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Bell Canada To Stop Internet Throttling
inject_hotmail.com writes "I just caught wind of a story over at the Huff. Bell Canada has written a letter to the CRTC indicating that it will end traffic shaping on March 1, 2012. Although Bell says that this is due to "increasing popularity of streamed video and other traffic" and 'P2P file-sharing, as a proportion of total traffic, has been diminishing,' it's far more likely that they are interested in higher revenue. In all likelihood, the change of heart is based on the fact that Bell has moved most of their customer base to, and offer no alternative to, low-usage-cap UBB packages, which would ultimately generate more income or deter full usage of their service (and thus require less infrastructure investment)."
Oh, they finally got it through their heads to listen to the users and the common good? Quick, someone get them to start implementing IPv6 before they start going back to their old habits of repression and ignoring their customers!
Aborting throttling is definitely a good thing.
However the caps and overage fees are definitely an issue, and I can see this being part of a plan to get that bandwidth used up earlier, and collect the overage fees. Dirty, but we should know better than to assume they're doing something for the good of the customers.
I'm still dreaming of the day when the physical layer is run by an agency that has no relation to the provider, and the provider of your choice can hook up at the CO.
The current setup is too much of a conflict of interest, and they'll want low caps so people use their TV services and such. This should never be...
Sent from my PDP-11
Similar to cell plans with unlimited nights and weekends, usage-based-billed broadband also ought to be cheaper during periods of low demand when there's plenty of spare capacity. If I were on such a plan, I would stream movies less and download movies more, during the wee hours, to save money. The ISP would also save money by not having to add capacity just to prevent the network from getting congested a couple of hours each day.
Everybody wins with efficient pricing.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
...they have stopped throttling because they have found another way to screw their customers over. And hey, it's not like I'm down just on Bell - pretty much all Canadian ISPs suck. ESPECIALLY TELUS - their suckage knows no bounds.
So, for what this means, here is some data on pricing and data caps:
Essential Plus - Speeds up to 2Mbps - $34 per month
2GB of bandwidth per month
= 2.27 hours of usage per month
Performance - Speeds up to 6 Mbps - $44 per month
25GB of bandwidth per month
= 9.5 hours of usage per month
Fibe 6 - Speeds up to 6 Mbps - $44 per month
25GB of bandwidth per month
= 9.5 hours of usage per month
Fibe 12 - Speeds up to 12 Mbps - $54 per month
50GB of bandwidth per month + $5 per 40GB
($1.50 per GB not prepaid)
= 9.5 hours of usage per month
Fibe 16 - Speeds up to 16Mbps - $64 per month
75GB of bandwidth per month
= 10.7 hours of usage per month
Fibe 25 - Speeds up to 25Mbps - $74 per month
125GB of bandwidth per month
= 11.4 hours of usage per month
Basically, Bell figures that you will use the full capacity of your connection about 10 hours a month or so.
1. Sell product with *unlimited bandwidth usage. *Restrictions may apply. ... repeat...
2. Implement traffic shaping because of overselling actual available bandwidth
3. Change everyone's plans to tiny, capped plans
4. Announce new *unlimited bandwidth usage plans and upsell existing customers. *Restrictions may apply.
I don't know if Bell did this in response to competition, but they have lost me as a customer permanently over the issue. I switched to TekSavvy for internet a year ago will never use another another Bell service as long as live (using Wind for cell phone and dropped cable TV entirely).
http://teksavvy.com/en/res-internet.asp#cable
I've downloaded well over 1 TB this month (of Linux distros!) on the unlimited package with no throttling or caps so far.
Sorry, I'm in pain, I'm laughing far, far too hard. Bell doing something positive for consumers, oh stop, please, it hurts! About the only nice thing Bell would do for customers is to provide lube to ease the penetration they usually inflict on users.
i do not understand why cell companies and internet companies have such low GB limits? 50 GB a month? try streaming a game and you have reached your cap in about 10 minutes..........never mind trying to upload pics from your smartphone to the web......last week i uploaded over 600 GB of hi res photos,.,......not looking forward to the bill.......oy vey.......
i could see caps of 5 to 10 terabytes.....but this 50 GB crap is BS!!!!!
