch.

I almost long for the corrupt liberals. Not sure whats better, conservatives stealing money by making it look legit in forms of these rulings or liberals who are just good old thieves.

I signed up for netflix, content is limited, but I am already at at 60+GB mark, but then I am with teksavvy and so far didn't need to care.

arghhhhh.... who do I go to......

Re:Frustrated

[Anonymous Coward]

To BCE headquarters, bend over and drop trow. /s

Re:Frustrated

[Anonymous Coward]

My suggestions:
1) A private citizens get cash in suitcases which would crush what are in the lobbyists'.
2) Start up a publicly owned WiFi network
3) Convince the CRTC and the politicos that we own the bloody cables and equipment Bell wants us to pay for. We have all been subsidizing Bell and its mismanagement now for decades.

An inquisitive Canadian wants to know

[Anonymous Coward]

Just how much of Canada does this actually affect? I've spent the last twenty years slowly moving to the west, so I've lost touch with the east.

-Manitoba has MTS (previously government) who own the lines.

-Saskatchewan has SaskTel (government), so they likely own the lines.

-Alberta and BC I'm not sure who owns them, but I can tell you it's not Bell. Telus and Shaw are the major ISPs, and they do a 'decent' job of competing with each other. The way Telus is going I wouldn't be surprised if they rolled out fibre in major centers before too long.

-Quebec I'm not sure about. I know they have providers that other parts of Canada don't, but I don't know who owns the lines. It's possible that it's Bell though, as apparently they are headquartered in Montreal.

-Ontario is obviously where this is the biggest problem, but for all I know it's the only place where it's definitely an issue.

-Provinces east of Quebec. I have no idea. As far as I know they could be using paper cups. Is Bell also an issue here?

-Northern province/territories are satellite, they have larger problems than Bell putting in data based plans.

Years ago when I lived in Ontario everyone used to think they solely represented all of Canada, but I thought that had changed over the years. You would think that would be increasingly true after a lot of their economy crashed, but articles like this confuse me to this point. If it's another one of 'those' articles, it's like saying the biggest ISP in Pennsylvania has started making people pay by the KB, and now the whole US is screwed.

Re:An inquisitive Canadian wants to know

[Interoperable]

Depends on where you live. If you live in Toronto, then it affects all of Canada because as far as you're concerned, Toronto = Canada.

Joking aside, Bell dominates the market in most of Ontario and Quebec. Most of the other providers in Quebec and Ontario are reselling Bell's bandwidth which means that this impacts a large portion of the internet business in Canada. Moreover, I'm sure it sets a precedent that would be relevant to resellers of Shaw or Tellus bandwidth in the West.

Shaw tends to be quite good compared to Bell but that could change. They have absurdly low data caps but they never enforce them; unlike Bell, which demands a pound of flesh for every GB over your 60 GB limit.

Re:An inquisitive Canadian wants to know

[Nemyst]

Actually, the dominant player in Quebec is Videotron for web services. They have more than a million subscribers.

Re:An inquisitive Canadian wants to know

[Anonymous Coward]

Out east (PEI, NS and Moncton), Eastlink provides a decent competitor to Bell Aliant to keep them in line. I'm living in Fredericton now, and am very disappointed with the service. We have muni owned fibre, however, it's only being used to deliver some sketchy spotty wi-fi. Seems like a waste if you ask me. Bell Aliant is rolling out fibre now to New Brunswick and some on NS, but it costs an arm and a leg. Since I refuse to use Rogers (caps), I'm stuck on 7Mbps Bell Aliant DSL. If Bell rolls out caps here, I'll be tempted to move back to Nova Scotia just so I can get Eastlink (faster and cheaper).

How?

[sarhjinian]

Maybe I'm being obtuse, but how does Bell get to do this? They already sell and make money off the last mile, and it's the wholesale buyer's backbone that's being tapped out, not Bell's. Why should it matter how much traffic is going over these lines when it's not Bell's traffic to route?

Between being able to throttle down wholesale DSL rates below what Sympatico can sell and this it really doesn't make a lot of sense.

Re:How?

[SuiteSisterMary]

Well, a) Bell still has to backhaul to the demarc with any given ISP, and b) DSLAMs are fininte resources. If they have to upgrade because ISP Alpha is offering super duper highspeed unlimited, it's only fair the ISPs pay their fair share. Besides, ISTR the ISPs begging for metered billing, rather than Bell doing wholesale (pardon the pun) traffic throttling and deep packet inspection.

Re:How?

[ph]

I don't know what would make you think Bell would stop packet shaping their DSL network. They already won that decision from the CRTC, why would they stop?

Re:How?

