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
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What's wrong is UBB is applied at the GAS level. Which means that independent ISP's who use their own network are also forced to pass this onto their customers even if they in turn have their own private network, and have paid Bell/Rogers/Telus/etc for access to the line. It's been proven in the past that the amount of service per node is way under what compaines like Bell are actually telling the CRTC. The problem is the CRTC is full of former industry execs. The majority of Canadians also know that th
People are going to whine and bitch, but... (Score:5, Informative)
net neutrality means "treat the ISP like a utility", and guess what???
Most utilities (even some PPTs) sell metered service: the more you use, the more you pay.
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.
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This gives them an unfair advantage over smaller companies.
Bigger companies have all sorts of advantages over smaller companies. Why is this particular advantage unfair in your mind? Would you object if a smaller ISP was offering breaks on additional services?
Bundling should not be allowed.
Why? Here in the states so-called "triple play" (phone/data/tv) packages are popular. You really think it would be to the benefit of society to force those consumers to pay more?
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Because Bell owns the wires. The smaller ISP has no access to its customers except by going through Bell. Bell can thus force the smaller ISP to raise its rates until it goes out of business.
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Technically, don't Canadian Taxpayers own the lines? With all the tax subsidies Bell has been receiving over the years, I think its Bell that owes *us* money.
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.
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Because Canada paid for the infrastructure that they are about to fuck us in the ass with?...
Not to mention that all that publicly funded infrastructure also runs through public land.
camperdave: Bigger companies have all sorts of advantages over smaller companies. Why is this particular advantage unfair in your mind?
Why should a huge company freeloading off subsidies, publicly funded infrastructure, AND rent-free public land use be allowed monopoly status by society? Not just any monopoly, but a government granted Coercive monopoly [wikipedia.org] - once of the worst kinds.
No need to answer through - we all pretty much know the answer. They are powerful and well funded enough to grease the right palms in the halls of government, a method that is
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The problem I have with it is that that's an outrageous amount to charge for moving a gigabyte of data. You can pay to have the data PHYSICALLY CARRIED on DVD or Blu-Ray cheaper than that (high latency, outrageously high bandwidth).
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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 an
Re:People are going to whine and bitch, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Price it like a utility then.
$8 "connection fee" for 100amp err... 10Mbit service
$0.07 per GB.
But then people that just check email would only net them $8.07... can't have that, can we?
$1+ per GB is insane. In civilized countries you can get 3G internet for that sort of money.
Re:People are going to whine and bitch, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
But then people that just check email would only net them $8.07... can't have that, can we?
We should.
The powerco doesn't "rate limit" me depending on what I do with the electricity I use, and neither should my ISP.
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The powerco doesn't "rate limit" me depending on what I do with the electricity I use
Actually yes they do. It is a requirement to have a meter plus a main disconnect breaker on your electrical service. If you for some reason were to exceed your permitted service capacity (think of amperage as being equivalent to your bandwidth like Mbps) of say 100A then the breaker would trip and cut you off the grid. The meter is there so the utility can bill you the cost of energy (kWh == GB) and if you use a lot you get a big bill.
Industrial power customers have contracts based on "peak demand" and t
Your logic is flawed (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a cute idea, but it is wrong.
With utilities, you are using consumable resources. Water costs per gallon. Gas costs per cubic foot. Electricity costs per ton of coal. If you don't use these resources in your home, then the utility doesn't burn up these resources at their end.
With the internet, the "utility" uses bits whether customers data are in those packets or not. As a second goes by, X number of Mbits are used and gone forever. You CANNOT save them like the other utilities I mentioned. It
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You CANNOT save them like the other utilities I mentioned.
Yet the ISP must still pay for the same fiber no matter whether it's Grandma checking her mail, or Dweezil streaming HD video 16 hours a day.
That's why I think you should pay for a data RATE. Not a data QUANTITY.
Low rate customers transfer "little" amounts of data use just as do infrequent users with high-bandwidth pipes. The multiplication statements are just different.
So, someone who constantly transfers a little data will pay the "same" as someon
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The problem is that most people don't use the internet at the same rate all the time. If you only use it now and then, the last thing you want is to be charged based on the assumption that you are using the maximum rate 24/7.
Remember that if lots of people are using the internet now and then, the total bandwidth (which is what actually costs money) will average out, more or less.
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Most utilities (even some PPTs) sell metered service: the more you use, the more you pay.
Let's put that to the test.
Electricity: Check
Natural Gas: Check
Local phone: No.
Cable/Satellite TV: No.
Internet: No.
So no, most utilities don't sell metered service.
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Water: Check
Local phone: depends on where you live.
So, that's 50/50 (or sometimes 40/60).
Metering internet service would be a big stick that we can beat Big ISP with to say, "Let me do what I want with my Internet service!!!"
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Then they should drop the base cost (the $X per month for a Y Mbps connection) and charge *ONLY* for the number of bytes that go through the byte. Just like a utility.
When was the last time your gas/electric company charged you based on the size of the pipe/wire going into your building?
So... (Score:2)
improvement (Score:2)
this is actually an improvement over their current practices.
they've been billing based on usage for years now, but they charge 8$/GB instead of 1.12$.
unless the article meant Gb, in which case it's meaningless and just validates their current business model
The sky is falling! (Score:2, Insightful)
What is the CRTC thinking? Bell should be split into two companies: one responsible for the internet infrastructure, another for selling internet service to end-customers. It makes absolutely no sense for Bell to be able to rent its lines to Teksavvy, then tell it how to run its business. Bell is abusing its monopoly power!
What can we do about this?
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The internet wasn't always unlimited. (Score:5, Insightful)
For those of you just joining us, it may be easy to forget the days when consumer Internet access wasn't unlimited. Dial-up connections were called "56K" but actually around 40-53K in practical use, and services like AOL and Prodigy billed by the hour to look at your e-mail, post on limited message boards, and use their clunky early Web browsers.
Unlimited service isn't a right, it was just a trend that started when a price war broke out because there were far too many ISPs. There were even a few national ISPs back then that offered free access if you were willing to look at ads on your screen. Natural selection shut these companies down and a string of mergers leave us basically back where we started with the Bells dominant and their upstart competitors being the already-hated cable TV providers.
If this leads to a $20 a month 5 GB at 1 Mbps plan I'd have it installed at my grandmother's house where there's no computer and no cell phone service in an instant for the family to use while we're visiting. Right now, the cheapest non-dialup plan is an $35 for 1 Mbps DSL that isn't worth it.
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Looking at your data differently, it means that at one time competition was sparse and prices high. Then competition popped up and drove prices down. Now the big players have strangled the competition and prices are heading back up.
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When dial-up was unlimited... it required you tie up a phone line while you were online, and in some rural locations it also meant a per-minute phone call charge.
When it comes down to it now... there's The Regional Phone Company and The Regional Cable TV Company. They own the wires connected to your home... and we've proven internet over sewer pipe and power line just isn't effective. Anybody providing DSL has to rent access to the phone company's copper. Earthlink has deals to borrow some cable wires, othe
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Internet over sewer pipe?
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Internet over sewer pipe?
Aha! So that's why I usually end up with a really shitty connection....
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Explains a lot, doesn't it?
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Uhm... the story is about Canada, which is not yet the 51st state (57th if you use our President's math.... ;)
Usage based fees? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Usage based fees? (Score:4, Interesting)
From the rumor is that the cap is set at 60 a month. You start your bill at 30$% 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.
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I think there are 2 independent issues: Lack of competition and usage dependent pricing.
Lack of competition will continue to produce problems, but is somewhat difficult to solve.
Usage dependent pricing actually seems like a good idea: it removes the incentive for companies to block bit-torrent and the like. If the pricing system is fair, then the low volume users will not need to pay to support the high volume users or vice-versa. I understand the argument about adds, but I think most volume probably comes
Bye Bye Bell (Score:2)
This kind of thing (Score:4, Insightful)
will only lead me to block more advertising. They eat up most of the bandwidth..
