Canada's CRTC Declares Broadband Internet Access a Basic Service

New submitter jbwiebe quotes a report from CBC.ca: The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has declared broadband internet a basic telecommunications service. In a ruling handed down today, the national regulator ordered the country's internet providers to begin working toward boosting internet service and speeds in rural and isolated areas. With today's ruling, CRTC has set new targets for internet service providers to offer customers in all parts of the country download speeds of at least 50 megabits per second (Mbps) and upload speeds of at least 10 Mbps, and to also offer the option of unlimited data. The CRTC estimates two million Canadian households, or roughly 18 per cent, don't have access to those speeds or data. The CRTC's goal is to reduce that to 10 per cent by 2021. To achieve that, the CRTC will require providers pay into a fund that's set to grow to $750 million over five years. The companies will be able to dip into that fund to help pay for the infrastructure needed to extend high-speed service to areas where it is not currently available. The fund is similar to one that subsidized the expansion of local landline telephone service in years past. Providers used to pay 0.53 per cent of their revenues, excluding broadband, into that fund. Now they'll pay the same rate on all revenues, including broadband.

option of unlimited data. so

[Joe_Dragon]

So our sat plan has an option of unlimited data*.

*data slowed to 56K speeds when you hit your fap cap or for an added $150-$200/mo you can get 50 down / 10 up all the time.

Just sayin'

[buss_error]

The CRTC is an even more toothless cur than the FCC is in the US. Nothing will change except the artful choreography with which the telecoms will dance out of the way of doing anything substantive. This is what they pay the politicians (in Canada and the US) to do for them, and they are getting their money's worth from the spend.

Re:Just sayin'

[Guspaz]

What has the FCC ever done? The CRTC maintains an effective wholesale access regime (enabling providers like TekSavvy to exist), and has managed to piss off incumbent providers to no end with their wireless code (mandating, among other things, the end to 3+ year contracts) and television code (mandating skinny basic and pick-and-pay). The incumbents fought tooth and nail against those. The incumbents also screamed bloody murder when the CRTC mandated that all the next-gen networks (FTTH and fiber-fed DOCSIS) need to be available to wholesale providers, and they also raised a big ruckus when the CRTC recently dropped the wholesale rates by up to 90% recently...

Re:Just sayin'

[Samantha Wright]

If you RTFA, you'll discover the little nugget of joy that the CRTC declined to regulate prices—again. So all those rural areas are going from terrible service to unaffordable service. I don't think the big telcos are that upset about this particular demand; they get money to overhaul their infrastructure (where needed) and can double-dip by charging their customers as much as they want afterward. It seems that this [theglobeandmail.com] probably won't be changing any time soon.

Re:

[Guspaz]

The CRTC doesn't regulate retail rates, but enforce a wholesale regime that results in independent ISPs covering all incumbent territory with prices that are generally somewhere around two thirds that of incumbents. So their strategy seems to be working pretty decently on that front.

Re: Just sayin'

[Anonymous Coward]

The CRTC does enforce retail rates. The most recent example being $25 TV plans.

Re: Just sayin'

[SirSlud]

They regulate wholesale access price, which permits completion that the suppliers need to compete with.

Re:

[Samantha Wright]

No, they use FUD, brand name recognition, and bundling, and charge obnoxiously inflated rates. Quite a few less-savvy customers end up badly gouged. My landlord is one of them. He's stuck with a ridiculously overpriced DSL package from Bell because of Fibe TV—and his location, deep in the heart of metropolitan Toronto, is mysteriously not eligible for the actual fibre-optic-to-the-pole service promised in marketing material. If you actually read the entire article, you'll see mention of lobbyist group

Re:Just sayin'

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno. Teksavvy just sent me an email saying they reduced my rate by $5 per month because the CRTC forced the big guys to lower the wholesale rates they were charging Teksavvy.

That doesn't seem toothless to me.

Re:Just sayin'

[Minupla]

Agreed - mine dropped almost 20$/mo. That's not nothing.

Thanks CRTC!

