Usage Based Billing In Canada To Be Rescinded 364
theshowmecanuck writes "The Prime Minister of Canada and the Minister of Industry are set to reverse a ruling by the CRTC (Canadian Radio and Television Commission) allowing big Cable and Telecom companies to charge based on bandwidth usage. The ruling applied to both retail customers and smaller ISPs buying bandwidth wholesale from the major companies. The head of the CRTC has been called to testify before cabinet on why they want to allow the big internet providers to do this. In this case the elected government agrees with the very large number of angry Canadians that this was bad for competition. Most Canadians see this as a bureaucracy aided cash grab with very suspect timing since companies like Netflix are starting to move into the Canadian market (big cable companies lowered caps and increased usage fees a week before Netflix started Canadian operations). The CRTC has a fair number of ex-industry executives on the board."
An outbreak of sense (Score:2)
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No, because our highest levels of government here are captured too.
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Re:An outbreak of sense (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not really an outbreak of sense-- if you RTFA the big providers will still have caps, and those caps are too low to support things like netflix. My GF lives in canada and goes over the cap (with Videotron) periodically just from normal use, without watching HD movies or anything. When I finally got around to getting an HD TV I went through 15GB in a few days watching netflix, but I don't have a cap (at least officially). She'd be getting overage bills if she did anything like that-- we were a bit disappointed that when Netflix decided to offer service in Canada it was only online, since the bandwidth caps make it so it's not terribly useful.
With any luck, the small providers will be able to push the big ones into no caps or high enough caps to be useful, but it doesn't look like there will be an immediate effect.
Re:An outbreak of sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Right on! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Why don't you make that government mandated too? Split price over the entire population, remove private ISPs. Free internet.
Either you don't understand how government works, or you have a curiously different definition of the word "free".
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I fully agree with local governments regulating and using tax payer money for the the last mile construction and maintenance. In the US now, it is already "kind of" government controlled with franchise agreements but that single company gets exclusive use after that. The users/residents are paying the same exact amount for the lines one way of the other, why not have them opened up for competition? I'd much rather pay my local government for the lines and the choice to pay Comcast for service than be stu
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Yeah, let the invisible hand of the free market decide... oh wait. Nevermind.
Re:Right on! (Score:4, Insightful)
And as is regularly brought up, there's a reason for that. Without government sponsored monopolies most cities would have 50 ISPs jumping over themselves for the lucrative to operate and relatively cheap to install urban markets, while the unprofitable to operate, relatively expensive to install outlying areas would be luck to get Internet at all. The whole idea of local government owned or government managed utilities came about precisely because people outside of the urban centers got tired of not being able to get electricity, water, and phone service. Do you think the Internet would be miraculously different somehow?
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That's a nice history, but false. When telegraph & phone companies reached-out their lines in the 1800s and early 1900s, they used barbed wire to reach distant ranches and homes. 95% of the nation already had phone service before government ever became involved.
And cable was actually BORN in rural communities, not cities, because television reception was lousy. Therefore bright businessmen set-up giant antennas on mountains & fed the feed to anyone who wanted to hook-up to the cable. Hence the a
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What an interesting version of history. And tell me, where exactly was that copper laid out? The telegraph usually ran along the railways, a good chunk of which were land grants. The copper was part of the right-of-way given by state and municipal governments. The taxpayer underwrote telegraph and telephone, and ultimately Internet services as well.
Re:Right on! (Score:5, Insightful)
Then run it as a god forsaken utility! First and foremost, there are plenty of rural areas stuck with zero broadband options. No cable, no DSL, no 3G coverage.
Secondly, utilities are highly, highly regulated. If the power company wants to increase your bill by $.02 per kWh, they have to go and ask the government's permission to do so.
They generally don't even own the distribution lines, they have to bid to offer services and the lowest bidder gets access. Imagine a world where the costs of starting an ISP exactly equal to the costs of installing a trunk line to your basement and the servers and software needed to operate. And unlike electricity or natural gas, there's no reason that the distribution lines couldn't be shared by multiple ISPs. Now, can you even begin to imagine how such a system would change the way ISPs operate?