More competition needed (Score:2)
How much competition is up there? More competition would not hurt [the consumer]. Trouble is consumers do not know that things could be better for them.
No wonder places like Malawi or Uganda, that are thousands of miles away and much poorer, receive gadgets like the iPad, iPhone and Droids much earlier than Canada which shares the border with the mighty USA.
Wake up Canada...wake up!
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But, Canada is a big place, and relatively sparsely populated. In the case of the telcos, they own the existing infrastructure -- they built it, they paid for it, and it costs them to operate it. It sucks, but how do you introduce competition in this domain without laying a crapload of new wires??
Bell is basically the old phone company, and the Cable compa
I'm sorry, how is this new? (Score:3, Informative)
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Bell Canada is imposing their caps and pricing scheme on customers of all independent ISPs selling DSL connections. So say an ISP is selling an account with a 200 gig limit for 30 bucks. Now Bell is saying that each ISP must pay them a $21 fee for leasing the DSL connection and a surcharge of $1.25 for every gig of usage above 60 gigs. The numbers are approximate but they're close enough.
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
Not really affecting Bell customers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nailed it. This destroys captive competitors. (Score:4, Informative)
Usage billing was already being done by most ISPs.
This move just let Bell (completely ridiculous) lets bell impose bandwidth charges on the competitors who get their local loop from Bell.
These guys generally are paying for their own backbone to the internet so it is ridiculous that they have to pay bell again for that bandwidth.
Anyway more monopoly supporting moves from the CRTC, not a real surprise.
Force them to share if they're getting free $$$ (Score:2)
Since people don't have much choice on who to go to, it would be nice if they allowed competitors to use the same lines.
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But, they're just being good capitalists and trying to maximize shareholder value and increase profitability on an annualized basis. Companies (mostly) exist to make money -- that's what they do.
There's two problems with that. Possibly more, but I'll stick to two.
1) Why would you equip someone to compete with you? Are
How is this news? (Score:2)
Rogers already does this. I thought Bell already did this as well to customers that went over the monthly cap.
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Ridiculous (Score:2)
Ridiculous to charge 75c per gigabyte when wholesale bandwidth costs are less than $1/megabit.
Makes sense, really (Score:2)
While the exact limits and overage charges can be argued over, the core concept seems to make sense, and it's a relatively sensible way to address massive BitTorrenting and the like.
The Problem isn't what you think. (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem isn't that they are charging regular users on a scale, it's that they are charging their wholesale customers this way. All of the ISP's in Canada are required to sell their pipes to other companies, this is to create competition, as many of the companies are working off former legal monopolies, (crown corporations), and competition is few and far between. What this means is that competition is going to be COMPLETELY shot in the ISP world.
This has been going on for a while. (Score:2)
Good Plan but Prices too high (Score:2)
I am a big fan of well thought-out metered service. I think it gives ISPs an incentive to provide better infrastructure because the more bandwidth customers use, the more money the ISP makes. Without metered service, the incentive is reversed - the ISPs want to discourage you from using any bandwidth at all. In any form of business it is better that the customer's interests and their vendor's interests be aligned rather than at odds.
But the proposed pricing here is not an incentive to the ISP, its puniti
Double billing (Score:5, Informative)
The structure of all this is hidden from consumers so it's pretty difficult for the average user to understand but this scheme amounts to double billing.
These charges are for WHOLESALE clients.
So Bell is selling ADSL access services to ISPs. Those ISPs are required to pay for a high capacity link to the Bell backbone in order to receive the traffic generated by their customers. That link between the ISP and Bell is the point where Bell used to be billing for usage. A lower volume ISP would pay for a link that could burst up to a certain speed, they would pay for the loop charge and the would pay for BANDWIDTH usage. A larger ISP may decided to pay for a dedicated link which allows full time 100% usage of the link they have paid for. They could saturate their link 24/7 and they would pay a higher price for their bandwidth fee to Bell. That is where the billing of bandwidth on a wholesale basis has occurred for years. This link is 100% dedicated to the transport of ADSL customer traffic between Bell and the ISP. It doesn't get used for any other purpose.
