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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!
'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 read that as:
Primus VP delivers a verbal jab at Bell, Bell having raised its rates, which Primus is going to happily pass on to its customers.
On second look, it still appears to be a bizarre, mixed message....
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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.
With all due respect to the anti-conservative/capitalistic commentary (which has a lot of apparent validity) this type of situation occurs BECAUSE of government regulation... not because of insufficient regulation. At least in the US, governments have permitted and even encouraged monopolistic business practices that restrict the free market and customer choice. Whether traditional carriers (AT&T, Verizon, etc.) or traditional cable (Comcast, etc.) they all have PURCHASED - FROM THE GOVERNMENT - an exclusive territorial provider contract. That means that the very government that should be encouraging competition is in fact allowing the exact opposite. Because we consider ourselves more civilized, we no longer call this graft, corruption, bribery, etc. Instead we bury our collective heads in the sand, take the contract purchase dollars, and tell ourselves that its OK. Isn't it great that we are so good at lying to ourselves?
As a free-market capitalist, and traditional conservative, what I want to see is governments getting OUT of market control. Once there are multiple real choices in providers, with the associated competition for customers, we will see this disturbing trend reverse itself.
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,
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.
I doubt that. I have been a Shaw customer for over a decade (they are slightly less evil than Telus). In the time from when I first got Shaw high speed cable Internet my desktop went from a 486DX2/66 with 8 megs of ram and a 100 meg HD to a quad core AMD with 8 gigs of ram with a 120 gig SSD and a terabyte HD. In other words almost exactly 1000 times faster/more ram/storage/etc.
On the other hand my high speed cable Internet connection (roughly the same cost plan) has gone from 10 megabits download and 1 megabit upload with no caps to ... wait for it... 15 megabits download and 1 megabit upload with a cap of 100 Gigabytes/month.
In other words I can use my Internet connection at full speed for about 15.2 hours a month before I hit my cap.
I'm sure in ten years it'll be MUCH better.
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.
That's a false dichotomy. We have the regulations necessary to prevent that abuse, it's just that the typical conservative view point is to take the government out of regulating it and to leave the regulators out of it.
The bigger issue which you're ignoring is that it's not cheap to do that last mile. The only reason why anybody did it was for a monopoly control over to guarantee that they'd be paid back for extending into territory that wasn't necessarily profitable.
You're not going to get a change by taking the government out of it, unless by change you mean change for the worse in terms of price and availability.
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.
I agree, in concept, but do you really believe any broadband companies would have laid all that cable if it hadn't been subsidized by the tax payers? I doubt even one would have, much less enough to generate actual competition. I don't know what alternatives there may have been, given that.
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.
I don't think that's the situation in Canada, but it doesn't matter, Internet access is a natural monopoly: it doesn't make economic sense for some other competitor to come in and build a big fiber network in the hopes of stealing business from the established players. The free market makes sense in situations where there are low barriers to entry, because in those cases, if profits are high, more competition will enter the market. It's obviously not going to be efficient to have e.g. competing fiber networks, so free market capitalism is not an efficient way to facilitate investment in network infrastructure. Governments should recognize this and deal with it accordingly.
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'! ;)
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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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.
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.
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).
But in any event, why would you be upset that someone else's business is running the way that they want it to run? The only people who can rightfully be upset are those who based their business on those prices. And yeah, for those providers reselling another ISP's service, sure raised prices are a problem. But having a supplier change their prices is nothing unexpected -- especially when your entire business model is based on under-cutting your supplier's from selling exactly the same thing.
Big surprise.
I ran an ISP in the early 90's here in Canada... This is before Shaw, Telus, Rogers, etc, got into the ISP business... We billed customers on a usage basis and were transparent about everything. It was a simple cost+ arrangement. Then the big companies all got into the Internet game. Since we were buying phone lines from Telus, they jacked up our contracted phone line rates well in advance of our contract running out... They all came in with their own dialup plans and had big bus advertisements touting "UNLIMITED USAGE!". We complained to the CRTC and the competition bureau but they just said "nope, looks like there's plenty of competition and the market is thriving..." Eventually, the big 3 drove the rest of us out of business... Once they had the market to themselves, they conspired together and added bandwidth limits and then eventually usage caps... So yes, I'm upset that they're running their business the way they want because the way they want was to use the regulatory bodies against their competition and form a monopoly to the disadvantage of the average consumer who now has no choice...
As a Canadian, I have always had mixed opinions on US foreign policy. Sometimes I agree completely with decisions made south of the border, sometimes I think you are all a bunch of wingnuts, and can't understand your government at all. Generally, the US seems very right wing in its political perspectives, what you folks call "Liberals" down there would often be conservatives up here in Canada, although our political leanings are moving more and more to the right as well (our one time "Liberal" party is now as conservative as our old Conservative party, which has moved farther to the right).
While the US might look at Mexico and take over at least the northern part to provide a secure buffer state which they can then police heavily to limit the drug and human trafficking trades, I suspect a new RightWing USA First! government would look north and decide to absorb Canada first. Mexico almost certainly has a larger armed forces than Canada, and we are only 1/10th the population, with probably double the resources of the continental US, including a fair amount of oil in Alberta and the north.
I don't think it bodes well for the future of Canada to have the US economy tank in another depression - and I think that China is going to surpass the US as a geopolitical and economic power some time in the next decade (while remaining far weaker militarily), which bodes poorly for future peace as well.
I expect a war between the US and China over Taiwan soon. They want it badly.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid