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Usage Based Billing In Canada To Be Rescinded

Posted by samzenpus on from the not-so-fast-eh dept.

theshowmecanuck writes "The Prime Minister of Canada and the Minister of Industry are set to reverse a ruling by the CRTC (Canadian Radio and Television Commission) allowing big Cable and Telecom companies to charge based on bandwidth usage. The ruling applied to both retail customers and smaller ISPs buying bandwidth wholesale from the major companies. The head of the CRTC has been called to testify before cabinet on why they want to allow the big internet providers to do this. In this case the elected government agrees with the very large number of angry Canadians that this was bad for competition. Most Canadians see this as a bureaucracy aided cash grab with very suspect timing since companies like Netflix are starting to move into the Canadian market (big cable companies lowered caps and increased usage fees a week before Netflix started Canadian operations). The CRTC has a fair number of ex-industry executives on the board."

6 of 364 comments (clear)

  1. Right on! by headkase · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As a Canadian and as someone who signed the: Petition, I am thrilled to see this reversal! Bandwidth while having a huge upfront cost is almost negligible in costs after that. When it costs a penny a gigabyte on the wire there is absolutely no reason to be charging near-two dollars for it! What we ultimately need is a country-wide backbone that is operated as a non-profit and allows anyone to sub-let it!

    --
    Shh.
    1. Re:Right on! by C0vardeAn0nim0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      either the ISPs charge for volume, or they charge for speed. charging for _both_ is the problem.

      so, if they want to charge for gigabyte, fine, but every line would have to be the same performance wise. like 100 Mb/s for everyone.

      or charge for a tiered speeds (10, 20, 50, 100 Mb/s) with no volume cap.

      the examples you gave are just like that. electicity is billed by charge (measured in kWh), gasoline by volume (in liters), fone calls by time (minutes), but there's no cap on how many amperes you can draw from the grid, how many lliters per second you can pump or how many calls per hour you can make.

      choose one form of billing and stick to it.

      --
      What ? Me, worry ?
    2. Re:Right on! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      post office

      The post office is self-sufficient and outside of the scope of your argument. We all hate snail mail spam, but it's what pays for the service that gets anything I want to ship to where I want it to go in less than a week (usually).

      I'm fairly happy with the quality of roads. They rebuild them when necessary and do a good job of clearing them of snow and debris. Yesterday we were hit with about 2 feet of snow overnight, and I was able to drive my teeny-tiny Fiesta all the way to work without problem.

      Internet seems like a perfectly natural monopoly like roads, electric service, and health care. Oops, I forgot. We have capitalist health care. That way when I have a heart attack, I can make a few phone calls to get some bids from area hospitals, do some negotiating for a good price, and then go into surgery. Hospitals with poor customer service and higher rates will either improve or go out of business. Right? Oops! My bad, I'm off-topic.

    3. Re:Right on! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      That idiocy again. Gasoline is metered because gasoline can be stored and used later. Gasoline that you don't use now is a substitute for other gasoline that you would have to buy later. Electricity is metered because the resources from which it is created can be stored and used later. (And yes, electricity that can't be stored is free if the demand is less than the supply.) Water can be stored. Making a unit of clean water, electricity, diesel costs a relatively fixed amount of money. Making a unit of transfer volume does not cost a fixed amount of money. You can only build networks and the price of a gigabyte transferred goes down the more you transfer, because the cost of the network is practically constant, regardless of utilization. If you want to pay by gigabyte, then do so, but know that you're asking to be price-gouged and will get less for more. With consumers as dumb as you, we'd still be telling users not to surf so many web pages with big images, like admins in the 90s did when the web was new and increased the demand for bandwidth over the previous text-only protocols at least tenfold.

      (If you're wondering why I'm calling you an idiot instead of calmly explaining the problem with your "argument", it's because you keep ignoring the facts. You're a Slashdot regular and you know quite well why electricity and other utilities are not a good analogy for computer networks, yet you bring up this bullshit every time. You're either trolling or an idiot, and I have no sympathy for that. Moderators don't mod you down because you're presenting an unpopular opinion, your comment deserves negative moderation because it is a display of ignorance or malice.)

    4. Re:Right on! by Kozz · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Why don't you make that government mandated too? Split price over the entire population, remove private ISPs. Free internet.

      Either you don't understand how government works, or you have a curiously different definition of the word "free".

      --
      I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
  2. The situation is much more complicated than that by SpeedyDX · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Most Canadians who are up in arms over this are missing the point. The ministry is missing the point. Bandwidth caps are GOOD. They provide the proper incentive structure for both consumer and ISP. On the consumer side, you can pick an appropriate plan that allows for only the amount of bandwidth that you need, resulting in more effective market segregation. This means low-use consumers don't need to subsidize high-use consumers. On the ISP side, the incentive is to provide as fast a connection as possible to encourage usage and excess usage.

    A little publicized fact about the recent CRTC rulings is that bandwidth caps are classified as an economic Internet Traffic Management Practice (ITMP). Throttling, DPI, etc, are classified as technical ITMPs. The CRTC is trying to encourage economic ITMPs and discourage technical ITMPs so that consumers know what they are paying for.

    Imagine these two situations:
    1) You pay $40/month for an unlimited 10Mbps connection, but can only get 10Mbps at 2-4am in the morning. Other times, because of high network usage, you get an unstable connection that goes 3-5Mbps, or even slower during peak times.
    2) You pay $40/month for a 10Mbps connection with a 100GB limit. Most of the time, your connection speed is around 10Mbps, but you just need to watch how much you download. There is a tool provided for you by the ISP to check your usage, updated daily.

    I would much, MUCH rather go for the second option. I am paying for a certain service. I know the terms of that service. I'm getting exactly what I'm paying for.

    The problem that most Canadians have (and rightly so) is that the caps were set way too low. The reasons are complicated, but I'll try to summarize them. In Canada, the Bell companies own the last mile infrastructure. However, they are mandated to lease their last mile infrastructure to third-party ISPs at a reasonable wholesale rate that allows for competitive plans and pricing. This has been working well for a while, as third-party ISPs were able to provide similar plans at lower cost. HOWEVER, the Bell companies recently started to roll out VDSL service. They argued that they should be able to sell VDSL service exclusively for a limited time to "recuperate investment costs", and the CRTC agreed. So third-party ISPs cannot currently sell VDSL service, only ADSL service. Then the Bell and cable companies argued for UBB, which was granted. When they were allowed to use UBB, the Bell companies purposely gutted their own ADSL plans, putting strict bandwidth limits and high overage costs. This meant that the wholesale plans that they sold to the third-party ISPs were impacted in the same way.

    All of that builds up to this: The third-party ADSL rates ARE competitive with respect to the Bell companies' ADSL services. However, since the Bell companies can sell VDSL services exclusively, they used that leverage to put in place anti-competitive practices.

    THIS is where the problem is. The problem is not UBB, but rather the slimy business practices executed by these Bell companies. To solve this situation, the government should NOT be repealing the UBB decision. Instead, they should either allow third-party ISPs to sell VDSL services, or mandate reasonable minimum bandwidth caps and reasonable maximum overage charges.