[canajin56]

Because Bell charges usage fees of $1/GB to their own customers, so if they can't charge at LEAST $1.12/GB to third parties then how can they possibly compete with third parties? I mean, besides slashing their lines like they do now.

Re:How?

[SuiteSisterMary]

Well, I'd assume that once they can charge ISPs for usage, they'd be more interested in moving more packets. They seem to have turned off the DPI machines lately, for example.

Given a monopoly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone provide a link showing how Bell Canada were given a monopoly on lines in Canada?

Googling does no reveal much and it seems like Videotron and Rogers are offering fiber-to-the-home in certain areas not to mention their "home phone" and internet service offerings.

The part I have difficulty understanding is the "given" part: since telecom and dragging copper or fibre to connect sites to one's network is very expensive, could it be nobody wanted to invest that much money to compete with a 100+ year old company?

Not Unlimited (& Cake)

[neoshroom]

It also brings to light the simple fact that you cannot give away unlimited amounts of something for a fixed price forever, eventually any system that tries will come crashing down.

Unlimited plans are not giving unlimited amounts of data. The data limit is fixed by the bandwidth speed. Additionally, you can give away "unlimited" amounts of something for a fixed price forever. Have you never been to an all you can eat buffet?

All you do is make a statistical analysis of the cost you have to charge for all typical users, both light users and heavy users together, to make a profit. It works the same way as an all you can eat buffet, well except of course if they tried to charge fat people extra at a buffet people might actually care.

Should I be worrying about the oncoming collapse of the Chinese buffet market? No. I'd say that would make the best policy for the Internet is "Let them eat cake," but we all know the cake is a like.

Re:Not Unlimited (& Cake)

[Anonymous Coward]

Additionally, you can give away "unlimited" amounts of something for a fixed price forever. Have you never been to an all you can eat buffet?

Oddly enough, they seem to mind when I sign up for their unlimited buffet and then dump plate after plate into the garbage. Hey, it's unlimited right? Fuck all those restrictions that I need to actually consume the food or they'll charge me a waste fee. Show me a person who can eat an unlimited amount of food in the (usually) 2 hour window they give you and you might have a point. Compare this to my computer, which CAN consume an unlimited amount of bandwidth without getting "full".

Re:Not Unlimited (& Cake)

[SirLars]

"if they tried to charge fat people extra at a buffet people might actually care." I like this analogy and this new ruling would be like McDonalds lobbying the government to DISALLOW these buffets from allowing people to eat all they want, and force those chinese buffets to sell McDonalds fries for 1$ each to any of the buffet's customers that want second helpings. Screw all the extra cost... this is as perfect an example of Bell using the government to ensure anti-competition in what was beginning to be an excitingly new competitive field! Netflix and CTV, CBC, SPACE channel, SHOWCASE, GLOBAL TV and all the channels are now showing their episodes online - bringing pop culture to a wider audience. Youtube and VideoSharing sites and tons of HowTo Video Websites etc etc.. the world is opening up to new Canadians... problem is, Bell's not getting enough of their dimes... Internet media is expanding at a tremendous rate and many households are now able to access the television programming and educational videos they previously couldn't afford with traditional cable or satellite providers. Bell is using the CRTC to squash their competition who are giving a better service for less money - planning on stealing those customers from their wholesalers by attracting them with their overpriced bundle deals that come with a "free month of texting".

Ameteur radio bandwidth.

[steeleyeball]

There are some pretty high bandwidth Ham radio frequencies. Is there a way around the CRTC by having an amateur radio license?

Re:Ameteur radio bandwidth.

[robot256]

Amateur radio cannot replace the Internet--at least in the U.S. regulations both encryption and 1st- or 2nd-party commercial traffic are banned. So you can check your home email via unencrypted POP or browse the web casually (even with 3rd party ads), but you can't check your work email, buy anything, or technically use SSL or SSH at all. The only time "message obfuscation" of any kind permitted is when sending control signals to satellites. Amateur radios frequencies are specifically intended for experimental applications, and using it as a dedicated internet connection would constitute a fixed service. The laws could be different in Canada, of course, but I would be surprised if they were vastly different.

Re:Ameteur radio bandwidth.

[steeleyeball]

That's an interesting way to look at it. I wasn't thinking it necessarily had to be connected to the internet. Radio modems have been used since the 1970's possibly earlier. It might be interesting to see what a network would be like if the requirement for use was the ability to set up or build your own equipment. It would be like the Internet before Tim Berners Lee messed it up. There are other frequencies that are unregulated and not part of amateur radio frequencies that can be used also. ... You know why the laws are like that....

Re:Ameteur radio bandwidth.