I say hell yes, treat them exactly like a utility. The current system gets all of the public costs associated with utilities and practically none of the benefits.
Bzzt, inapplicable (Score:2)
Canada != US
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But Canada is the icy dapper top-hat of USA!
Re:Right on! (Score:4, Interesting)
post office
The post office is self-sufficient and outside of the scope of your argument. We all hate snail mail spam, but it's what pays for the service that gets anything I want to ship to where I want it to go in less than a week (usually).
I'm fairly happy with the quality of roads. They rebuild them when necessary and do a good job of clearing them of snow and debris. Yesterday we were hit with about 2 feet of snow overnight, and I was able to drive my teeny-tiny Fiesta all the way to work without problem.
Internet seems like a perfectly natural monopoly like roads, electric service, and health care. Oops, I forgot. We have capitalist health care. That way when I have a heart attack, I can make a few phone calls to get some bids from area hospitals, do some negotiating for a good price, and then go into surgery. Hospitals with poor customer service and higher rates will either improve or go out of business. Right? Oops! My bad, I'm off-topic.
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* Yes, there is inefficient bureaucracy in Canadian government as well, which is mostly a byproduct of transparency and accountability, but there are many public services in Canada that just work.
And it's worth noting that it's only worth privatizing if (% profit margin)
Put another way, it's great to say that private industry will streamline everything, but then you have to remember that they'll take a percentage off the top to make it worth their while. And if the cut is more than the "pork", then we're worse off than we were before.
Back at the topic in hand, I think it'll get reversed, simply because the telecoms botched the presentation so badly - the holes in the argument are painfully transpa
Re:Right on! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather have pot holes and falling bridges than a road system owned by shipping companies who set-up tolls and send their own cops after those who might carry anything too big in their trunk.
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> What we ultimately need is a country-wide backbone that is operated
> as a non-profit and allows anyone to sub-let it!
If this country had a backbone, these asshole corporations would have been broken up ages ago. Content providers and access providers need to be separated, and anything less than that will be abused.
This decision might get overturned, but the telecom providers had a taste of total victory... they aren't going to let this go that easily.
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The situation is much more complicated than that (Score:5, Interesting)
Most Canadians who are up in arms over this are missing the point. The ministry is missing the point. Bandwidth caps are GOOD. They provide the proper incentive structure for both consumer and ISP. On the consumer side, you can pick an appropriate plan that allows for only the amount of bandwidth that you need, resulting in more effective market segregation. This means low-use consumers don't need to subsidize high-use consumers. On the ISP side, the incentive is to provide as fast a connection as possible to encourage usage and excess usage.
A little publicized fact about the recent CRTC rulings is that bandwidth caps are classified as an economic Internet Traffic Management Practice (ITMP). Throttling, DPI, etc, are classified as technical ITMPs. The CRTC is trying to encourage economic ITMPs and discourage technical ITMPs so that consumers know what they are paying for.
Imagine these two situations:
1) You pay $40/month for an unlimited 10Mbps connection, but can only get 10Mbps at 2-4am in the morning. Other times, because of high network usage, you get an unstable connection that goes 3-5Mbps, or even slower during peak times.
2) You pay $40/month for a 10Mbps connection with a 100GB limit. Most of the time, your connection speed is around 10Mbps, but you just need to watch how much you download. There is a tool provided for you by the ISP to check your usage, updated daily.
I would much, MUCH rather go for the second option. I am paying for a certain service. I know the terms of that service. I'm getting exactly what I'm paying for.
