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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."
Do Not vote for the Conservative Reform Alliance Party!
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Normally I wouldn't say anything, but Jesus Christ man, learn the word "you're."
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.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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/
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
--srj/mmv
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.
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.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
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.
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.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
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
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.
Thought thinks itself.
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.
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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.
Defective Logic
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.
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.
"His name was James Damore."