[robot256]

Any unregulated use is going to have strict power limits, and if they start to interfere with licensed services we'll hear about it in the news. If there are truly unregulated frequencies I would love to hear about it; it was my understanding that everything under 200GHz was accounted for. Above that is almost exclusively and explicitly designated as Amateur spectrum, so the same rules apply.

The laws aren't created with any particular malintent, just cognizant of the fact that if anybody could transmit anything anywhere, then nobody could use any radio for anything, period. It's the system we've got and we need to work with it.

Bell will destroy small business competitors

[ph]

Bell is doing this purely to maximize their profit and put the wholesalers who are trying to compete with them out of business.

The rates Bell has given to wholesalers of their GAS network are the exact same as their RETAIL rates for bandwidth. That means wholesalers have ZERO margins, and would have to actually incur costs to collect this usage charge on behalf of Bell. If there’s any errors, I'm sure it comes out of the wholesaler's pocket as well.

Wholesalers used to be able to compete against the big guys by having better bandwidth caps, better technical support, more flexable plans -- Bell has used UBB to level the playing field to where only they can win.

Why are the first 20 gigabytes after 60 so valuable ($1.12 per gig), then from 81 to 300 gigs are zero-cost? Because Bell has structured the system to screw over as many people as possible. They did an analysis of where the sweet spot is to collect as much money as possible from wholesale subscribers, then structured their rates to match.

Re:Bell will destroy small business competitors

[DarthVain]

Because both Bell and Rogers (surprise) charge 1.25$ per GB with a 30$ max on their 60GB accounts.

This way the "independent" can actually make 0.13$ cents a GB if they also charge 1.25$. This is to force the "competition" into the exact same pricing models as the Bell/Rogers duopoly. Apparently they can use the "regulator" CTRC to do this. I mean it worked for traffic shaping.

The whole situation is ridiculous. Once again the CRTC shows its true colours...

Protest this as a tax payer.

[aristotle-dude]

Stop giving the government an interest free loan and instead pay only what you owe in taxes at tax time instead of giving them free money and then collecting a refund. Not only will you earn money in interest but you can send a message to the government by hitting them where it hurts.

Re:Protest this as a tax payer.

[steeleyeball]

I have met people who are foolish enough to refuse to pay at all, but you have the right Idea. Make sure they don't get the interest your money earns because you earned it and deserve it.... Nice. That is a good way to send a message to them.

Re:Protest this as a tax payer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop giving the government an interest free loan and instead pay only what you owe in taxes at tax time instead of giving them free money and then collecting a refund. Not only will you earn money in interest but you can send a message to the government by hitting them where it hurts.

I wish I could. What's taken out of my first pay in Januari, 2011 isn't due until the end of April, 2012. "The Government" always make the rules to work out very nice for themselves.

They are freeloaders

[SuperKendall]

They are not "freeloading", they are using what they paid for.

They are freeloading in the sense that the amount of bandwidth they enjoy at the price they pay is paid for greatly by the fact that so many other subscribers are hardly using any bandwidth.

They are in fact getting a much higher level of service than they are paying for. How is that not freeloading? I use a lot of bandwidth myself but I'm not going to lie and pretend that there are not a lot of other light network users that help make this possible. Why is "freeloader" such a negative term to you in this context? Taking advantage of a situation is not always negative.

Re:They are freeloaders

[contra_mundi]

Googling define:freeloader gives the following:

# someone who takes advantage of the generosity of others
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

There's no generosity to take advantage of. Our "freeloader" is a paying customer among others.

# Freeloader is a game published by Cheapass Games. The object of the game is to mooch as much free stuff as possible off of your friends and neighbours.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeloader_(game)

Still a paying customer.

# One who does not contribute or pay appropriately; one who gets a free ride, etc. without paying a fair share; An individual who gets merchandise from the back of supermarket premises that are past-their sell-by-date (Canada, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Scotland)
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/freeloader

Still a paying customer, paying the full price required by the business.


# The Freeloaders were formed in 2004 by Kevin O'Toole and Dale Longworth, two of the founder members of N-Trance.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeloaders_(band)

Our "freeloader" probably can't play that well.

# Freeloading - The term "exploitation" may carry two distinct meanings: * The act of using something for any purpose. In this case, exploit is a synonym for use. * The act of using something in an unjust or cruel manner. It is this meaning of exploitation which is discussed below.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeloading

I know of some power users, but I still wouldn't call them exploitative or cruel in their browsing.

# a person who imposes on another's hospitality without sharing in the responsibility or cost.
www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/The-Bean-Trees-Study-and-Homework-Help-Full-Glossary-for-The-Bean-Trees.id-30,pageNum-74.html

Again, they pay in full.


