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Canada Rules To Uphold Net Neutrality (www.cbc.ca)
According to a new ruling by Canada's telecommunications regulator, internet service providers should not be able to exempt certain types of content, such as streaming music or video, from counting toward a person's data cap. The ruling upholds net neutrality, which is the principle that all web services should be treated equally by providers. CBC.ca reports: "Rather than offering its subscribers selected content at different data usage prices, Internet service providers should be offering more data at lower prices," said Jean-Pierre Blais, chairman of the CRTC in a statement. "That way, subscribers can choose for themselves what content they want to consume." The decision stems from a 2015 complaint against the wireless carrier Videotron, which primarily operates in Quebec. Videotron launched a feature in August of that year, enabling customers to stream music from services such as Spotify and Google Play Music without it counting against a monthly data cap as a way to entice people to subscribe to Videotron's internet service. The decision means that Videotron cannot offer its unlimited music streaming plan to subscribers in its current form -- nor can other internet providers offer similar plans that zero-rate other types of internet content, such as video streaming or social media.
Please, please tell me why Google Play Music should be free while Bob's Music Shop down the street would cost to stream the exact same songs?
Net Neutrality is a good thing. I am all for it.
But off net content bears additional charges to an ISP then on-net costs. There are reasons that most ISP's - the same ones who provide cable TV - host netflix servers on-site.
The issue is that every ISP could arguably use this as an advantage against any competing business and that would suppress competition.
Having a preferential rate for one particular internet service over another (or, for that matter, having an exception for certain paid-for services) is the exact opposite of net neutrality. And from a network engineering standpoint, it means ensuring you have adequate bandwidth to upstream hosts. The idea of the internet is meant to be that it's fault tolerant and multi-homed, so if a route is congested or at capacity, packets can be routed through another path to get to the same host, albeit at a slightly longer hop path.
How about just get rid of data caps. My300/100 connection is uncapped with Bell. Why can't it be that way everywhere in Canada?
so if you have iptv from bell it will kill your cap? just from there TV system being on?
FTA:
The CBC basically got it wrong by generalizing the word services when in fact the government is talking about data types (data stream, web, email, voip...etc).
The government is basically saying they will not allow ISPs to throttle data types that are considered to be bandwidth consuming. The broad strokes here are that Netflix won't be going at a snail's pace and your gaming bandwidth won't dry up in Canada or the ISP will face regulatory charges and also be required to compensate users for breaking the law.
tl;dr: this is a set of "non-interference" regulations that bind ISPs from screwing over their customers.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
rays music exchange takes IOU's
As much as your vitriol is deserved, this is all about CANADIAN Internet, not USA. Though it does have to be said, Canadian broadband is even worse than the US, but at least the CRTC is actually upholding their charter and doing what they're supposed to, rather than the FCCs... approach. As for CNN.com taking 10-14 seconds to render, that could be related to slow DNS resolvers (try switching to Googles or OpenDNSs servers), Javascript issues (browser plugins blocking events), or just a slow/overloaded computer. Try using the network console (inside Developer tools in any modern browser) to see where the delays are. On my system, it seems the homepage takes over a second to download, and the main page CSS file is over 1.3MB (Which is just stupid), along with a crapton of js files that seem to take a long time to process.
No, because the IPTV is an Intranet service, on the ISP-local network, not an Internet service, hosted on the wider internet. So when you access your Bell IPTV, it doesn't go to the internet and doesn't add to your internet usage.
Please, please tell me why Google Play Music should be free while Bob's Music Shop down the street would cost to stream the exact same songs?
Because Google can store the music on servers on its own network and not rely on pulling data in from a peer.
This is why it probably makes sense to split such companies up into physical connection companies and content providers, since the physical connection companies have a built-in advantage for providing content.
Do you have ESP?
I don't think our broadband is worse up here. I get 150mbit/s access with Shaw Cable with a 1TB cap for only $80/mon CDN. Shaw has been providing great speeds at good prices for over a decade now.
