Slashdot Mirror
Canada CRTC Rules Against Usage Based Billing
iONiUM writes "In a somewhat surprising end to the ongoing fight between large ISPs (a duopoly in Canada), and independent ISPs, the CRTC has ruled in favor of the small ISPs. This means that independent ISPs can continue to have unlimited plans offered to customers. From the article: 'Under the CRTC’s new capacity-based approach, large telephone and cable companies will sell wholesale bandwidth to independent ISPs on a monthly basis. Independent ISPs will have to determine in advance the amount they need to serve their retail customers and then manage network capacity until they are able to purchase more. Alternatively, large companies can continue to charge independent ISPs a flat monthly fee for wholesale access, regardless of how much bandwidth their customers use. Both billing options give independent ISPs the ability to design service plans and charge their own customers as they see fit.' Score one for the citizens."
Sure, score a small point for not letting Bell and Rogers increase the abuse, but our wired broadband status quo is still terrible. High prices, low monthly caps (60GB typical) with massive overage fees, absurd asymmetry between D/L and U/L rates (10 Mbps down / 0.5 Mbps up typical), unmitigated throttling any time the provider feels like it (apparently 65-85% of the time), 'unintentional' throttling of gaming, etc. Aside from the low caps, you can't even get around any of this by going with one of the smaller ISPs since AFAIK the leased lines are subject to the same 'traffic management' policies.
The service is pretty shitty also - video buffering on a 25Mbps D/L connection, ping to the west coast randomly spiking up to 400ms, problems that 5 calls to tech support over the period of a month and one modem replacement failed to resolve. The tech support guys and technicians all but admit that it's a policy issue rather than anything they can fix.