In the final analysis, you are kind of right. But we're all freeloaders of society. A doctor will cure us, and we use an insurance that's in effect paid by the premiums of other people. We use public infrastructure that has been paid by taxes. We eat food that is subsidized by the government.

The thing is, it's a negative term, and nobody wants to be called a freeloader.

Haha. Bell (and Rogers) are not reasonable.

[SilverJets]

Canadian ISPs are not about facilitating access for consumers. They are all about how much money they can bleed out of their customers with data usage caps. And I know Rogers (maybe Bell too) does not allow home users to run servers across their internet connection.

Don't get me started on their iron fist strangle hold on our cellular networks.

Re:that makes comcasts 250gb cap and higher busine

[nurb432]

Expect that 250 to drop as competition is bought out.

Low rate codecs and torrents

[flyingfsck]

The effect is clear. If you want to distribute or watch movies online, use a torrent or a low rate codec.

down with UBB

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone with half a brain can see why Rogers & Bell want to cap internet usage and charge more for more data. The internet directly competes with their core business -- Telephone, TV and movies.

These companies hold a monopoly on internet services for the majority of Canadians. What choice do we have? This is a terrible decision that does NOTHING to protect Canadians. It is high time for the government to step in and put these guys in their place.

Re:down with UBB

[Khyber]

No, it's high time YOU stepped up and put these people in their place, because it's quite obvious the Canadian government isn't going to do jack shit, and you need to grow some backbone.

1.5 Gb/hr is high

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if Netflix is sending a less compressed picture or going with 1080p, but movie torrents (around 1h 40min each) at full 720p and 5.1 audio are in the 1.4 to 1.5 Gb range. Roughly 1 Gb per hour. If there's a cap here (I'm with Videotron), I'd opt for the slightly lower quality and save some bandwidth. Hell, 480p is good enough for a lot of the stuff out there (sitcoms in particular).

As a side note, I'm using an "unlimited" business account, where they don't start looking at how much gets transferred unless you consistently pass 200Gb per month. That's 200 hours of 720p entertainment - much more than an average person can consume in a month - and just about enough for a household of 4 average tv watchers, assuming some shows are watched by more than one occupant.

Be careful Netflix streamers.

[sosaited]

Since Netflix recently announced online rental for Canadian customers, I was wondering if there were some Unlimited, or close to unlimited packages available in Canada. Well I can stop wondering that now.

You know what? This is Canada.

[twidarkling]

We're a left-leaning country. I have a great fucking idea. Nationalize bell. I was never a fan of this privatization shit. Let's get this socialist bit working again, and have the government own the lines, and then companies like Teksaavy (or however it's spelled) just pay the government maintenance rates for access, then anyone can compete, since it's a government entity without an interest in the market AND NOT DIRECTLY OFFERING SERVICES that everyone's going to. Bell charging companies for access while still selling access to individuals is pretty fucking anti-competitive. That way, if an area wants better internet, you just talk to your MP and they put it on the list of infrastructure to be improved in the area.

I mean, fuck, taxpayers already paid for all the lines, so fuck Bell. Yes, I'm just a wee bit angry at this.

Re:You know what? This is Canada.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with this. Our roads are public, and it's better that way. Network infrastructure is a similar case.

I've lived abroad, and have friends who have lived abroad elsewhere. I've got to say -- the Canadian internet and mobile markets are a complete disgrace. Overpriced, with painful choices and inconvenient packages, lock-in, hardware locked devices, bundling with undesired new toys (which wind up in the garbage), 'loyalty programs' (how the fuck is this legal?) where either your money is stored up in an account just for them or it's only affordable to communicate with people on the same plan, spending on excessive marketing (including physical junk mail), lengthy subscriptions, and the kicker -- nobody offers a sensible bandwidth cap for an affordable price. Really nice job for a country that helped develop the technology in the first place. It's enough to make me prefer to live in practically any other country, because I'd like to think I have nothing in common with the people running the place and it's constantly infuriating.

Also, certain services like call display are bundled with other crap that I don't want, in a package that usually costs somewhere around $8 per month. I say 'fuck that', and don't pay it -- and I lose out. Of course, call display costs them nothing. In a public system, it would make sense that such things that are free to offer would be doled out for free.

captcha- policed

Re:You know what? This is Canada.

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps I should have made my main point which caused me to long ago come to the conclusion that it ought to be public (and seeing things as they are now, I was right)--

The theory is that the market will cause the service to improve. However, that theory does not apply here, because THERE IS NO MARKET (sure, it you pick nits, you could argue that Rogers vs Bell is a fight, but you would be naive and wrong). It is a monopoly. In such cases, there is no theory predicting that privatization is a good idea.