Now on TOP of the fee the ISP's have already been paying to Bell for bandwidth on their dedicated link to the ADSL aggregation backbone they now want to bill the customers directly for the traffic they inject into the ADSL backbone. So they now collect a toll at the entrance to their network and the exit of the network effectively billing twice for the same ISP to customer traffic.
If Bell feels they are not charging their wholesale ISP's enough for the bulk pipe they bought well then who's fault is that? Those pipes are on contracts and when those contracts expire they can renegotiate those rates.
I don't understand why the CRTC is going to allow this.
Actually I do understand why they made the decision to allow it, if you look at the makeup of the CRTC boards they are stuffed full of big telecom ex executives. The majority of power at the CRTC comes from people who used to hold jobs at the old monopoly telecoms providers. I just don't understand how they can defend their decision as their explanations seem to defy the facts.
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Sir –
Incidentally, these fees to wholesale clients are not for internet traffic. The internet traffic for e.g. Teksavvy does not typically travel over Bell's backbone - these independent providers have their own backbone internet providers, switched from the copper DSL lines to the independent ISP's backbone at the DSLAM (essentially). The fees the CRTC is imposing cover the cost of setting up and maintaining the "last mile" of copper between the household and the DSLAM. The backbones by these indepe
Just perfect, and then there's Harper... (Score:3, Informative)
Capping vs. charging (Score:5, Informative)
Ignoring for the moment the fact that apparently TFA is about wholesale rather than retail pricing ...
Based on the experience in New Zealand (which faced this problem earlier than elsewhere, due to the high cost of sending data underwater) most consumers prefer a fixed bill. Nowadays, after some initial thrashing around, most ISPs offer plans where if you exceed your data cap your bandwidth is cut down to a little better than modem speed, but you don't incur any extra charges. My ISP allows you to choose to pay an extra charge to increase your cap on a given month.
I expect eventually the rest of the world will catch up and offer similar schemes.
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...
This isn't actually very good for Bell... (Score:3, Informative)
Mark Goldberg has a nice analysis [mhgoldberg.com] of the decision. Note that Bell must first apply this usage based billing for all their existing retail customers before they are able to do so for third party ISPs leasing lines from them. This means they risk losing existing retail customers who have legacy unlimited plans, i.e. the ones who have been around the longest. In addition, their tariffs are actually being lowered, which will improve the profit margin of the independent ISPs. In other words, this isn't happening in the short term.
Side note: If you're a Teksavvy customer like me, they are also launching a cable-based service through leasing lines from Rogers as well. The details are up on their site [teksavvy.com], however I believe it's limited to the GTA only right now. You can get faster speeds, but lower caps. However, if the Bell usage-based plan eventually goes through, the caps will actually be about the same. I'm not affiliated with Teksavvy, I just happen to use them for Internet and home phone service and think they're awesome.
Amusing anecdote about how awesome they are: I have a Linksys WRT54GL router and flashed it with the Tomato/MLPPP firmware in order to bypass Bell's throttling when we signed up for Teksavvy. Eight months later, I convince my wife's parents to switch over (from Rogers, ironically) and they can now actually buy this same router along with the modem when they sign up for the service. So they do this, and I come over to set everything up along with the Tomato/MLPPP firmware on my USB stick so I can flash the router. After setting everything up, I discovered that they've already done exactly this. They've put the Tomato firmware on their, configured the modem for passthrough mode, set up all the login info on the router, and turned on single-link MLPPP to get around Bell's throttling. I literally had to do nothing but plug the wires in. Now that is what I call good customer service!
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I guess everybody should start getting a little more worried about their open wifi connections.
