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Canada's CRTC Declares Broadband Internet Access a Basic Service (www.cbc.ca)
New submitter jbwiebe quotes a report from CBC.ca: The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has declared broadband internet a basic telecommunications service. In a ruling handed down today, the national regulator ordered the country's internet providers to begin working toward boosting internet service and speeds in rural and isolated areas. With today's ruling, CRTC has set new targets for internet service providers to offer customers in all parts of the country download speeds of at least 50 megabits per second (Mbps) and upload speeds of at least 10 Mbps, and to also offer the option of unlimited data. The CRTC estimates two million Canadian households, or roughly 18 per cent, don't have access to those speeds or data. The CRTC's goal is to reduce that to 10 per cent by 2021. To achieve that, the CRTC will require providers pay into a fund that's set to grow to $750 million over five years. The companies will be able to dip into that fund to help pay for the infrastructure needed to extend high-speed service to areas where it is not currently available. The fund is similar to one that subsidized the expansion of local landline telephone service in years past. Providers used to pay 0.53 per cent of their revenues, excluding broadband, into that fund. Now they'll pay the same rate on all revenues, including broadband.
What has the FCC ever done? The CRTC maintains an effective wholesale access regime (enabling providers like TekSavvy to exist), and has managed to piss off incumbent providers to no end with their wireless code (mandating, among other things, the end to 3+ year contracts) and television code (mandating skinny basic and pick-and-pay). The incumbents fought tooth and nail against those. The incumbents also screamed bloody murder when the CRTC mandated that all the next-gen networks (FTTH and fiber-fed DOCSIS) need to be available to wholesale providers, and they also raised a big ruckus when the CRTC recently dropped the wholesale rates by up to 90% recently...
I dunno. Teksavvy just sent me an email saying they reduced my rate by $5 per month because the CRTC forced the big guys to lower the wholesale rates they were charging Teksavvy.
That doesn't seem toothless to me.
Doubt it. In Canada we did this kind of thing with phone service. Everyone has phone service now, and the CRTC mandates that the owners of the lines must make the available at regulated wholesale prices to other companies that want to sell phone, long distance or Internet service. It seems to have worked out pretty well.
Agreed - mine dropped almost 20$/mo. That's not nothing.
Thanks CRTC!
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
If you RTFA, you'll discover the little nugget of joy that the CRTC declined to regulate prices—again. So all those rural areas are going from terrible service to unaffordable service. I don't think the big telcos are that upset about this particular demand; they get money to overhaul their infrastructure (where needed) and can double-dip by charging their customers as much as they want afterward. It seems that this probably won't be changing any time soon.
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Hi - I work for a Canadian ISP (much like Teksavvy). Something to watch out for in a big way with any 3rd party Canadian ISP this year: Fiber to the Premises. Keep reading..... Looks like CRTC and the big boys are going down a path where all 3rd party ISP's need to run (or connect) to each serving area independently and individually. What does this mean? Well, for the smaller 3rd party ISPs (most of them) it's not financially sustainable (impossible) for us to cover all the metro regions -optically- to the customer. Today we have aggregated circuits that go back to the big guys (like Bell/Rogers) that covers entire provinces with a single optical connection (the NNI - network to network interface), now we will need hundreds of (very expensive) NNI's to be able to cover all of the subscribers. They call this "disaggregated". CRTC is going down the disaggregated path to permit optical interconnect. The technology exists where all of this can be 'clean' and 'aggregated' just like before. If disaggregated access for ISPs is mandated, you're going to see far fewer options to connect from 3rd party ISPs for FTTP. This is a big deal. Again, watch out for this and support 'aggregated' for the small ISPs. This disaggregated approach stemmed from something called CBB - now the big boys are using the disaggregated approach to slow all the little guys from gaining access. More fun. What ever your thoughts are on monopolies vs 3rd party 'leeches' of the network, remember the tax dollars built up the infrastructure and the companies that can afford to lay the infrastructure down. The smaller companies pretty much have no hope of doing this in established areas sadly - it's not all money - some of this is politics keeping us out.