Re:You know what? This is Canada.

[Civil_Disobedient]

I'm actually kind-of shocked you guys haven't already done this. I mean, if anything can be argued to be a public good it's the country's communication channels.

Re:You know what? This is Canada.

[corychristison]

I live in Saskatchewan where we have Sasktel (a province owned Crown Corp) everywhere and a few others like Shaw, Access Communications, Bell, Telus, etc in a few select area's.

As far as I know, Sasktel owns all telephone lines in the province and in turn sells Internet, TV (IPTV) and telephone over ADSL (currently transitioning to VDSL). I currently pay about $140/month for all three (I think it can get as low as about $80 depending on which plans and addon's you have on each service, I'm closer to the high end). No caps have ever been witnessed by myself or anyone else I know with Sasktel.

The cable companies are different, though. Shaw & Access Communications are ridiculous. higher speeds, shittier service (more outages) and bullshit caps. The prices are competitive, though.

That's the situation I'm in... I can't imagine living with restrictions others have pointed out here on Slashdot (in ON, QC, etc.)

Re:You know what? This is Canada.

[mdielmann]

I have a great fucking idea. Nationalize bell.

We don't need to nationalize Bell. We just need to nationalize Bell's lines. We can even contract out servicing, and perhaps even upgrading those lines, but then lease usage to whoever needs it (i.e., the ISP you contract with). This gets rid of the natural monopoly being used against competitors, and puts everyone on a level playing field.
To be properly done, the cable companies and cell towers should be nationalized, as well, with the same rules.

For all Americans

[No. 24601]

For all Americans who think this will never happen to them, you should read this article from Reuters just this past Wednesday. Looks like the Canadian telecom industry is the role model our boys are looking to follow. But unlike what the article says, Canadians are not accepting this situation lying down. They are actively seeking out and subscribing to the new disruptive competition like Wind Mobile and Mobilicity.

Re:For all Americans

[pablo_max]

Doesn't fuck all matter when Bell owns the lines and can charge other providers the extortion rates.

Re:For all Americans

[RealGrouchy]

Wind mobile has its own cell towers/network.

- RG>

Re:You WANT usage based billing(MARKUP SUCKS!)

[EdIII]

That's not really true. The markup is several orders above that, if not really approaching infinity.

The truth, as I understand it, is that your cellphone receives literally thousands upon thousands of text messages each day. That 160 character limit was not arbitrary you know. Apparently there are communications that need to occur between the cell phone and the cell tower on a regular basis, similar to polling devices. That 160 characters is the space that is wasted in those messages. An engineer got the bright idea that you could set a flag, and then interpret that wasted space as a message. Pretty neat right?

There was a time, a brief period, when text messaging was free. It was relatively unknown, and pressing those number pads to send alpha-numeric was a bitch. I clearly remember having an old TDMA AT&T cell phone (fucking amazing coverage, seriously, amazing) and I never paid a cent for any text messaging at all. It was not advertised, and was not even covered at any point in my plan. I *found* text messaging by rummaging through the menus on my Nokia phone when I got it.

Seemingly overnight, this feature that I thought was kind of interesting but not practically usable, became a major feature with separate billing plans because obviously some executives figured out that teenagers were sending shitloads of messages instead of using those valuable minutes.

Was I interested? Fuck no. Why send a 160 character text message that took two minutes to type, when I could just send an email, or actually call the person? Never made much sense to me at the time and I always declined to add it to any of my cell plans.

When I finally received my first smartphone and it was much easier to send a message I saw what they were charging and laughed my ass off. Seriously? Near infinite markup? I'll pass. I know when I am getting ripped off. Prey on the teenagers. They don't pay the bills anyways.

More than a decade later, I find myself under constant pressure to reactivate that fucking feature but steadfastly refuse because 5$ for the minimum level of service for something that costs absolutely next to nothing is insane.

A 6500% markup on a text message is low. Very low. We are talking about some software on the towers and in the handsets that relays the messages. Other than a bunch of servers routing the messages and handling billing, there really is not that much infrastructure handling that message.

The truth is that sending and receiving email through your phone costs a hell of a lot more in infrastructure and software costs than that text messaging, and yet they are not charging you 5c per email are they?

The idea that text messaging is valuable, should cost 5c per message, and takes effort to accomplish is something that was marketed to us for the last 15 years. It's artificial, it's a scam, and a wildly successful one that at that.