Min

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

nah, teksavvy is one of the decent providers. I was with them while in their service area and NEVER had issues with them. Wish I could say the same about big red....

Re:Just sayin'

[PsychoSlashDot]

They'll get it back out of you somehow. Either by raising some other fee, or by reducing the quality of service.

If by reducing quality of service you mean increasing the quality of service, you're right. My notice from Teksavvy reduced my bill $9/month while simultaneously increasing my link speed 10%.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

you'd be surprised. I'm with Electronic Box, they dropped my rates by $10 / month. $5 / month because they upgraded some infrastructure and no longer were relying on Videotron's, and another $5 / month for "loyalty" as I've been with them for a while now without ever signing a contract.

Re: Just sayin'

[SirSlud]

My internet bill just went *down* 6 bucks a month thanks to a CRTC ruling. I understand calling regulatory bodies toothless makes you feel like a grizzled callitlikeitis realist, but it makes you look naive when it's demonstrably untrue.

Re:

[mean pun]

My internet bill just went *down* 6 bucks a month thanks to a CRTC ruling. I understand calling regulatory bodies toothless makes you feel like a grizzled callitlikeitis realist, but it makes you look naive when it's demonstrably untrue.

It pains me to say this, but you are wrong (and naive) to think that on /. being wrong makes you look naive.

Common carrier status?

[HalAtWork]

So if internet access is a basic service, logically by extension their ISPs should be considered common carriers?

Re:

[epine]

That $750M fund that's supposed to grow in five years will all be paid by the current and future subscribers, as ISPs will pass on the buck to us.

Back when we built the giant railroad, I think it worked the same way.

Mass infrastructure projects tend to have this bizarre social calculus where the hat is passed around during the daylight hours, and then the bat makes its rounds (among the free riders) after sunset, i.e. these projects are pretty much always designed to get you coming or going.

The golden goose [mftd.org]

0.53 per cent?

[manu0601]

Providers used to pay 0.53 per cent of their revenues

One dollar earned, that is, 100 cents, means 53 dollar to pay. There must be something wrong in this sentence.

Re:

[hvrbyte]

0.53% of 100 cents is 0.53 cents. So even if you round it up to the nearest cent it would be $0.01 for every dollar earned.

Re:

[jcochran]

WHOOSH!

The OP was interpreting "Providers used to pay 0.53 per cent of their revenues" as meaning.
Providers need to pay $0.53 for every cent that they earn. That's technically correct given the above sentence... Methinks there's an extra space that should not be in the original sentence.....

Re:

[ceoyoyo]

We often write "percent", but the word actually means "per cent," i.e. "for each hundred." 0.53 per cent literally means 0.53 for every hundred.

You maybe were thinking $0.53 per cent, which could be interpreted as meaning 53 cents for every cent earned. Yeah, one character makes a lot of difference, but it isn't the space.

Re:

[manu0601]

The problem is with the reader, not the writer.

Indeed, I now understand I should have readen "percent" and not "per cent". If it is 0.53% of revenue, then it makes sense.

Didn't we try something like this in the US?

[Chas]

About 15-20 years back?
Didn't the Internet companies at the time take payments, pay out a bunch of HUGE bonuses that year, and then did fuck-all to improve infrastructure?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

That was the reverse of this.

This requires the telcos to put money into a fund for development.
The US gave telcos billion dollar tax breaks in exchange for empty promises of development.

Re:

[jfdavis668]

Did this with phone service long ago. Yes, now rural areas have phone service. But, now all the lines are a monopoly owned by them. That's why they don't have Internet access or any kind of competition. Sometimes winning one battle causes more problems than it solves in the future.

Re:Didn't we try something like this in the US?

[ceoyoyo]

Doubt it. In Canada we did this kind of thing with phone service. Everyone has phone service now, and the CRTC mandates that the owners of the lines must make the available at regulated wholesale prices to other companies that want to sell phone, long distance or Internet service. It seems to have worked out pretty well.

