Here at least the situation isn't too bad, because we have competitive resellers at the ISP level[1].
The ISPs compete on service, bandwidth, data limits and inclusions. For example, many (most?) ISPs arrange peering with video providers like Tivo so video streamed on their services don't count towards the data cap.
[1] There are laws to ensure that any ISP can install their equipment in the exchanges, or get access to the dominate telco's equipment at close-to-cost. Most of the time, these laws work, if slower than ideal.
Even thought this may now be legal to do, Canadians may find that some ISPs still offer unlimited plans just to get ahead.
The norm in New Zealand is to pay for say, 20GB per month, and if you exceed that then you drop down to dial-up speed (or pay for more).
With all due respect to the Canadians here, it's not really that bad at all. Life goes on, and it actually seems to be a pretty good life too.
You do realize you are being horribly ripped off?
It's true that life goes on, even for slaves.
http://internet.bell.ca/index.cfm?method=content.view&co...
oh and here's an article talking about people being on 1 2 or 3 year contracts for bell internet. How could they be on contracts if no one has them?
while true; do
wget http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/publications/reports/policymonitoring/2010/cmr2010.pdf;
rm cmr2010.pdf;
done
Japan ($9/month unlimited Internet access)
People who use 300 GB of data per month cost the ISP more than people who use a few GB a month. That`s just a fact of life.
Should they have flexibility to charge more - Yes.
Furthermore, since so many mediums and industries are seeing their traditional cash flow streams go away due to the easy availability of free alternatives on the Internet, it makes sense that if you can't beat em, join em, and then just charge for the pipe to it all. So-called "pirates" can avoid paying for the official e-versions of digitizable media (songs, movies, images, encyclopedic info, sound effects, games, books, news, etc.) but it's much harder for them to avoid paying for the physical connection.
In retrospect though based on the amount of members or customers of both these companies would there usage growth take that much of a hit and would those two companies still be able to operate if they were forced to change there business models and chage people just to access there content.
In the case of Facebook how many members would thy have if people were required to pay say $9.99 a month to access Facebook.
In the case of the Internet as a whole clearly it costs money for companies like Verizon to expand and lay new lines to meet the demands of usage.Why then would it not be right to charge the data hogs for overuse of bandwith?
Society has become addicted to free and believe that content in itself should have no cost associated with it.However people don't realize the manpower,creativity and cost associated just to have that content produced. It makes sense now as to why Rupert Murdoch is against the freemium models for news via the web.
I mean just think about it on a small scale just for me to write this comment.I'm paying for Internet service,heating bill,electric and other costs also.So why shoudnt I be able to pas that cost to the end user?
There is an ongoing confusion about what is the free market and what is corporatism/fascism. The free market provides for free competition between individuals where all transactions are voluntary and no force is used to interfere with any interactions between parties. In a corporatist/fascist environment the government uses force to interfere in nearly all aspects of the market. In fascism, corporations end up in bed with the government and the corps use that power to get what they want while the government sells the idea by using propaganda to fool people into thinking that "it's all for your own good".
When the government is in charge of setting rates for internet access this is the farthest thing in the world from a free market. What it is, is soviet style socialist central planning.
But there seems to be a strong desire to blame the free market for all woes, despite the obvious government interference in all aspects of these interactions.
What is free about having the government set the policies for internet charges?
In a free market the government wouldn't be involved at all, and the rates would be determined via competition.
Take a look at markets that are relatively more free, such as the cell phone market and the market for computer chips. Quality and features improve while prices go down over time.
When I admire my HTC Android phone I marvel at the quality and features and the amazing technology. This is the result of healthy competition.
Take a look at markets where the government is involved such as health care. Quality and choice are reduced while prices go through the roof. (and no, that's not going to change with "obamacare")
Please don't confuse markets that are highly regulated and controlled by the government with free markets. They are polar opposites.
This is also not free-market capitalism. I'm not sure what you would call it.
When there's no actual competition and little threat of new competitors entering the market, their incentive to innovate or become more efficient is diminished. Consumers end up paying too much for mediocre goods/services.
I'm not looking for a flamegasm here, so this is my final reply to this thread. Peace.
> If it were not for the crtc, bell would never ever have shared their infrastructure with smaller companies and the free market would have delivered us a monopoly for sure.
How do you know this?
Not in Canada - same two monopoly suppliers. Means you get the iPhone 18months after the US, kindle 2 years later, still can't get skypein etc.
I currently have no caps with TekSavvy and pay $39 a month. Starting from March 1st, I will pay $31.95/mo with a 25 GB cap. Any gigabyte over the limit will cost about 2 bucks.