You're a bunch of pussies

[pablo_max]

Seriously, Americans and Canadians are the biggest bunch of pussies in the world. Everyday we get to read stories like this and listen to everyone complain how unfair it is and how the government is doing whatever big business wants, yet YOU DO NOTHING!
Oh, sign this online petition. Are you kidding me? Get a fucking backbone and do something about it!
Do you watch the news?

France is the perfect example. The government does something the people don't want and they take to the streets in mass to force change. Meanwhile, your media skews the stories to ensure you side with the French government so as you don't get the same idea. Like always, you lap it up like good little lemmings.

Seriously, what must happen before you stand up for yourselves?

**disclaimer, I was arrested twice during peaceful protests, but at least I didn't sit on my ass while my government took my rights like you lazy fucks.

Re:You're a bunch of pussies

[Eightbitgnosis]

If only there were a Slashdot post explaining this to all Americans and Canadians we'd all truly change

Re:You're a bunch of pussies

[Anonymous Coward]

France is a terrible example. The protests in recent weeks are getting smaller and smaller, and the pension reform law they were protesting has been passed.

Re:You're a bunch of pussies

[Anonymous Coward]

**disclaimer, I was arrested twice during peaceful protests, but at least I didn't sit on my ass while my government took my rights like you lazy fucks.

The system should be structured so you shouldn't have to protest or get arrested for protesting. The fact that you even had to lift a finger to prevent your way of life from changing (and when you did lift your finger, your life changed anyways) is a problem in itself.

Pass the Buck

[Eightbitgnosis]

So now Canadians can sue online advertisers for damages done by usage of bandwidth?

A knife in the heart of competition.

[guidryp]

Wow.

A lot of the competition only get last mile access through Bell/Rogers, have their own back end that actually provides the bandwidth.

There is no reason that they should be able to sell that bandwidth at whatever rate they want to customers.

This is an insane anti-competitive ruling, bought by the Bell/Rogers monopolies with lobby money.

It fills me with the urge to DEFECATE!

In most areas they are the only cable co!

[Joe The Dragon]

In most areas they are the only cable co!

Yes, they are freeloaders as you have defined it

[SuperKendall]

someone who takes advantage of the generosity of others

Which as I described is other people paying for more bandwidth than they used.

That is all.

Idiomatick's Idiom Tick

[Anonymous Coward]

That should read "in favor ... of", not "in favor ... for". But if Idiomatick is not a native English speaker, we should overlook it.

The CRTC has lawyers who never saw the internet

[lsatenstein]

My experience with Lawyers from all but the last generation is that lawyers don't know a keyboard from a watermelon. They have secretaries who do all the correspondance, print out the emails, manage responses, etc. These lawyers are the lobbyists, or advisors to senior management. In the business way they are intelligent (so they think). The CRTC decision does not look at the consumer, it looks at business. If you had a business and you had to give away your products to any competitor, how would you react? On the other hand, as a monopoly (or oligopoly), they have an obligation to provide the services that allowed the competition to enter the market. Even so, the competition should have some access to the internet that bypasses the oligopolies. I wish the government would do to the Internet what they do for interprovincial (interstate) highways. It is a requirement for trade. Bell should only be compensated for true costs. Those costs are only valid when resources are consumed at peak periods. My algorithm would be something that says, when network utilisation of traffic reaches 60% saturation, we begin to charge extra. If the traffic is at 60% due to competition, then charge, and if the traffic is at 60% repeatedly for long periods of time, upgrade your services. Just a thought about fairness.

cheaper

[hey]

All computer stuff gets cheaper over time. Bandwidth should too.

UBB Metering is.... broken

[mrobinso]

The biggest problem with UBB is the way the incumbents measure traffic. It's patently broken. 100% borked.

On the DSL side, traffic is measured at the BAS.
On the cable site, traffic is measured at the node.

It's quite simple to demonstrate how broken their measurement methodology is.

Fire up a cable or DSL internet account, set the modem up, then connect nothing to it. Then, send me your IP address. I can assure you, at the end of the month you're going to get a whopping bill for usage - whatever the max is, that's the bill you're going to get. Just let me know how much usage you want the bill to show. 200G? No problem. 1.5TB? No problem. The usage on the bill will show whatever I want it to show.

The fact is, this has been going on since UBB's inception. Bell, Rogers, Cogeco, Telus... all of them... know the metering is borked. They know it and do nothing because its raking in millions and millions of dollars for each of them, every month.

The concept of UBB is reasonable, IMHO. I have no problem paying for something I use. The more I use, the more I pay. I have no problem with this. But if you're going to charge me XX dollars for XX usage, that XX usage better be MY usage, and it better be at least half-assed accurate.

Right now, it's not even that.

Mike

Bell is super

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of reselling bandwidth, why isn't Bell allowing their competitors physical access to the lines? ?

