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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."
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.
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.
This is like charging $1 per 1.44mb , very soon this arbitrary measurement will hamper innovation and Canada as a whole will suffer.
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.
Do Not vote for the Conservative Reform Alliance Party!
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
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.)
Reasonable points, but you overlook the fact that at wholesale, $1.12/GB is overpriced by about an order of magnitude.
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.
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.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
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.
#define true false
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.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Why is Snark Required?
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.
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.
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.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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!
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......
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.
--srj/mmv
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.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
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.
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.
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.
There are some pretty high bandwidth Ham radio frequencies. Is there a way around the CRTC by having an amateur radio license?
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.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
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.
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?
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".
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.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
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.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
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.
Expect that 250 to drop as competition is bought out.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The effect is clear. If you want to distribute or watch movies online, use a torrent or a low rate codec.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, the dominant player in Quebec is Videotron for web services. They have more than a million subscribers.
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.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
Defective Logic
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.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
Well said!
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game
So now Canadians can sue online advertisers for damages done by usage of bandwidth?
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/
Thought thinks itself.
For completeness, here's beardy Branson's outfit: http://shop.virginmedia.com/broadband/compare-broadband-packages.html
Thought thinks itself.
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!
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
All computer stuff gets cheaper over time. Bandwidth should too.
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
-- Karma whore? You betcha. --
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.
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.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Why must they all be true for the parent to have a point? What if just one of the above were true?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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."
Right in the BELL (and probably rogers) TOS it says you can not use your bell connection to host a server or any kind.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
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.
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!
http://saveie6.com/
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"
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
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
Need Mercedes parts ?
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?
Need Mercedes parts ?
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).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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/
Huh? I get 24.855 Kbps based on a 30 day month. I think it's you that has the math error.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
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!
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."
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?
Need Mercedes parts ?
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.
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!