Bell is not going to do anything - ANYTHING - unless they believe they can squeeze every possible dime out of their customers. This is a company hellbent on profits at the cost of anything remotely approximating good business. Worse, they are a company that still thinks they have a monopoly and acts like it. And, worst of all, too many Canadians are willing to let them when there are many better options available. I'd go with Rogers (who I loathe) a million times over before going with Bell...
Believe me, the only reason they're doing this is they did the math and they believe they can screw their customers over better this way. I believe someone else in the thread supplied math that demonstrates this rather nicely...
Don't for a second think that Bell is doing something good - they are screwing customers every chance they can. They are the worst sort of the greed-corporations...
Was I the only one who had a double take thinking initially it was "Bell Canada To Stop Internet Trolling" ?
First: I'm glad to see traffic shaping gone.
Second: I don't really have a problem with caps. I mean, is it really, truly reasonable to expect unlimited bandwidth? And before you flame me, take a moment to calm your gut reaction nerd rage in regards to this issue. I mean, that shit's not free. There should be some expectation that people pay for what they use. We don't expect unlimited electricity, so why would we here. That being said: the overage charges need to be reasonable. I have no idea of what the marginal costs to Bell are for each gigabyte over the cap. One *hopes* their overage charges are somewhat in line with this, but who knows.
Third, in relation to that last point: When I lived in Ontario a few years ago I had Bell. I lived in a house with six other guys, and we sucked bandwidth. I don't remember what they charged us per extra gigabyte, but I do remember that the overage charges were capped at $30/month. *If* Bell still has this overage charge cap, then I think this is an especially reasonable thing.
It is indeed strange to see Bell throttle people when they have ridiculous bandwidth caps and extra fees in the first place... One has to wonder if this wasn't planned all along: throttle down the connexions because they were not technically capable to force usage-based billing to their customers. Now that they have figured out that bit, they can get in the lucrative business of reselling bandwidth. And they resell that bandwidth at high price.
Doing the math:
So. This means that bandwidth is sold by bell 90$/mbps whereas they are paying probably something closer to 10$ or even 5$/mbps, probably even less considering the monopoly and sheer volume. We could also observe how those prices usually also involve a 100mbps pipe, whereas Bell offers you a 20mbps connexion. Of course, those are datacenter prices which do not cover the connectivity costs, but still, one could assume those are covered by the 25$/mth base price.
And i'm not even talking about how competitors of Bell *can't* even offer 25$/mth packages because *they're* base price is over 30$/mth... No wonder they fought so hard to try to charge their competitors based on usage too: it is the only edge they have left. (This is still in the cards, by the way.)
I am also ignoring the fact that Bell is also a *content* provider which puts them in a conflict of interest: throttling people and charging them extra for downloading stuff helps them sell their digital TV offerings and other revenues
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction
The smaller ISPs have fought and won the legal battle over throttling. They have won the right to not cap their customers, even though they buy (in bulk) from Bell. Bell is just dropping into line with what their competitors are now doing. I had an email from my own ISP (TechSavvy) a few weeks ago about it.
So a lot of small ISP's buy bandwidth from Bell. And then they re-sell that bandwidth to users like you. Up until now, those users haven't been using too much bandwidth, because the "backbone" (from Bell) used traffic shaping to reduce their throughput.
Now that Bell has stopped shaping, what do you think will happen to those ISP's? Their customers will torrent away all their bandwidth, and the ISP's will either have to add their own shaping or add caps to their plans.
End result: Bell's customers (on capped plans already) see no big benefit. ISP customers get some short-term benefit until their ISP's adjust to the new system. ISP's suffer. Bell wins.
I love it when all the anti-Google crowd misquote the "don't be evil" into "do no evil".