Data Speed and Cost

[Anonymous Coward]

In Canada the major telecom companies (telephone, cable, satellite, wireless) collude like a mafia don's wet-dream. We pay outrageous rates for data regardless of its delivery method (cable, fibre, wireless, satellite) for slow download and even slower upload transfer rates. I recently augmented my cable ISP service with wireless ISP as a connectivity backup. In general, the wireless Internet service is no worse than the cable Internet service although the same price gets me 5 GB wireless and unlimited cabl

Re:

[Rhipf]

In Canada the major telecom companies (telephone, cable, satellite, wireless) collude like a mafia don's wet-dream. We pay outrageous rates for data regardless of its delivery method (cable, fibre, wireless, satellite) for slow download and even slower upload transfer rates. I recently augmented my cable ISP service with wireless ISP as a connectivity backup. In general, the wireless Internet service is no worse than the cable Internet service although the same price gets me 5 GB wireless and unlimited cable. The wireless service has tiers so as I use more than 5 GB I pay about CAD15.00 more for each upstream tier. If I dumped my cable Internet service then streaming videos (CraveTV, YouTube, and education / professional training) would get expensive pretty fast. The area in which I live is urban but not sparsely populated compared to Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver . There should be plenty of wireless bandwidth available to enable the wireless carrier to decrease the cost to the consumer; the service is HSPA+ (on a good day) and most (95+%) of my Internet usage is education, professional training, and career related. I am willing to pay CAD75.00 per month for true unlimited data (wireless) and based on past usage the typical bandwidth "consumption" tends to be less than 50 GB a month. Today the 50 GB costs CAD110.00.plus taxes and fees. By the way, CAD75.00 is the current 10 GB data usage price plus taxes and fees.

So where exactly do you live that you think Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver are "sparsely populated"? :-)

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Data caps make high-speed useless

[RogueWarrior65]

For many years, I had a paltry 12 megabit DSL service. One day it went out and the company said it would take FIVE days before a tech could come out to look at it. I told them that that was unacceptable and I switched over to cable modem on the grounds that a) I would be getting 100 megabit and b) it would be slightly cheaper. What I didn't realize is that I was only given 300 gig per month of data which I burned through in about 2-3 weeks. I quickly figured out that this is how they are screwing over t

Needs to be a utility in the US

[DogDude]

Home and business Internet service needs to be related as a utility in the US. Obama has been trying, but the typical Republican douchbaggery have fought him every inch of the way so that Time Warner/Comcast can continue to make money hand over fist.

I work for a Canadian ISP - watch out in 2017

[maxrate]

Hi - I work for a Canadian ISP (much like Teksavvy). Something to watch out for in a big way with any 3rd party Canadian ISP this year: Fiber to the Premises. Keep reading..... Looks like CRTC and the big boys are going down a path where all 3rd party ISP's need to run (or connect) to each serving area independently and individually. What does this mean? Well, for the smaller 3rd party ISPs (most of them) it's not financially sustainable (impossible) for us to cover all the metro regions -optically- to the customer. Today we have aggregated circuits that go back to the big guys (like Bell/Rogers) that covers entire provinces with a single optical connection (the NNI - network to network interface), now we will need hundreds of (very expensive) NNI's to be able to cover all of the subscribers. They call this "disaggregated". CRTC is going down the disaggregated path to permit optical interconnect. The technology exists where all of this can be 'clean' and 'aggregated' just like before. If disaggregated access for ISPs is mandated, you're going to see far fewer options to connect from 3rd party ISPs for FTTP. This is a big deal. Again, watch out for this and support 'aggregated' for the small ISPs. This disaggregated approach stemmed from something called CBB - now the big boys are using the disaggregated approach to slow all the little guys from gaining access. More fun. What ever your thoughts are on monopolies vs 3rd party 'leeches' of the network, remember the tax dollars built up the infrastructure and the companies that can afford to lay the infrastructure down. The smaller companies pretty much have no hope of doing this in established areas sadly - it's not all money - some of this is politics keeping us out.

Also a basic service ...

[micahraleigh]

Also a basic services is asking electors to vote against the voters in their district because someone on our team clicked on an email from Russia (that was also sent to the other side, which knew enough not to click on it)