The problem that most Canadians have (and rightly so) is that the caps were set way too low. The reasons are complicated, but I'll try to summarize them. In Canada, the Bell companies own the last mile infrastructure. However, they are mandated to lease their last mile infrastructure to third-party ISPs at a reasonable wholesale rate that allows for competitive plans and pricing. This has been working well for a while, as third-party ISPs were able to provide similar plans at lower cost. HOWEVER, the Bell companies recently started to roll out VDSL service. They argued that they should be able to sell VDSL service exclusively for a limited time to "recuperate investment costs", and the CRTC agreed. So third-party ISPs cannot currently sell VDSL service, only ADSL service. Then the Bell and cable companies argued for UBB, which was granted. When they were allowed to use UBB, the Bell companies purposely gutted their own ADSL plans, putting strict bandwidth limits and high overage costs. This meant that the wholesale plans that they sold to the third-party ISPs were impacted in the same way.
All of that builds up to this: The third-party ADSL rates ARE competitive with respect to the Bell companies' ADSL services. However, since the Bell companies can sell VDSL services exclusively, they used that leverage to put in place anti-competitive practices.
THIS is where the problem is. The problem is not UBB, but rather the slimy business practices executed by these Bell companies. To solve this situation, the government should NOT be repealing the UBB decision. Instead, they should either allow third-party ISPs to sell VDSL services, or mandate reasonable minimum bandwidth caps and reasonable maximum overage charges.
Re:The situation is much more complicated than tha (Score:5, Insightful)
On the consumer side, you can pick an appropriate plan that allows for only the amount of bandwidth that you need, resulting in more effective market segregation. This means low-use consumers don't need to subsidize high-use consumers. On the ISP side, the incentive is to provide as fast a connection as possible to encourage usage and excess usage.
What actually does happen, though, is that the ISP provides ludicrous plans (too much money, too little bandwidth) AND the ISP does everything in their power to encourage excess usage. They have their cake and eat it, too, because we lack proper, level playing-field competition.
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Thanks you! It is good to see a comment that is more sophisticated then the "all UBB are bad" comments I'm seeing in much of the Canadian activism.
It is a serious problem that the current, very low, usage caps were put in place to prevent services such as Netflix from effectively competing with the incumbents TV services, but that doesn't mean we should get rid of UBB entirely.
We need either (a) real competition, which is not going to happen in Canadian telecom as the current alignment is too entrenched, o
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The situation is extremely simple: oligopoly (Score:2)
Problem is: in practice nobody gets anything close to any of the two options for 40$ per month.
Here is what major providers are selling around 40$:
Bell "performance": 6mb/1mb, 25 Gb cap, 42$
Rogers "express": 10mb/512k, 60Gb cap, 47$
Rogers "lite": 3mb/256k, 15 Gb cap, 36$
Telus "standard": 5mb/?, 30 gb cap, "fom 45$"
Videotron "standard" 3mb/? 4gb cap, 30$
Videotron "high speed" 7mb/?, 40gb cap, 54$
Since the major providers have gained the power to throttle financially all the competition, this is what we get.
UBB pricing (Score:2)
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1) You pay $40/month for an unlimited 10Mbps connection, but can only get 10Mbps at 2-4am in the morning. Other times, because of high network usage, you get an unstable connection that goes 3-5Mbps, or even slower during peak times.
2) You pay $40/month for a 10Mbps connection with a 100GB limit. Most of the time, your connection speed is around 10Mbps, but you just need to watch how much you download. There is a tool provided for you by the ISP to check your usage, updated daily.
I would much, MUCH rather go for the second option.
I would too, if thats what would happen.
What would happen is you pay $40 a month for a 10Mbps connection with a 100GB limit and most of the time you'll get 3-5Mbps because of high network usage. Right now, the caps they set are too low, which would encourage even the medium and light users to watch their bandwidth. 10Mbps all the time for the 20GB limit they set... That's like 4and a half hours a month you can use the speed you were promised! Some activities that would require that speed are playing games,
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I picked my cap. It was 200 gb.
I got a letter saying the CRTC would force the ISP's to downgrade my cap to 60gb or I can happily pay $100.00 more a month (50 for a higher plan, 50 for going over) to get back to my cap.
YOU are missing the point of why we're pissed off.
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Imagine these two situations: 1) You pay $40/month for an unlimited 10Mbps connection, but can only get 10Mbps at 2-4am in the morning. Other times, because of high network usage, you get an unstable connection that goes 3-5Mbps, or even slower during peak times.
