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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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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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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).