Bell makes money by reselling and new providers cannot lay their own line, but maybe now this will be a nice pivotal argument to allow competitive Internet providers either physical access to the lines or the right to lay new groundwork.

Hell, it might encourage full city wireless. I'd be down for that.

Re:Haha. Bell (and Rogers) are not reasonable.

[Murdoch5]

Yes they do, I've had 3 rogers Internet connections and ran servers across all of them. My friends on Bell etc... run Servers on there connections. Rogers / Bell etc.... don't care if you do.

Re:that makes comcasts 250gb cap and higher busine

[commodore64_love]

Comcast has competition? Not really. Some areas offer a choice between Comcast and the Phone company, but most areas do not.

I don't have a cap on my Netscape or Verizon line but there is a practical limit due to the speed of the line:
5 KB/s * 30 days == 13 Gig
90KB/s * 30 days == 233 Gig

What about patches?

[G1975a]

Bell's minimum xDSL plan is $22 (bundled) and only provides 2GB of bandwidth. How can a Windows user even keep up with OS patches, Anti-virus & Anti-spam definitions and Adobe patches with 2GB of bandwidth? I think the CRTC should mandate that all large commercial/wholesale ISPs (Telus, Bell, Rogers, Videotron, etc.) must provide everyone a free minimal amount of bandwidth for security, anti-malware and other patches. I'd say 5 GB/month would suffice (AV updates, OS patchesand can be used for any purpose (ie if the person doesn't use it all for security, they can use it for anything). They should have to provide it to ALL citizens as all the telcos have been given monetary grants and the ability to charge us 'taxes' to improve Internet connectivity to rural Canada (btw: where is that?). If you are not with one of the big telcos, they should be forced to pass this allotment on to the local providers like Teksavvy, etc. If you don't have an ISP, you can choose one of your liking to provide this, again at no cost. This is an issue of national security to ward off a potential cyberwar.

Re:What about patches?

[wwbbs]

5 GB is hardly enough for me, I average 3.87GB TX and 8.43GB RX Daily. That said with crazy mandates such as this it will only spur further innovation. Like finding away to bridge a highspeed connection over the PSTN using our free long distance packaged with everyones home phone. Perhaps everyone should use there dial up connections and give them good old portmasters a job. We might even cause Bell to eat some costs; instead of causing us grief by pricing newer services out of general use e.g Netflicks, iTunes, Skype for that matter. I guess they figure they can get away with it since people happily pay those obscene prices for mobile internet.

Toronto thinks it is the center of the universe...

[Fynnsky]

Nice to see everyone here referring to Bell as the only telco in Canada (with a couple references to Rogers). Sasktel, MTS, Telus? Bell and Rogers are not the only telco's running backbone in Canada. You may be surprised to find out that there are actually Canadians living west of Toronto.

Like the old saying goes:
Toronto thinks it is the center of the universe, New York knows it is.

Re:Haha. Bell (and Rogers) are not reasonable.

[NIK282000]

Right in the BELL (and probably rogers) TOS it says you can not use your bell connection to host a server or any kind.

Re:Haha. Bell (and Rogers) are not reasonable.

[Yvan256]

Read your contract. They clearly specify that you can't run home servers of any kind (even Web and Email). Just because they don't enforce it now doesn't mean they won't in the future.

Vote for Campaign Finance Reform!

[Billly Gates]

As an American I apologize for my country demonstrating how to screw tax payers and consumers over by influencing votes with unlimited money.

The monopolies and being raped by the telecoms are not the problem, but rather the symptom of a much larger and bigger problem.

In accounting 101 in the first day of class one of the most important questions of business was asked. What is the goal of a company. If you answered to make money it was wrong. The answer was to raise its stock price. Canadians, both the liberals and conservatives will vote the same way for this. They both get huge campaign funds from Canadian and American mega telecom monopolies who only care about their stock price.

We have the same problems here in the states and 10 years ago I remember more choices for ISP's. Today we have 1 or 2. They lobbied to deregulate and won. Expect American style health care where your national system will be privitatized to third party insurers funded by your taxes next. Think I am crazy? Just wait 5 years. The US was very close to having free health care and these drug and insurance companies went crazy to poison it for their own personal gains and money can buy anything.

Europeans reading this comment should take note. First the US, then Canada, and you will be next.

Do something about it and demand your politicians stop unregulated money and influence before its too late!

You're off by almost a full power of 10

[Anonymous Coward]

60 * 1024^3 bytes per month = 195987 bits per second, or about 192 kbps.

You probably meant KBps, and you're defining a Gigabyte as 1000^3 (which is wrong, but it's wrong in the same way that Bell Canada and the French government are wrong).