Hopefully Cogeco will continue to charge overage fees to residential customers only. Us "Business" on commercial accounts aren't subject to such fees, yet.
I think Bell needs to work harder on providing Broadband to all Canadians rather than ripping off those who already have it.
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The CRTC has approved Bell Canada's request to bill internet customers, both retail and wholesale, based on how much they download each month.
I think Bell needs to work harder on providing Broadband to all Canadians rather than ripping off those who already have it.
CRTC = Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
In other words, the Government regulators approved this.
You have a problem with it, take it up with them [crtc.gc.ca]
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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:Got it (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that you are a computer geek living by yourself. When you factor in the average family size of about 3 people, that 30GB usage of yours would be 90GB for a geeky family.
At 90GB, that hits the $22.50 mark which is about 70% increase at the fees with NO additional improvement in services. What else in the IT world has rates going up without major improvements/speeds/capacity?
Re:Got it (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that you are a computer geek living by yourself. When you factor in the average family size of about 3 people, that 30GB usage of yours would be 90GB for a geeky family.
Well, if you buy into the notion that bits cost money, why shouldn't that family pay more? They pay for the increased electrical consumption of multiple people, why not the increased data consumption?
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The rest of the modernized world are flat rate. For the same $30 a month, people in Hong Kong have unlimited 1Gbps internet. So wise one, please explain to me how can they make money even assuming that 100% of that $30 goes into just transporting bits at 200X times faster and potential 200X usage than the 5Mbps of DSL in Canada that is under this decision?
CRTC's reasoning of approving UBB is it is an economic measure of "traffic management" and not so much as a cost recovery.
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Australia and South Africa aren't part of the 'modernized' world?
Besides, I wasn't condoning this pricing practice. I was just pointing out the fact that the "I have a family, we need to use more" justification really wouldn't fly under a metered billing system for any other product, why should it fly for data?
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If I started listing all the things that are shite about Belgium, I'd run out of paper before I got anywhere near internet transfer caps.
Get a sense of perspective.
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I suspect that Bell's prices are based on their costs. If not, surely the regulators will notice?
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If it meant that I had a choice of internet service providers, yes, I would put up with this.
Of course the "ten companies tearing up the street" image is a straw man. In many locales they would be able to utilize existing telephone poles and/or wiring conduits. New construction could be built with the wiring conduits in mind for multiple service providers. Older construction might have to be torn up to accommodate the new infrastructure, that's a fact of life as technology advances, isn't it?
they pay a lot of employees a lot less? (Score:2)
in my industry, labor is manual, and 45% of costs...
if I could cut payroll to 1/3rd- by paying $3.00 an hour-
I could drop my prices in half.
what are tech salaries at ISP's in hong kong?
how much wire do I have to run per 100 customers in hongkong vs. canada
7million people in 426 sq miles vs
vs 34 million people in 3.8 million sq miles..
ya-- it just doesn't add up-- why are prices different in hong kong....
the expenses should be the exact same....
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New Zealand (and I believe Australia) have always had usage-based charging. The current Vodafone rate is NZ$80 per month with a 1GB cap, $90 per for 5GB, $100 per for 20GB. Forgive me if a 60GB cap doesn't seem like all that much of a hardship!
Re:Got it (Score:4, Insightful)
The rest of the modernized world are flat rate. For the same $30 a month, people in Hong Kong have unlimited 1Gbps internet. So wise one, please explain to me how can they make money even assuming that 100% of that $30 goes into just transporting bits at 200X times faster and potential 200X usage than the 5Mbps of DSL in Canada that is under this decision?
CRTC's reasoning of approving UBB is it is an economic measure of "traffic management" and not so much as a cost recovery.
Population of Hong Kong: 7,038,000
Population of Toronto: 2.48 million people (5.5 million in the GTA - Greater Toronto Area)
Size of Hong Kong: 1,104 sq km
Size of GTA: 1,451.5 sq km
Conclusion? Higher population density for Hong Kong, which probably means it's cheaper to wire everyone up.
