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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.'"
You can always switch to other providers. That's what Capitalism says. Corporations will never get large, agree together for certain things and therefore control the market directly.
No sir-ee.
He's VP of a company that leases from Bell and is having the price increase imposed upon them.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The root problem here is the monopoly on infrastructure owned by a company that also provides services. For years now, other competitors offered uncapped DSL using Bell's infrastructure, while Bell offered a fraction of the bandwidth for much greater prices (and hassles.) I guess enough people woke up and started switching away from Bell's native service and jumped to other providers. And naturally, Bell uses their governmental friends to kill the competition, instead of, you know, competing and improving their services. BELL CANADA IS THE WORST COMPANY IN ALL OF CANADA. BELIEVE IT.
For much of the most densely populated area of Canada, Bell and Rogers own both the infrastructure and provide services to end users. I don't think that should be permitted. Companies should not be able to perform both functions. This is already what happened in our electricity industry in Ontario, when Ontario Hydro was broken up into separate generation and transmission entities.) Bell continues to use the CRTC, which is an impotent and ineffectual organization that seems to be on the leash of the same politicians that decided their friends at Bell would get a monopoly, to prevent other organizations from laying down wires underground in new residential developments.
This problem would not exist if a real competitive market was in place.
I am continually surprised by the amount of energy that Bell puts in to creative marketing, customer disservice, finding ways of adding hidden fees, and downright screwing people. If they just put a fraction of their efforts into actually improving their services, they would actually be a competitive company. But wait, they aren't interested in fair competition. Bell just wants passive income through forced usage of their monopolistic network.
By the way, it bears repeating again, Bell Canada is THE WORST COMPANY IN ALL OF CANADA. I am seriously not joking. Imagine the incompetence, bureaucracy and arrogance of government incorporated into a business. Add the fact that it's their intent to screw you at every turn and "accidentally" add 48 month contracts onto every deal that to which you've never agreed, and for which they somehow lost the audio recording of that CSR's call. That's Bell. They're like government for much of the Canadian population because you pretty much HAVE TO USE THEM because they own the wires.
*Note for other Canadians: I am fully aware of the other Telus / MTS / and other monopolies outside of Ontario/Quebec.
How much does this have to do with things like Netflix now being in Canada? Not to mention other things like slowly more and more games being sold digitally for the XBox360, PS3, PC/Mac (Steam, Mac App Store), iTunes movies, ect.. These are all using more and more data and I think they are wanting to capitalise on the digital download bandwagon. They watched Rogers do this and hey, it didn't hurt Rogers so the others are just following suit thinking "If they can do it and make more money for nothing, why not us?" And what is the caps? Anyone can say that only a small percent of users hit these caps, but that could also be based on just a rough estimate of "users typically do basic web surfing and check email, meaning they should only need 5-10 gigs max a month". Helps make gov look the other way by making baseless claims like that.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
There are really two Chinas. The China you hear about is the urban China. It is a few cities across their eastern seaboard mostly. They are quite developed over all, and have a good deal of modern conveniences, though their pollution and other health issues are rather severe. This is actually the minority of China though. The rest of China is rural China where people are still, in a very real way, peasants. They have no medical care, no education, and live very much a subsistence living. This is the reason people will put up with the poor health/environmental conditions in the city, because that is far preferable to rural life.
China has a massive divide, and as you accurately point out is hardly communist at all. It is a major capitalist system, and in some ways a fascist system in that the government has major stakes in many companies.
China is, if anything, an example of a failure of communism and a success of capitalism, though to what extent you consider it a success may vary depending on your perspective and priorities.
Regulatory Capture is the name for what is going on here. The USA suffers from it in many industries and Canada is not far behind. Lobbying is how it started and now you have organizations like the RIAA basically writing their own laws. The government is supposed to step in and put their foot down when a provider (especially since the providers are virtual monopolies in most places) begins to charge the "many, many, many" times more rate than their cost. We're being fleeced and our government is complicit in it.
Shh.
Judging by their pricing and traffic shaping policy, I'd venture that they have some heavy congestion in their backbone, i.e. that they need to invest more in their infrastructure. This emergency throttling is very typical for this. However, since you're on a satellite link, remember that both the RF spectrum AND the number of transponders on the satellite is a scarce and very limited resource. You're essentially competing with many other customers for limited physical resources that are (in the case of the RF spectrum) absolutely not, or (in the case of the number of transponders and satellites) not easily and cheaply extended. This fundamental limitation applies to EVERY wireless plan, worldwide, and there's not much you can do about it.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
You keep hearing about how they want to raise prices for all those lousy bandwidth hogs. I guess thats fair, on some level? So what about all the people who use much less than the average amount of bandwidth?
If they want to charge the hogs more, then they should also proportionally charge the non-hogs (mice? sippers?) less!
Yet I have never heard anybody seriously suggest anything of the sort.
I wonder why...
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