Re:You're off by almost a full power of 10

[afidel]

Huh? I get 24.855 Kbps based on a 30 day month. I think it's you that has the math error.

Re:Haha. Bell (and Rogers) are not reasonable.

[Murdoch5]

I know what it says but if they ever tried to enforce it they would meet should an uprising of computer users they'd take it right back.

They have it there so when someone gets busted with 1000 TB's of Child Porn Bell and Rogers can say "Oh well they can't run the server which hosted that"

Netflix may open some eyes in the next billing

[rs79]

I'm a computer engineer and have been on the net since 86 or so, and in theory know what I'm doing.

Within days of Netflix opening up here in Canadia I subscribed. This was in the third week of September. Clever that, as it's not gonna show up on Septembers ISP bill - you can't use that much bandwidth in a week of movies no matter how chronic you are.

But in the first week of October I suddenly realized, "whoa - I bet these 4 movies a day aren't sustainable given the cable co's 60G cap" and when I checked, sure enough, I'd have gone over that cap around the 2-3rd week of October if I hadn't curtailed it severely. One movie is between 1.3 and 2.6G, an HD movie is way more.

God help anybody that just used Netflix flat out. Worst case (*cough*Rogers*cough*) they could be looking at hundreds of dollars to watch those "free" movies. A 60G cap is tight if you really use the connection.

P.S. Watch Raajneeti. It's one of the coolest films ever. Watch "Wake up Sid" to warm up.

Nationalize Bell

[rs79]

I'm down. Can we take PetroCan back too?

Look at the way the US Department of Commerce split up Network Solutions in the same kind of monopoly situation they had with .com. If we're a socialist country how come we have a less socialist model than even the US when it comes to critical infrastructure?

I think we're going to hit a wall

[wapush]

I've written a paper on ISP that oversell their pipes some months ago: http://patrickroy.ca/en/2010/08/black-white-or-grey/. I think we're going to hit a wall soon if legislation do not pass quickly to keep ISP honest. Also I've asked the question of what exactly fits into a quota? routing protocol query's? DHCP traffic?... with rate as high as 1.12$/GB there's a lot of money on the table and regulations should be made to allow them to billed us only for traffic that really reach the Internet, not to your neighbor or to your ISP local equipment. you can read my tough on that here: http://patrickroy.ca/en/2010/09/internet-service-providers-are-stealing-us/

Re:You WANT usage based billing(MARKUP SUCKS!)

[Anonymous Coward]

NOT WHOLESALE!

Stop voting for lizards

[alexo]

Yeah, because Harper's doing so much better. Oh wait, he's not.

You are right, of course, but so is the parent, and the grandparent.

You're so busy trying to prove that the other party is worse than "yours" that you're missing the simple truth: both major parties are bad for you. They are both evil, they are both corrupt, they will both fuck you over (and in fact have been doing it since time immemorial). Sure, one may be worse than the other, but they usually take turns.

(The above is true for both the US and Canada)

Remember that voting for the lesser evil is still voting for evil.

Vote NDP, bote Block, vote Green, vote Pirate, vote Marijuana Party... Hell, vote for the fucking Rhinoceros Party, but DO NOT VOTE FOR EITHER THE LIBERALS OR THE CONSERVATIVES out of fear that the wrong lizard might get in!

And yeah, I voted Conservative.

FAIL!

From "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" by Douglas Adams:

[An extraterrestrial robot and spaceship has just landed on earth. The robot steps out of the spaceship...]

"I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, "take me to your Lizard."

Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.

"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

"What?"

"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"

"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."

Ford shrugged again.

"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."

Dissolve the CRTC? Huh?

[rs79]

The CRTC is the only thing between us and Bell doing what it wants. It's all very well to say you want to dissolve it, but you need to replace it with something better. Got that organization built?

Why doesn't Teksavvy seem to have a problem?

[hendrikboom]

I'm having difficulty figuring this one out. I've had a bit of correspondence with TekSavvy, and they tell me they have no intention of changing their unlimited plan (which I'm using). I'm definitely over the 60G limit the news article is talking about. So either (1) Teksavvy is a bunch of idiots and cannot possibly stay in business, being charged more by Bell than they're getting from me, or (2) the situation is not as it's being understood. I looked at the CTRC ruling itself, and I am no clearer. It's full of acronyms like GAS and UBB. Yes, it explains that GAS is Gateway Access Service, but what is that? Could it be that the particular kind of Bell service Teksavvy uses isn't what this ruling covers? Could it be that this ruling applies to a very specific kind of service for which it's actually reasonable? I find the situation clear as mud.