Sounds like a good conclusion too, but then:
Population of Sweden: 9,059,651
Size of Sweden: 410,335 sq km of land
So I don't get it either...
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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.
First "Grandma who checks her email once a day" should be getting the internet for $1.99 per month with a $50 install fee.
Second "Bandwidth is a finite resource", it is not. The ISP I work for currently pays for 20Mb/20Mb and expects to be able to use 20Mb/20Mb 24/7/364. When we NEED more we will upgrade, but not until then. If our customers started using 19Mb/19Mb most of the time, not just 6-9 (when they use 19Mb/5Mb), then we would upgrade immediately. As it is we are upgrading to a 100Mb/100Mb circu
Re:Got it (Score:5, Insightful)
First "Grandma who checks her email once a day" should be getting the internet for $1.99 per month with a $50 install fee.
This is the problem. I think it makes sense that the people who use the most should pay the most, but the prices only go up, not down. So if you want a fast connection but only plan to download 1 GB of data per month, you still have to pay full price, but now the ISPs want to say "Well we'll keep charging everyone the same price as before, but now we'll charge certain people more". In other words, it costs more, but there's no benefit for consumers.
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That's because the pricing was originally based on typical usage patterns. In recent years, for reasons everyone already knows, average usage has sky-rocketed. Naturally prices are going to increase, this represents the increased costs of providing more total bandwidth.
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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.
That is neither here, nor there.
Even your local ISP data is anecdotal, at best.
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.
Now you're misrepresenting the past and present of internet usage.
In the past, grandma was subsidizing the heavy user, and this was perfectly fine.
In the present, grandma is the problem, because she's suddenly accessing media intensive content.
Keep in mind that present day grandma might not be using a lot of bandwidth, but the sheer number of 'light' internet users who've upped their usage by a few GB/month has changed the equati
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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.
The problem is that while right now few people use a ton of bandwidth, it's pretty much certain that trend won't continue. The "average" person is starting to notice services like Netflix streaming (how many gigabytes for a 2-hour movie on a megabit-class
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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?
Yes. Especially when the broadband ISP touted it as unlimited when I signed up (not with Bell). Then my ISP introduced caps (and subsequently attempted to change the definition of "unlimited"). But the price never went down, in fact it has gone up almost every year since.
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If I'm paying for a 5 Mbps connection, then why should I be penalised for using that 5 Mbps connection 24/7? I paid for it, I'll download all I want, since it's paid for.
They can either charge for a pipe (Mbps) or for usage (MBs). But they can't charge for both.
That would be like the gas company sending me a bill for "a pipe capable of X cubic cm/min" on top of charging me for using 18 GJ of gas in a month.
It doesn't work that way.
Pick one or the other: the speed of the link or the amount of bytes that g
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That's silly. Both of those factors affect the cost to your ISP, so of course they will both affect your cost.
Bandwidth is unlimited! (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you watch TV online? (Hulu/Netflix/etc?) Because in my family, we do, and we'll blow past your 30 GB in a week or so.
Today, few people are watching TV online, but that figure is growing rapidly. My own habits have spread to my 5 employees and my business partners, due in part to my endorsements. Add in online gaming, video chats, working from home via VPN and remote-desktop, and perfectly legit, normal usage suddenly passes your threshold for "reasonable".
But why? Bandwidth is one of the few things which
Re:Got it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Yeah, totally. And because of this move, Bell will be cutting the price of grandma's connection by 90%!
Oh wait, it won't, because this really isn't "usage based billing", but both a money grab and an effort to cripple competition even further.
They're charging a dollar a gig, which is quite literally thousands of times the actual cost.
And they're allowed to cripple the speed of wholesale lines while they offer higher speeds to their direct customers.
Never mind that they have all this leverage (in terms of infrastructure and last mile copper) because they were a monopoly until '97.
And sadly, there are more than enough people like you out there to let the telecoms get away with pretty much anything.
