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Internet Downloading Costs To Rise In Canada
An anonymous reader writes "According to CBC News, 'Surfing and downloading from the internet is about to get more expensive for many Canadians as internet companies Shaw and Primus have announced plans to impose new fees and caps on internet usage. Over the past year, the CRTC, Canada's communication regulator, let Bell and Rogers start charging extra for customers who download a lot of data. ... Primus and Shaw have said they will begin passing on higher fees to their customers beginning Feb. 1. Primus, for example, rents bandwidth on Bell's networks and said Bell is inflating the costs for everyone, including them. 'It's an economic disincentive for internet use,' said Matt Stein, vice-president of network services for Primus. 'It's not meant to recover costs. In fact these charges that Bell has levied are many, many, many times what it costs to actually deliver it.'"
'It's an economic disincentive for internet use,' said Matt Stein, vice-president of network services for Primus.
Translation: "We are discouraging you from using our product." What VP in their right mind says that?
Umm, a VP who is upset with the company he's renting bandwidth from. Primus is making Bell out to be the "bad guys", hence the comment.
I believe this particular logical fallacy is called a "false dichotomy".
Bell is just a terrible company. Unfortunately, at some point, pretty much every ISP has to buy product from Bell. They had it so easy for so long, and now their competition is taking them down and they are having major suck fits. They also got fined 1.3 Million dollars for calling people on the do not call registry. Looks good on them. I would rather not have a phone or internet than buy anything from Bell.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
Bell already owns the majority of pipe in Ontario, and they deliberately restrict pipe for end users of the ISPs that lease bandwidth from them. It's done entirely to make Bell's half-assed service look better.
Only difference is 4chan allows you to upload pictures (...)
It's seems you're not familiar with 4chan's text boards.
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The cap is pretty much universally 40GB with overage fees around CAD$3.00/GB. Some providers cap the overage fees and cut off service (possibly illegal for VoIP providers) whilst others don't and just rack up the charges. The actual tariff has not yet been finalized but that's the standard figure being pushed by providers who have started billing already. I'm with Acanac who hasn't started billing, has no caps, has declared that they have no intention to add them and is fighting Bell both at the commission and in the media.
This is a direct result of Netflix hitting the Canadian market a few months ago as it competes directly with Rogers and Bell, the two largest ISPs who happen to also be the two largest cable and satellite providers. Netflix HD movies take around 4GB each and a couple hours of TV programs is about the same. If you are in the habit of watching two hours of TV a night then you'll easily go over 100GB in a month. Bell wants to blame this on piracy but the fact of the matter is that this is perfectly legal and normal usage.
Internet connections used to be faster and cheaper and the providers were rolling in cash. We've seen price hikes, throttling, and severe curtailing of progress. The current government is clueless on the portfolio but wants the market to sort it out- the only problem is that we don't have one and the regulatory commission is stacked with former Bell/Rogers execs with active financial interests in the company. It's a blatant conflict of interest but the conservative government claims they're powerless.
Yeah, we basically can only choose between Bell (phone) and Rogers (cable). The current regulation creates an illusion of competition by forcing Bell (and possibly Rogers as of late, I'm not sure what happened there) to provide wholesale access in some way to third parties. However, the CRTC isn't forcing Bell to offer access to the highest speeds of service, isn't preventing them from throttling the BitTorrent (et al) traffic from customers of third parties (e.g. TekSavvy), and is now allowing them to impose 60GB bandwidth caps on third party customers with big fees for going over. Basically, every possible differentiator for the third parties is being gradually eliminated by Bell. Meanwhile, Rogers made the news recently for trying so hard to throttle torrents that they're now throttling download traffic that is sometimes not even related to BitTorrent. We're not exactly third world, but our regulators are certainly failing us, and most people are too ignorant to make a fuss about it.
And don't forget:
Sweden - 22.4
Norway - 15.7
Canada - 3.66
Australia - 2.77
You can't put Israel into the comparison. Their economy is HUGELY subsidized by the U.S.
This is a direct result of Netflix hitting the Canadian market a few months ago as it competes directly with Rogers and Bell, the two largest ISPs who happen to also be the two largest cable and satellite providers. Netflix HD movies take around 4GB each and a couple hours of TV programs is about the same. If you are in the habit of watching two hours of TV a night then you'll easily go over 100GB in a month. Bell wants to blame this on piracy but the fact of the matter is that this is perfectly legal and normal usage.
Full Disclosure: I previously worked for Shaw Cable in Technical Support: Specifically in AUP for some time, dealing with this exact topic.
First off, the largest ISP is very relative to where you are. Here in Western Canada, Bell and Rogers are not even true options. Shaw Cablesystems is pretty much the only company that owns any Coax out here, and Telus is the local incumbent telephone and DSL provider. Shaw has had the same caps for the past like 5 years, and the current ones are clearly listed for all to see right here:
http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/newdatausage?utm_source=shawca&utm_medium=textlink&utm_content=extremelanding&utm_campaign=datausage.
Aside from the limits not changing much in at least 5 years, possibly more, they have had some form of limits in place for well over 10 years. Before they implemented the DOCSIS network, the maximum speed offered per modem was 5 Mbps, with a monthly cap of 20gigabytes. When they introduced Docsis, they also introduced faster plans for 10 dollars more, up to 10 Mbps, and 60gigs per month. Those limits themselves have gone up over the years (I'm sure along with inflation of the prices), to now be sitting at a monthly cap of 60 gigs and 100 gigs respectively.
Not liking monthly caps is one thing, but trying to claim this is a new phenomenon is just inaccurate.
Switch providers? You're kidding right?
The CRTC just handed the only 3 companies with the infrastrure cart-blanche to strangle anyone, even if you're with a competitor who happens to be leasing their lines.
No my friend, we're foobared.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
The difference is that companies like Shaw/Bell are sometimes directly publicly supported (tariffs/taxes/etc.), and always indirectly supported, i.e. right of ways, gifted infrastructure, etc.
The members of the CRTC are all ex-execs from companies like Bell and Rogers. You figure it out.