Now, Rogers and Bell could be worse from what I hear.
Or move there. The difference is starting to move into the embarrassing zone. Check your kevlar vest at the border, and oh, if you forgot to buy your travel medical it won't cost you $30k to get back home if you happen to break your leg running away from a moose.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
They pluck the low-hanging fruit. A quote from their own website... https://www.beanfield.com/resi...
> Beanfield is condos. We are primarily focused on servicing condominiums
> in high density areas at the moment. We are working as fast as
> we can to hook up as many buildings each month as possible.
The concept works great in downtown Toronto in a highrise condo. An average residence... not so much.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Because poor starving billion dollar corporations need help while Bob's music shop is making way too much money...
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
Gee, wish we could force this to happen to cable tv providers and content...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Rogers also offered this same deal on Spotify. They also offered you free services such as Shomi, NHL GameCenter if you signed up with them. They're getting desperate because they're such a lost company. Like Sprint in the US
It's a good thing that Net Neutrality has nothing to do with banning QOS, then.
Because Google can store the music on servers on its own network and not rely on pulling data in from a peer.
And that network is not behind my connection to my ISP? Since otherwise it wouldn't make any sense whatsoever not to count it toward my data cap.
Ezekiel 23:20
Well the city I live in was a village ~180 years ago. It was incorporated as town just after WWI, a city just after WWII. If you're dealing with Bell, there are many areas of the city where 5/1 DSL is it. There's no FTTN, no FTTH either. Telephone service? Most of the wiring is all original from the early 1900's, lots of homes still have the very old big block graphite lightening strike resistors in them too which cause more problems. Rogers? Well they offer 150/15Mbps because almost 20 years ago they rewired the entire city and upgraded the infrastructure. I can get internet though from teksavvy, start, mtl, execulink, and a dozen other companies because those last mile lines are rented at least. The US had that ~20 years ago, and I remember 5/1DSL being as cheap as $9/mo in places like detroit and indianapolis.
But, that still means in places like Oxford County(main city Woodstock) for example, there's still entire areas with no broadband even in the heart of southwestern ontario. If you cross to the south of the 401, most people there are stuck on either dialup still or use wireless. Execulink has been laying fiber there for the last year to bring broadband service to places just outside of Tillsonburg and so on, because neither rogers or bell want to. Even though 60% of the county's population is rural.
Interestingly enough Shaw used to be the provider here until around 1990 when rogers bought up all of their eastern canada territory. Telus can be a complete shit show, my sister lives in an incorperated town in a IA(industrial improvement area aka asshole of nowhere but within 4hrs of a city with a population of 10k). Getting basic DSL service was complete hit or miss because there were no ports for line cards available, and it took the previous provincial government threatening them to fine Telus for failing to provide the service that they were contractually obligated to provide.
Om, nomnomnom...
Isn't the entire internet "behind" your connection?
QoS is packet prioritization and flow control, the issue at hand is a hard cap on the total amount of data transferred. Totally unrelated.
Gee, wish we could force this to happen to cable tv providers and content...
Yeah, I don't care as much about Google as I do Comcast. They at least just added netflix to their set top box, but I don't think it'll do 4K video yet.
Do you have ESP?
Because Google can store the music on servers on its own network and not rely on pulling data in from a peer.
And that network is not behind my connection to my ISP? Since otherwise it wouldn't make any sense whatsoever not to count it toward my data cap.
They pay less to carry that traffic because they don't have to bring it in through a peer.
Do you have ESP?
That's the internet, but content producers can't be forced to play.
Streaming services such as Netflix provide ISPs what are essentially servers stuffed with drives that provide a local cache to their streaming content. This means you don't end up using bandwidth between the ISP and their Tier 1 provider for that type of content. While the CRTC are saying that should still count toward your data cap, it can also be considerably less expensive for the ISP.