Two counterarguments:
1. Slower speeds during peak times should be expected. It's as much a fact of life on the internet as rush hour is on the streets.
2. If the ISP can't supply that 10 Mbps connection consistently, that's false advertising on their part. I'm amazed how long they've gotten away with "up to (stupid speeds)" as is - no manufacturer would get away with making a toaster that "toasts up to 100 pieces of bread at one time" and only has two slots.
2) You pay $40/month for a 10Mbps connection with a 100GB limit. Most of the time, your connection speed is around 10Mbps, but you just need to watch how much you download. There is a tool provided for you by the ISP to check your usage, updated daily.
In this scenario, why are we capping the speed at
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You realise there's a reason for that puffed chip bag? You're getting the same amount of chips as before, just that the bag is larger and puffed with air ... so that the bag doesn't get squished and crush your chips.
Take that Canadian mega-corporations! (Score:2)
There are two main players here in Toronto that provide internet access Bell and Rogers and neither of them competes with the other except to the extent that they want to see the how badly they can gouge their customers.
What is funny is that they both complain about the massive amounts of usage they are forced to provide and therefor makes them sped billions on infrastructure.
Our national/local public broadcaster, the CBC had a crony from Bell's "legislation and regulation" team on the radio gloating abou
Re:Right on! (Score:5, Informative)
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Now, most months I use only a fraction of that, but when a new linux distro comes out, I want to give back by sharing as much as possible - plus I have several boxes that I want to upgrade (I do the network upgrade option, and with ~5,000 packages, that's almost 10 gigs per box).
For the people who point out that water is metered, guess what? Water is supplied
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My internet is provided by Sasktel which is a crown corporation. There are no bandwidth caps that I am aware of.
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The issue here is not that people are being charged for usage (entirely sensible model imho), but that the telcos are price gouging consumers.
Conversely, the 'unlimited internet' thing just doesn't work, because you have this thing called 'fair usage' that means you are allowed to redefine the word unlimited as unlimited for any value smaller than X.
The reality (for anyone that has any kind of dedicated/cloud server or hosting account) is that bandwidth is actually relatively cheap. This is the dirty little
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"costs to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary"
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I don't mind my bandwidth to be metered, but charge me the true price for it and do it from 0 and not after a specific threshold was reached.
The problem is not so much that they charge for bandwidth, but rather the way they do it and the reasons why they do it.
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They cannot.
Price of bandwidth is not linearly dependent on the amount of G transferred. Not even close.
And trust me, you would not really want to be charged according to anything close to the real formula. If you will, you will scream for the days when it was a simple quota + overspend. By the way, quota + overspend is a reasonably good approximation of the actual cost model.
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As for "the real formula", I'm gonna throw a big [citation needed] on that - it'd be good to know how much it "really costs" to get a bit down the ol' information dirtroad.
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I got netflix in January. My December usage was 40GB, my January usage is 149GB. I also cut my cable as my kids are the only ones who watch movies, and about 1 a day, fortunately my kids don't care that Netflix content is crap, they can get all the sponge bob and diego they want.
So 25GB cap is a tad bit too little if you ask me.
Enabler. (Score:2)
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Re:Right on! (Score:5, Interesting)
either the ISPs charge for volume, or they charge for speed. charging for _both_ is the problem.
so, if they want to charge for gigabyte, fine, but every line would have to be the same performance wise. like 100 Mb/s for everyone.
or charge for a tiered speeds (10, 20, 50, 100 Mb/s) with no volume cap.
the examples you gave are just like that. electicity is billed by charge (measured in kWh), gasoline by volume (in liters), fone calls by time (minutes), but there's no cap on how many amperes you can draw from the grid, how many lliters per second you can pump or how many calls per hour you can make.
choose one form of billing and stick to it.
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Electricity is charged by volume (watt hours) and peak flow (amperes). Most domestic installations are on the lowest tier of the peak flow.
To continue the analogy, the generation cost and the size of the wire and transformers are a factor.