For those of you who are American English challenged, these two phrases have totally different connotations.
"Don't be evil" is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, more like "don't emulate Hollywood villains".
"Do no evil" is fire-and-brimstone church preacher telling you you're going to Hell.
If you want to rank on Google for being hypocritical, you should first try to understand this. It's important.
I've had Bell internet at my home for 7 years now. I'm still on the original plan: 1Mb/s down, unlimited bandwidth. I know that I could upgrade to a better speed, but that would mean loosing the "unlimited" part. As it is, Netflix, at the highest quality setting, works just fine. What more could I ask?
to a shitty, small, pathetic amount of gb's package.
so you can't even stream 24/7.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I was going to second the recommendation for TekSavvy, but wait, what, 1 TB / month?
That's > 1,000 Linux images.
I don't believe the internet has that much data. /joke
Man, that's a lot of downloading.
Has taught everyone to be disingenuous.
This is because Bell is changing their billing structure to the wholesale customers, like my employer. Bell is going to reduce our monthly bills per subscriber by 6-7$, but then introduce a capacity charge of $2200/100MB/month. This comes in to play starting February 1st.
We have time of use billing for electricity here in a lot of Ontario Canada now. It's a crock. Want to do laundry? Wait until after 7PM so you get the "cheap" rates. I could not stand that for internet too. What happens is the "cheap" off peak rate is the same as what the standard rate used to be. The non off peak rates are then more expensive and you end up paying MORE every month. Time of use no matter what it is for is just a way to get you to pay more than you are now. ISPs will never settle for REDUCING your monthly rates.
If you're a TekSavvy or other 'small' ISP subscriber, your rates are going to have to go up. In Ontario, Canada Bell will be charging ISP's an ADDITIONAL $2,213/month per 100mbps of aggregation at the head end connection. Essentially, for an ISP to sustain 100mbps (relatively small value these days) for a group of subscribers, the ISP has to buy $2,213 (per 100mbp) of bandwidth in addition to the ISPs other costs from Bell (such as the head end connection, rack space, power, bandwidth from Tier 1 carriers, employees, etc). Just think, four 25mbps customers all downloading at the same time who saturate the subscribed head end speed. A company like teksavvy has multiple GigE connections back to Bell, this translates into an added monthly expense of $22,000/month per GigE connection to supply 1000mbps of sustained traffic to a grouping of end users/customers. To be clear, this is NOT 95th percentile billing, this is per 100mbps block of transfer speed available on the GigE head end link. Bell is reducing the circuit cost on a per subscriber basis, but depending on how many subscribers an ISP has per GigE connection, it might not make up for the new added expense. This is all in response to UBB. No one wanted to pay anything per gigabyte transferred. I'm in favor of charging per gigabyte as long as it's a reasonable rate. Bell should not force this on small ISP's as they are already paying (large) for a circuit into the Bell network, but that is my opinion.
It makes me sad that your current state of mind is such that you can't ever imagine living in a house with family & kids
"When I was your age, there was one TV in the house, and we all watched the same thing. Now get off my lawn!"
I use Bell mobility ( it is cheaper and faster than satellite ) and the price isn't bad up to 10 GB. After I hit 13GB,though, it's cheaper to buy TWO packages and alternate them every 2 weeks.
Bandwidth is limited instantaneously
Caps are a way to get people to use less bandwidth at peak times so that it doesn't saturate instantaneously at peak times. For example, a cap on transfer outside the least saturated hours encourages customers to shift large transfers to the least saturated hours. But as more people shift their usage away from peak times to the wee hours, the network will start saturating during the wee hours as well. At that point, use throughout the day becomes fungible, and any use of the network at all negatively affects other users.
You make tiers for max total use and if someone goes over you bump them into the next tier and charge them for that.
Providers have to plan ahead to set up a budget for future spending on infrastructure. They can make room for this spending by ensuring a minimum guaranteed revenue stream. This involves setting up overage fee structures that in turn encourage their customers to plan ahead.