CRTC Approves Usage Based Billing In Canada 381
qvatch writes with this from CBC News: "The CRTC has approved Bell Canada's request to bill Internet customers, both retail and wholesale, based on how much they download each month. The plan, known as usage-based billing, will apply to people who buy their Internet connection from Bell, or from smaller service providers that rent lines from the company, such as Teksavvy or Acanac. ... Customers using the fastest connections of five megabits per second, for example, will have a monthly allotment of 60 gigabytes, beyond which Bell will charge $1.12 per GB to a maximum of $22.50. If a customer uses more than 300 GB a month, Bell will also be able to implement an additional charge of 75 cents per gigabyte."
My government doesn't listen to me (Score:2, Interesting)
So the majority of canadians don't want this but the government goes the other way... nobody listens, oh joy
Re:Got it (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a computer geek and I only use about 30 gigs a month (on a different provider). I don't really see what the problem is.
A friend works at a local ISP and he tells me that 0.1% of the customers use as much bandwidth as I do. That's a very tiny percentage.
If people want to use the Internet to download massive amounts of p2p content, do they really expect they should pay the same as Grandma who checks her email once a day? Bandwidth is a finite resource, even if we don't believe it.
Re:People are going to whine and bitch, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
You're wrong. If Bell was a utility then it would sell the infrastructure, not the service. Bell sells its internet service at the same cost as its competitors, but then turns around and says "If you order extra services, your internet bill will drop by $10/month". This gives them an unfair advantage over smaller companies.
Bell should be split into two companies: one providing infrastructure and one selling services on that infrastructure. Bundling should not be allowed.
Re:Usage based fees? (Score:4, Interesting)
From the rumor is that the cap is set at 60 a month. You start your bill at 30$% and add to that by going over the cap, until it maxes out at 22.50. So there is no discount for anyone using less.
Require advertisement of the capped rate (Score:3, Interesting)
I say if they want to do this the capped rate has to be stated before any peak rate in advertisements
IE 60GBytes/month cap == 0.185Mbits/sec
Or they can state how long you can connect at your peak rate.
IE 5Mb/sec with a 60GB cap == 1.11 days of actual usage per month
Good concept, bad rates (Score:5, Interesting)
What it is:
1st bit = $X, presumably $CAN
2nd bit through 60GB = free
60GB - 80GB = $1.12/GB
80GB-300GB = free
300GB+ = $0.75/GB
What it should be:
First bit = $X
2nd bit through 60GB = free
Each GB thereafter = less than $X/60.
In other words: consistent per-GB charge with a monthly minimum and possibly a small fixed charge, meaning your initial allowance per-GB cost is more than your per-GB cost for usage beyond your allowance.
Re:Got it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:People are going to whine and bitch, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Um ... that doesn't sound the slightest bit surprising. I'm fairly sure it's always been cheaper to move large amounts of data physically. Hence the old saying, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of tapes" (or something like that).
There are regulators involved, yes? Surely they will be looking at the cost structure, and would call foul if there is any blatant overcharging? I suspect you are underestimating how much it actually costs to provide bandwidth - and don't forget that geography and economy of scale are both big factors.
Re:People are going to whine and bitch, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, that's the real crux of the problem. Bell has a government-sanctioned monopoly over the lines that were largely paid for by taxpayers, and smaller ISPs have no choice but to bend over backward for Bell.
An ISP should definitely not be put in charge of leasing our lines to their competing ISPs, since that's a giant conflict of interest. To make it even worse, Bell sells satellite TV, so Internet streaming isn't in their best interest either. The CBC got screwed by this a while ago when they tried to broadcast a TV show via bittorrent, and Bell shaped the hell out of it.
The CRTC has tried to control this problem with regulation, but I think they're going about it the wrong way. Our lines are a shared resource, like roads. The government should buy them from Bell and lease them out to ISPs in a non-discriminatory way.
Re:Double billing (Score:2, Interesting)
Remember trying to go on the internet last year while on vacation, Rogers had been redirecting some 404 pages (and other pages) to their own landing pages where they had advertising... is this legal? Plus they forced people to use their own 'homepage' (which got funneled through results pages similar to ads on proxy sites. Tried getting the computer to use another homepage but no luck....Talk about vendor lock in.
Lets have a quick look at their pricing history: Cell phone charges by the same cartel are already some of the highest in the world [www.cbc.ca]. Paying a few hundred a month for some extra channels on cable. Finally convinced everyone to switch over to online media (streaming, downloading, netflix, etc) and now the prices go through the roof with tiered pricing... Wish these cartels would stop pushing back time and grow with the market. It is time to invest in giving customers what they want. Customers want unfiltered, unlimited internet.
Doing the math. 2 to 5 Gbyte per US$ in the UK (Score:3, Interesting)
I recently downgraded from traffic shaped 20 mbit virgin coax cable to 8 mbit post office adsl... so let's do the math.
On virgin I could get 20 mbit for 90 minutes, and then hit the cap, which cut me back to 5 mbit, so, doing the math at 3,600 seconds to the hour...
20 x 3600 x 1.5 = 108,000 mbit before the cap
5 x 3600 x 22.5 = 405,000 mbit after the cap
for a total maximum of 513,000 mbit or (/8) 64.125 gigabytes in 24 hours.
This was UK£ 35 a month so 1.15 a day, therefore 55.76 gigabyte per UK£
On the ADSL I actually get 7.2 mbit, no traffic shaping, no cap.
7.2 x 3600 x 24 = 622,080 mbit or (/8) 77.76 gigabytes in 24 hours.
This is UK£ 19.95 a month so 0.66 a day, therefore 117.81 gigabyte per UK£
This gives is the MAXIMUM cost to the ISP and the MINIMUM revenue.
It also gives us MAXIMUM daily traffic for the ISP (assuming no local content, cache, etc)
Say my actual usage is 10% of this theoretical maximum, then just divide the cost, eg "x" GB/UK£, by ten, so virgin cable would be 5.57 GB/UK£ and PO ADSL would be 11.78 GB/UK£
SO.. a lot of the packages are like the family sized toothpaste tube, yeah, the tube is twice the size of the normal one, but the diameter of the hole in the cap is much bigger too, since they know you put toothpaste on the brush by length, not by volume...