So charging for both peak and average flow is reasonable, but the per unit charge must be related to the supplier cost. 25GB then $1/GP is not a reasonable charge.
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I think the bigger issue isn't that it will be 10 cents per GB, but closer to 10 dollars per GB. We, the customer, are at their mercy for billing. Because of the government-granted monopolies in many areas and borderline collusion on pricing, there isn't anywhere for customers to go to get better products or services.
And with the other metered services you mention, the user is depriving someone else from using those items. They are physical, tangible things (including electricity because of what it takes to
Re:Meter (Score:2)
Except just for you, to show your support for metering, Comcast will charge a dollar a byte past your cap.
The danger of positions like you are recommending is the two parts - ... I don't have any problem with them charging..."
A. "I support metering
coupled with
B. (Low price that I pick, which need not at all be the actual rate).
You forgot about the "give an inch, take a parsec" effect going lately. See for example the story of AT&T illegally overbilling usage.
Re:Right on! (Score:5, Interesting)
That idiocy again. Gasoline is metered because gasoline can be stored and used later. Gasoline that you don't use now is a substitute for other gasoline that you would have to buy later. Electricity is metered because the resources from which it is created can be stored and used later. (And yes, electricity that can't be stored is free if the demand is less than the supply.) Water can be stored. Making a unit of clean water, electricity, diesel costs a relatively fixed amount of money. Making a unit of transfer volume does not cost a fixed amount of money. You can only build networks and the price of a gigabyte transferred goes down the more you transfer, because the cost of the network is practically constant, regardless of utilization. If you want to pay by gigabyte, then do so, but know that you're asking to be price-gouged and will get less for more. With consumers as dumb as you, we'd still be telling users not to surf so many web pages with big images, like admins in the 90s did when the web was new and increased the demand for bandwidth over the previous text-only protocols at least tenfold.
(If you're wondering why I'm calling you an idiot instead of calmly explaining the problem with your "argument", it's because you keep ignoring the facts. You're a Slashdot regular and you know quite well why electricity and other utilities are not a good analogy for computer networks, yet you bring up this bullshit every time. You're either trolling or an idiot, and I have no sympathy for that. Moderators don't mod you down because you're presenting an unpopular opinion, your comment deserves negative moderation because it is a display of ignorance or malice.)
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The issue was not paying more for getting more. The issue was cable companies taxing online video by dramatically lowering bandwidth caps and dramatically increasing overage charges. Essentially saying the Internet is not for video, that is what cable TV is for.
So, no, you don't have a problem with a 250GB cap and 10 cents per GB over that cap. But what if Comcast dropped you to a 60GB cap and $2 per GB overage because you subscribed to Netflix? That is what happened in Canada.
Re:Right on! (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as someone who moderates a lot, your preemptive claim of moderator abuse doesn't help get the moderators to leave you alone. :P
As for the cap, the caps aren't like that. What actually happened is that your new cap is 25GB, and it costs $2/GB beyond that. Still think its a great idea to watch hulu or download a 10GB game off Steam? Those are the actual numbers the ISPs in Canada are pushing on people.
The other issue is that this came from the CRTC, which is notoriously stuffed with former telecom insiders and who ALWAYS rules in their favor (except when they clash with the big media companies, but Canadians never win in these things).
This decision was terrible and the government is doing the right thing by stepping in. What they actually need to do is purge the CRTC and fill it with true experts instead of former Bell employees, but I'll take any kind of forward progress at this point.
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In principle, many Canadians agree with you. In practice, Bell set the caps/charges at 25GB and $2 per gig overage.
If it was 250GB and $0.10 overage, we wouldn't be in this mess. But when I have to pay $50 in bandwidth to download a videogame from the playstation network, or pay $4 an hour to watch netflix, something is wrong.
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I don't believe your view is that unpopular, nor unreasonable. The problem is always in the details. So, let me ask you this, let's suppose you were told your Comcast cap is 25GB per month (that's for $44.95/month), and you have to pay $1/GB over that. Would you be happy with that level of service? I ask because that is what my ISP told me I will now start getting. I am *not* happy with that, even though I have *never* used more than 60GB in one month.