This is why our cost for broadband is about twice as much (well, even more now) as it is for people in the USA.
http://gizmodo.com/5390014/internet-speeds-and-costs-around-the-world-shown-visually [gizmodo.com]
No, the "Canada is less dense and they have to provide to these small villages" argument does not fly because our broadband coverage of rural areas is laughably pathetic and a significant portion of small communities can't get any decent internet access.
And it's just going to get worse, so thanks for being part of that.
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"Unlimited" is just a holdover from 56k modem times. They offered a number of minutes per month for the basic subscription fee, and over time as AOL and MSN and the occasional third leg battled it out for customers that number increased fairly consistently. Pretty soon it was $20 for unlimited internet. 5k transfer per second, 2592000 seconds, that's 12960000k or 12656m or 12GB. It would be impossible for you to download more data than that (we'll ignore compression since the limit ignores compression,
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Well I can tell you I don't use 60 GB a month.
I don't mind the concept of usage based billing, why should someone using 800 GB a month pay the same as someone using 800 MB a month? Should someone with 800 lights on have the same power bill as someone with only a single light?
I really don't think the CRTC needs to be involved here (other than making sure the smaller ISPs don't get locked out), in Edmonton I have Telus and Shaw both competing to give me reasonable rates. Of course I assume government funding/
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in Edmonton I have Telus and Shaw both colluding to give me ridiculous rates.
FTFY.
$55 for "up to" 15/1 is a far cry from "reasonable" IMO. Especially when that 1Mbps UL turns out to be less than 512kbps on a good day, in the same city, no less. [60gb cap also].
I kind of vomit when I see that I could get 100/10 for the same money in some parts of europe.
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And for that, the fastest connection is a mere 5 Mb/s...
Says me who for living just outside the main city area can only get ADSL of up to 10, 12 Mbit/s or so, while many high-rises have 30 Mb/s (fibre) at about the same price, and up to 1000 Mbit options. That's faster than my LAN, but really expensive of course.
I have 8 Mb/s and routinely get >800 KB/s downloads, torrents or otherwise. So that 8 Mb is the true speed. For under USD 30 per month. And no GB limits. Including some free pay-TV channels to
Re:Got it (Score:5, Informative)
actually it's 60+(22.5/1.12)GB, or about 80GB.
From 0-60GB, you pay a set amount X.
Between 60-80GB, you pay an amount between X and X+22.50
From 80-300GB, you pay X+22.50
Over 300GB, you pay more.
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.
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and it's complicated enough that it's going to piss people off. You forgot that part.
Re:Got it (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's not the real issue. If you look at a datacenter, it typically has a dedicated connection to a backbone somewhere. With most consumer connections, the bottleneck is in the last mile. There may be, say, 200Mb/s available on particular segment. In typical usage, most customers won't be saturating their connection for more than a few minutes at a time, so the 200Mb/s will provide some head room for them. If one customer is using 100% of their 10Mb/s slice all of the time, then that means that there's
Re:Got it (Score:5, Informative)
My new TiVo box streams Netflix in HD when available. It seems to average around 5mbit/s for the duration of the program. That works out to ~2.2 gigabytes per hour of programming.
It's not really all that hard to exceed 20GB in this day and age. Looking back at my Cacti logs I seem to average around 55GB per month. And no, I don't download stuff for the sake of downloading it.
Re:Got it (Score:5, Informative)
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Remember: you can download tons of games, music, and movies each month not only legally, but with the blessing of the industry behind it (e.g., iTunes or other such online music store, NetFlix or other such video streaming service, etc.). And those aren't the only big things you can download. For a while, especially early in the release cycles, I was grabbing regular snapshots of KDE. That's about 300MB per snapshot. And I could be getting two, sometimes even three, a week. That doesn't take long to ch
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hopefully, since this would double my current internet cost.
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My bandwidth allocation is 1GB/month, although I'm considering paying the extra to up it to 2GB. For conventional web and email, that's plenty.