There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
What the hell happened to the Slashdot layout? The right-hand sidebar ads are now covering a significant chunk of the comment text. I literally am unable to read the discussion when larger ads are displayed because the text is completely covered by the ad. This is happening in both IE and Firefox. I can't even find a way to submit a complaint...
How I read this.
The ISP's lobbied for the ability of data Caps, then they wanted to selectively take advantage of not using Caps for their own services for a competitive advantage for their own benefit... Live by the Cap, Die by the Cap I say! They want to have their cake and eat it...
For the most part, 2 or 3 companies own everything in the Canadian telecommunication world, so them doing this (other than international impacts) really is a more less level playing field between them. That said, there are other smaller players, that don't own the infrastructure, or multimedia conglomerates, and as such would be at a significant disadvantage.
As is they are all a bunch of crooked bastards really, and anything the CRTC can do to reign them in is a good thing. What was likely their business plan was to not use Caps to promote their services for *a time* and then at a certain point once they have built a customer base, they would change the terms of your agreement to make the data apply to your Cap again, it's what they do. They can't help it. It's like that parable about the scorpion hitching a ride on the back of a frog to cross the river, only to sting them halfway across, and when asked why they did it the answer is "I'm a scorpion"...
There are others, to be sure, but the fact that AT&T is building FirstNet as a dedicated network for law enforcement and "first responders" illustrates a fundamental flaw in net neutrality. Not all content is equally important.
Please, please tell me why Google Play Music should be free while Bob's Music Shop down the street would cost to stream the exact same songs?
That's not even the main problem. Why would streaming music be free while reading slashdot isn't?
If you saw our mobile data rates, for example, you'd definitely ask how is it possible that land peering connections for the same unit amount of data could be even remotely comparable in price to the end point connection prices, not to mention the approximately half-terabit-per-second capacity of our national peering. Any exemption from data caps for this "reason" would be an obvious extortion by the ISPs, many of them such as O2 competing with other media providers.
Ezekiel 23:20
It's far more insidious and darker than that.
All publicly traded, for-profit businesses have two general classes or types of customer: not individuals and businesses, (they often have one, the other, or both,) but I mean, they have consumers of their goods and services, traditionally thought of as their customers, and then there are the OTHER customers. The ones who invest, or loan them, their money, and who OWN the thing. They must make one happy, as a minimum to be successful. When such an organization makes the consumer happy, by for instance, proving a good or service cheerfully, with consistent quality, helpful customer service and providing great value, with a bonus if they also can do it while being good corporate citizens, and protecting the environment, they're really only doing it to make the OTHER customers happy by providing THEM with what's called "ROI," an acronym for "return on investment," though by a funny coincidence, in some language, it also means "king."
Businesses may have a Better Business Bureau Rating, a number of stars on Yelp or favorable reviews on Angie's List, but at the end of the day, in a monstrous economic system like the perversion of capitalism practiced in Amerika, only one thing matters: how profitable IS IT?
This is why monopolistic ventures are so devastating; they typically provide mediocre to lousy goods and services, with surly and unhelpful, annoying or difficult to reach or find, to nonexistent customer support, get horrible reviews, engender mass hatred from their customers, but can be fabulously profitable, because they are the only game in town, so to speak, and as a result, everyone attends.
I used the expression monopolistic ventures rather than monopolies, because most don't have true monopolies in the strict micro or macro economic studies sense of the words. But they do enjoy some of the features of such protection of their profits from what would be the consequences of their horrible quality of... bads and disservices.
For example: an airline can get away with treating you like day-old dog shit if all the others do the same, or if any that don't aren't useable by you because they're far too expensive, and especially if they're on welfare (the real welfare queens: corporations!) in the form of government subsidies, or prohibitively high "barriers to entry" for any would-be competition. Managing to sidestep these barriers is referred to as "disruption".
(Has Uber considered hiring private pilots who own small aircraft to ferry people around avoiding the airlines, the TSA, etc, altogether?)