Now, let's say my ISP told me I would get 60GB for
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But I do think bandwidth should be metered. Gasoline is metered. Diesel is metered. Electricity is metered. Water is metered. Phonecalls are metered (well mine are- 18c/minute). Why not megabytes?
Because all those other things you mentioned are finite resources (except maybe phone calls over POTS/cellular which could be argued either way, phone calls over VoIP are non-scarce), to produce more of them requires more resources to be consumed and more work to be done. With data, once the infrastructure is set up, the data is infinite at a certain speed. You can run electrons or light pulses down those wires all day long and it doesn't require any more resources.* Metering bandwidth is applying applying
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But I do think bandwidth should be metered. Gasoline is metered. Diesel is metered. Electricity is metered. Water is metered. Phonecalls are metered (well mine are- 18c/minute). Why not megabytes?
I'd actually be OK with by-the-bit internet, *if* they dropped the bandwidth caps. (So, instead of paying for 5 Mbps, I get the best speed available, but I pay for each bit.). It's getting squeezed both ways that irks me. Using your comparisons, all of those are charged by volume, not flow-rate (your water flows at the best rates the pipes can handle). What UBB is doing with billing is charging you for the water, and then charging you *again* based on how much water pressure you want.
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The problem there is that the ISPs are not being allowed the option of offering their customers options. The ISPs who provide DSL to customers are being charged these fees by Bell (the telco) and are themselves being charged $1 per gigabyte the customer uses past the first 25GB. Unfortunately, because Bell is both in the ISP and Satellite TV business, there is a massive conflict of interests here - they tend to charge the same per DSL user to the ISP that they charge their own end customers, meaning that
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something wonderful (Score:3)
Balance as usual. (Score:5, Insightful)
The CRTC has a fair number of ex-industry executives on the board.
Apparently none were ex-Netflix.
There, fixed it for you (Score:2)
There, I fixed it for you.
* * *
Here is one of the most influential documents [dslreports.com] sent to the federal cabinet that led to the eventual ressicion.
Facebook isn't so bad, in this case.. (Score:2)
I have to say, while I, like many /. users, don't like facebook, I strongly believe that the "laymen" internet users were informed about this horribleness through social networks such as facebook. I for one was able to inform over 15 "friends" (we'll use that term, I guess) and all of my family (none who are geeks) through facebook about this issue, and they all signed up because I was able to explain it well (i.e. you're going to pay more for internet).
So perhaps facebook has its place. In any case, I'm re
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I believe you mean the general power of the internet to inform people of breaking news. Facebook is a subset of networked people, and I feel there's trouble there siphoning off the praise for the general internet as support for a specific entity like Facebook. I'll leave it to my betters to quote the fallacy involved, but it is at the heart of all the flaws of marketing.
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This is an issue people can understand. "Bell & Rogers are going to charge you more to watch youtube to fatten their profits" is easily understood by everybody. Bell & Rogers are two of the most loathed entities in the country, right up there with the CRTC. So, this one is easy to get people riled up about.
Toss in a minority government that really can't afford to ignore people, and you have swift action.
It doesn't work on everything. Their DRM bill has serious problems, but try explaining that to yo
Not yet a victory (Score:3, Insightful)
Election season (Score:3)
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That's a legitimate concern. We're talking about a population famous for its complacency and apathy about the political process, and yet over 1% of the population -- a very significant number -- felt motivated enough to sign a petition and/or email their parliamentary representatives.
Faith in humanity... (Score:2)
Speed issue next - not enuff press :( (Score:3)
Article i wrote yesterday (Score:2)
The fox guarding the henhouse
Many other people have written articles and commentary about the CRTC's decision to allow Bell to force its wholesale customers to accept usage-based billing (UBB). This is my take on it.
