Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Since organization of human societies can be completely arbitrary, there are literally an infinite number of possible permutations.
Anything from religious communes all the way to totalitarian corporate empires.
I sense however that you somehow, for reasons probably personal, have invested all your ego into "solutions" based on philosophies that center on individual greed as being the cure-all for all ills of humanity as the only possibility.
May I point out that the level of happiness of the members of a society is the only criterion of its success, and that, for example, "innovation" and "enterprise" are four letter words to people whose existence becomes unhappy because of them.
So ultimately it does not matter how the society is organized, as long as its members are happy with the state of affairs. And this is the point a lot of hard-core ideologues, like yourself, seem to forget. A "primitive" agrarian society that has 90%+ of happy members is in actuality far superior to a high-tech empire where 90% of people are depressed in their pan-global-information-network interface equipped climate-controlled apartments complete with automated anti-depressant dispensers.
But then again all this is probably entirely lost on you, because greed-centered world-views have a way of making their victims evaluate everything only in terms of amassing of possessions and the degree of power one has over others and so consequently you probably cannot be happy until someone else is enslaved and in pain. And so all your scenarios revolve around that theme.
The obvious and universal solution is to create multiple societies so that people can choose one that fits them best and then work on making those people and their society mesh to maximum of their potential, rather then trying to force your one-size-fits-all, simplistic pet solution down everyone else's throat.
The US may have started China's economic growth, but if they lost the US's business now, they would still have you by the balls. They've used the last couple of decades to reverse-engineer everything worth reverse engineering, and I'd be surprised if they couldn't sustain themselves and their economy going forward.
I am sick to death of how horrible the industry is in Canada, and the CRTC is not our friends either. I pay $150 per month for satellite internet as I live in rural Canada and don't have any other options...well dial-up, but I don't consider that an option. When I first heard of Netflix coming to Canada I was excited, but not anymore. I won't be able to use it. That's with a $150 per MONTH plan! This plan I'm on is xplornet's second best offering (Kabang). I recently received information from them about how they control are bandwidth usage, through what they call Fair Access Policy (FAP). Here is an excerpt:
I apologize for not formatting this table below in a better fashion. It appears I can't use tables in Slashdot's HTML.
It gets better....
I'm completely disgusted by this whole industry and their price gouging. What's worse, there is no competition really. I can't even tell xplornet to shove it and go elsewhere.
I may respond to future replies of my post here, but you'll have to excuse me for at least an hour or so until I wait out 'Recovery Mode'! ;)
Here's what I received yesterday from Bell (I have their 25 mb/s "Fibe" fibre optic service) - I love the "extreme usage" bit: "Effective March 2011, an extreme usage fee of $1.00 per GB for usage exceeding 300GB per month will apply. This change will not likely affect you given your current usage level. For more information, visit bell.ca/usagepolicy. If you wish to modify or cancel your service as a result of this change, please call 310-SURF (7873). Sincerely, Jim Myers Senior Vice-President Customer Service" I'm going to downgrade one tier on general principal (it'll still be more than fast enough for my purposes, but will reduce my payment to Bell). That's strike two against Bell - strike one was the STBs they gave me, which don't include a FireWire socket (unlike the US, a FireWire socket is not mandated in Canada).