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

[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: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: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: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.

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.

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.

Pass the Buck

[Eightbitgnosis]

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