Another more germane example is cable companies. They use a variety of techniques to get around the Sherman Antitrust Act and other antimonopoly laws and rules... but their FAVORITE method seems to be jacking up your bills, and using the money to BUY YOUR POLITICAL "LEADERS" (hahaha) and then using their new "friends" to change laws and rules allowing them to make ever larger and larger profits, which gives them MORE money, which they use some of to buy MORE politicians... see where this viscous cycle ends us up with a general reduction from a first world quality of life to a third world country, which is what Amerika is rapidly becoming with its shockingly and hilariously inept, incompetent, brazenly corrupt, nepotistic, fascistic dictatorial regime and its mostly useless, corporate-owned mass media empires which present only the point of view their owners want you to see.
(Your best hope for breaking out of this is to inform yourself by tuning OUT all corporate-owned or sponsored or partnered media, all state-run or cooperative media, and instead get your news and information from AD-FREE, EXCLUSIVELY VIEWER SUPPORTED MEDIA with professional staff who know what journalistic integrity IS, and live by it: such as Democracy Now, democracynow.org, which will happily tell you what the puppets of the... only six now, I think, giant media conglomerates who own all the other "news" (read as "propaganda") outlets, DESPERATELY D
Canadian broadband really depends on where you live, but in my experience while it's quite expensive everywhere, it's fairly fast and reliable in Western Canada and much less so in Eastern Canada.
At least that's my personal experience with BC vs Ontario
* Bell=Suck
* Rogers=Suck
* Shaw=Good, though not cheap
* Telus Fibre=Good (though Telus tech support is kinda suck as they love to blame you for issues on their end)
This gets to be a tough subject. Where I live you have 3 options for TV service:
- Satellite (sucks once you get used to modern cable/iptv offerings)
- Cable from the cable company
- IPTV from the phone company
From an end user perspective, the Cable and IPTV offerings are identical, but behind the scenes they are very different, cable is it's own path and doesn't exist as an IP service on the customer's network, but IPTV does.
If you stop allowing zero rating of the IPTV service, you put the phone company at a major disadvantage to the cable company, and effectively kill that as a competitor in the marketplace. So right now the CRTC has taken the view that if a holder of a broadcast license is streaming that content on their own network they can consider it "equivalent" to the cable offering, and zero rate it, however if it's over someone else's network, or it's not content covered by the broadcast license, it can't be zero rated. (though interestingly enough the rulings so far have limited "their own network" to the wired network, zero rating it over a cell phone was deemed to violate net-neutrality, probably because that's not competing directly with cable on equal terms)
This is a reasonable compromise to keep IPTV as a competitor in the marketplace, while still enforcing net-neutrality.
He means traffic. And not treating paid-for or lobbied-for traffic with preferential speed priorities.
In real life this would mean letting the regular four door sedan family car drive on the same road as the fancy corporate limousine. Who cares that one is some anonymous schmuck driving to the lake, and the other one is carrying high-profile personalities to a paid event? They both ride the same roads and it should be that way.
You know what OP meant.
Interesting that Facebook is lobbying FOR net neutrality in the US but argued AGAINST it in Canada. I guess they're sufficiently entrenched in zero-rating deals up north.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This is the same argument videotron is using ... it's our OWN streaming service, from our OWN servers, over our OWN network. It really doesn't work well when the ISP is also the content provider (i.e. vertical integration).
Except it's not. From TFA (emphasis mine):
Videotron launched a feature in August of that year, enabling customers to stream music from services such as Spotify and Google Play Music without it counting against a monthly data cap
So, they're external services (Spotify and Google Play Music). If it was a internally hosted service, it wouldn't be an issue.
Rogers include a subscription for one of the services (Spotify, Showmi, NHL GameCenter - your choice) with your pre-paid monthly fee. You still have to pay for the bandwidth it uses. Though I believe they own Shomi and the rights to NHL GameCenter, so that may be considered part of their network.