I've be
Minor grammar complaint (Score:2)
My eyes had to rescan the headline several times trying to make grammatical sense of the construction until I realized there was a missing hyphen between the first two words. At first I thought there was a preposition missing between the second and third words. Bad grammar makes reading more difficult. In the 12 years that I've been reading Slashdot, the stories have always had bad grammar, and that has never been excusable. This isn't some rinkydink site, it's a major internet destination. Its grammar shou
Usage-based billing is the fairest system (Score:3)
I won't comment on the specific CRTC situation; maybe there really was something corrupt happening there. But if people are reacting negatively to usage-based billing, then those people are being short-sighted fools, begging to be exploited and have to pay more.
I'm not saying usage-based billing isn't a cash grab by the ISPs, but anything else is even more of a cash grab and costs the consumer more. If you are paying flat rate, then you are either being subsidized by your neighbors, or you are subsidizing them.
Now, we all think we are the ones gaining unfair advantage and getting something-for-nothing, so flat rate sounds like a good idea. But are you sure that you aren't the one who is being a sucker? Maybe lots of other people are thinking the same thing.
That's the uncertainly. What doesn't have any uncertainty at all, though, is that the ISP will get their money. Whatever profit margin they think they can get away with (whether set by competitors or set by a regulatory commission), they're going to set their rates in order to get it; their gross revenue for all customers combined, is going to be some number marked up from their costs. So the only question is how much of that sum total, you pay. If you aren't torrenting 24/7 and you are paying a flat rate, then you are subsidizing the people who do that.
Need this in the USA (Score:2)
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What?
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At present, most ISPs are also historical incumbents(telco or cable) or little vassal companies that they are statutorially obliged to lease infrastructure access to. In many locations, the level of competition is also somewhere between oligopoly and monopoly.
The regulatory apparatus is a (weak) attempt to force an outcome more in line with what a hypothetical free-market equilibrium would look like(ie. not massive rent-se
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If anyone believes for a minute that the big ISP providers in Canada are going to back down, you are sadly mistaken.
Hence we someday invented something called judicial and legislative power. I hear it's a great counterweight to economical power.
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To be honest, I'd rather pay a little more a month, and not have to "watch the clock" so to speak. $50 a month and being able to do whatever I want is a LOT better than $30 a month and having to always worry about transferring too much and getting overages.
So let them charge a little more, I say. But don't restrict so heavily how much we can transfer, e
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Re:best interests (Score:3)
In a horribly clunky square wheel fashion, it is the best interests of the public.
1. Make terrible policy
2. Outrage threatens political viability
3. Reverse terrible policy *in the best interests of the public*
It's just a pity that the process requires way too much artificially amplified drama. Oh look, drama sells TWO copies of a news media exposure - one for the bad policy, one for the reversal.
Re:best interests (Score:5, Insightful)
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are you kidding me? Harper has been bending over and taking it from American big business since he got into office. Just every once in awhile his self-preservation and what canadians want coincides.
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That's awesome. I'm glad that option was available for you to save money. However, tiered pricing would not save me money and would severely limit how I prefer to use my mobile device.
For example I ride the bus to and from work and work out several times a week. During the commute and while on the treadmill I enjoy watching Netflix on my phone. 45 minutes of Netflix appears to create about 250MB of data transfer. I'd wipe out AT
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Why is this modded Redundant?
This is EXACTLY what would happen if the CRTC was disbanded. Just because the CRTC makes unpopular and poorly-reasoned decisions occasionally (ok, quite frequently) doesn't mean that there's no need for a regulator. The only reason we had unlimited-use packages from smaller ISPs at all was because the big telcos requires CRTC approval to abolish them.
Is that really something you want to do away with? Reform the CRTC, yes. Demand greater accountability and public oversight, absol
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Good point.
Sadly it was probably the CRTC that made the ruling to have the smaller ISPs have the right to use the gigantic bandwidth from the mega-corporations.This would have been several years prior under a Liberal Party governmaent
So we fast forward to today. There is a difference in government. A much more corporation friendly Conservative Party government. This probably gave the CRTC the impetus that they ought to toe the party line and cut the mega-corps a break.
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