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."
It cuts out the suprise bills at the end when you find out just how much bandwidth you really used last month, but it doesn't really stop ISP's from charging consumers based on how much bandwidth they actually use, or, more specifically, they intend to use.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
In any given area, there's one company that owns the phone lines (say, Bell) and one other company that owns the cable lines (say, Rogers). That's it. Any Internet access you can get runs over their last mile lines or is horribly expensive and/or slow (satellite, wireless).
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
How many of those ISPs have overlapping service areas?
Shaw, Rogers, Cogeco, and Videotron have divvied up the territories for cable service, and don't overlap service areas.
Similarly, Telus, Bell, MTS, and Aliant have divvied up the territories for landline service, and also don't overlap service areas.
It's only in the mobile telephone area that there's overlap between companies like Bell/Telus, and even that isn't *real* overlap, as they're sharing each others' towers.
So yeah. For Internet service, there is a duopoly. You're either buying cable service from one of the cable companies, or you're buying landline phone service from one of the phone companies, and the only way to choose which cable/phone company it is is to move to a different part of the country.
Spell TekSavvy right and link to it so others can bask in its awesomeness!
see this :
http://teksavvynews.ca/index.php
Chatham, Ontario, November 15, 2011 â" TekSavvy Solutions Inc. (âoeTekSavvyâ), one of Canadaâ(TM)s leading independent internet service providers, is disappointed with the rates for the wholesale high-speed services that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (âoeCRTCâ) approved today. The rates are for services that Internet service providers need to purchase from the large telephone and cable companies, such as Bell and Rogers, in order to provide Internet access services to their own retail customers.
In Telecom Regulatory Policies CRTC 2011-703 and 2011-704 issued today the CRTC implemented new rate structures and rates for wholesale services.
TekSavvy is pleased with the rate structure adopted, but the actual rates will increase the cost of Internet for Canadian consumers.
âoeThe CRTC decision is a step back for consumers. The rates approved by the Commission today will make it much harder for independent ISPs to competeâ, said Marc Gaudrault, TekSavvyâ(TM)s CEO. âoeThis is an unfortunate development for telecommunications competition in Canadaâ, he added.
-30-
Usage-based billing with variable pricing is actually the most efficient way to charge for a limited resource. Under the "all you can eat" flat rate model, the most economical amount of capacity is not where there is no network saturation ever, but where the cost to your users of the inconvenience of network saturation equals the cost of adding capacity. That means a little network congestion is actually a good thing in this pricing model.
Under the "usage-based billing with variable pricing" model, there are neither heavy periods nor light periods, but expensive periods and inexpensive periods. It gives people the freedom and ability to economize by scheduling their heavy downloads for the cheap periods to save money.
If something is in less demand during certain times of the day, why shouldn't the seller charge less during those times? This is why restaurants offer lunch and happy hour specials.
Aren't freedom and the ability to economize good things?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
It's not going to change the fact that in virtually every market *except Toronto* you're buying your connection from your phone company or your cable company directly. Toronto seems to be the only city with the critical mass and regulatory structure to allow third party providers to survive and flourish. It hasn't happened here in Vancouver.
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
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.
I'm in Vancouver, and *enjoying* my first Shaw-free month with TekSavvy as ISP over Shaw's cable lines (I own my cable modem).
They're certainly worth checking out, if for no other reason than $30 / month is what a 7.5 Mbps connection is actually worth.
Note, at 17:25 on a tuesday afternoon I'm getting SpeedTest.net score of 30ms ping, 19.24 Mbps download, and, 0.48 Mbps upload speeds.
Shaw is, of course, still making money on the last mile, but a lot less than when I used them directly.
TL;DR: it's up to *us* to make the 3rd parties flourish: change ISPs today.
The CRTC's UBB Decision: Bell Loses But Do Consumers Win?
If I've done my math right, then for Bell-based customers this works out as roughly 14.6GiB per dollar, or seven cents per gigabyte, assuming the network is always congested. The actual cost depends on the peak to off-peak traffic ratio and on how much congestion is considered acceptable, but this provides a minimum.
Folks who want, say, 5Mbs free-and-clear (no congestion and no data cap) would be paying Bell $110.65 per month plus a $14.11 access fee. That's more than I'd prefer to pay myself, but it isn't out of reach.
However, it isn't clear to me exactly what this is buying. I suspect it doesn't include actual internet connectivity, but is just what the retail ISP is paying for Bell to get the traffic from the customer to the ISP. So you need to add the ISPs internal costs, profit margin, any applicable taxes, and whatever wholesale internet rates the ISP pays. I strongly suspect that by the time you've added all this up, 5Mbs free-and-clear is still going to be too expensive for most people.
I don't understand.
Rogers' customer retention tried to keep my mobile business, but I just hated them far too much.
Shaw didn't try retention deal and I wanted to be rid of them anyway. Had they matched TekSavvy's deal, I'd still not have stayed since Shaw would likely have continued to up the price every few months.
Unfortunately, TekSavvy screwed up my order, which I didn't find out about until connection day.
Fortunately, Wind includes unlimited internet for my $40 / month, so I tethered with them until TekSavvy waived their $50 connection fee (and, double bonus, the first month's fee too!).
All in all, I feel good about who I do business with now, and how rare is *that*?