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

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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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.

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.

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.)

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]

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: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: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: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

[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:60GB is nothing

[realityimpaired]

You're confusing your contractions of yore.

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: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.