Now, you can buy a block at discounted prices. According to TekSavvy, based on my internet usage, I will need to buy at least a 275 GB extra block. Believe it or not, I don't torrent. I simply like to watch NetFlix, HD movies from iTunes, lots of educational videos online, and backup data in the cloud.
That 275 GB block costs $55/mo. So I suddenly go from paying $39 for unlimited data to paying $86.95 per month, and having to be careful about what I download and what not.
Oh, and the first thing I need to do is stop backing up my data, videos, and photos in the cloud. That's pretty much out of the question with the risk of paying $2 per extra GB. I'm buying an additional external hard drive instead.
How is that for innovation?
But imagine this: on mobile networks, instead of voice minutes, text messages, data caps, fees for tethering, and every other scheme the Telcos are concocting right now (with regard to charging for individual services), we instead have a single measure of our usage — data — and our bill starts at something reasonable like $5 or $10 a month.
The problem with "unlimited" in my view is that it conditions us to think that said resource really is unlimited, versus, say, electricity where we are incentivized to be aware of our usage. Now, if they're going to charge $2 per GB above some arbitrary cap — that's clearly absurd. But to start the bill very low (for the basic connection), and then charge, say, 10¢ or 15¢ per GB? Sign me up.
Now, if the line from the CO (where the DSL terminates) to the internet was a significant bit of the cost, I'd agree with you. But my understanding is that the line from the CO to the 'net is a very small cost compared to the cost of all those copper pairs.
You also have a point when it comes to shared-loop technologies like cable. Metering is probably the most fair way to decide who gets what percentage of the limited fixed loop. (and probably the best way to get the telco to add more capacity when a loop becomes overloaded)
I'm just saying, the last-mile has many situations where running the connection, regardless of how much you use that connection, dominates the cost. And in those cases, "unlimited" (up to your port speed) billing makes a whole lot of sense.
Metered is out, flat-rate is the future. The only hold-outs will be the mobile carriers and even there I already see flat-rate offerings.
$5 or $10 / month would not work due to fixed costs and write-off on equipment higher than that. But once the equipment is paid for you might as well use it to its full ability without being penalized further.
The piece of pie in Canadian market didn't shrink, it evolved slightly out of bounds of Bell and Rogers oligopoly, and UBB attempts to push you back into that fold.
What's even worse, there can't be any competition as firms are not allowed to lay competing cable infrastructure.
You honestly think the rate will be within an order of magnitude of your guess? Pardon me while I get a hernia from laughter.
This is the problem that telcos have been struggling with in terms of mobile data for years - they don't want to give up their fat margins on voice, but the actual bytes used by voice calls is trivial.
What you want is spot prices dependent on congestion, but that creates a different problem, opacity in pricing, where people will be fearful to use owing to uncertainty in how much it will cost.
I think the fairest mechanism is probably some kind of QoS by inverse usage: where congestion occurs, drop packets belonging to users who transfer the most. Unfortunately, I'd expect that to be computationally infeasible, as it would require fairly complex dynamic and stateful logic in routers to process the accounting and make decisions on a packet by packed basis fast enough.
I'd like to pay for internet like I pay for electricity. We pay by the kW*h and that's it. I think it'd be nice to pay a higher rate for electricity / internet during the day if it meant that we'd pay a lower rate during the night.
I keep hearing about how europeans get the mobile phone services waaaay cheaper than we do here. Some guy in a TED Talk said that cell phones were common in poor regions of Africa. There's no way that these poor people are paying what I pay for texting on a mobile phone. :P
Nice use of passive voice.
In addition to purchasing less of online services, many people that I know refuse to buy anything from Bell and Rogers. No cable, no landline phone, no satellite tv. In fact, with the new mobile companies popping up in the last 12 months, you can save quite a bundle.
There is an angst growing amongst customers that spreads like wildfire. In past few years, I converted almost every one of my friends and relatives to Teksavvy internet. At that moment in time, it made sense. It no longer does and I wish that this turns up the heat enough to make it an election issue. It is, pardon my french, a fucking racket.
I don't envy the US at all, I envy Sweden, Japan, South Korea. No offence but I'd sooner move to many places before the USA.
Don't get me wrong, the CRTC is worse than useless actively harming the tech landscape. We have zero competition with Internet and phone pricing at all, the big guys basically just fix prices because it's more profitable for them to collude than compete. We have a lot of major problems.
If you want decent internet connectivity, move to Europe or Japan or something. They're rolling out 100mbps broadband in the UK.
I'm with Teksavvy as well and currently pay $31.95 + tax for a 200GB cap. I'm using less than half of that, or about ~80GB/month. Under the new rules I will have to pay $40.45 + tax for 105GB cap. In the rare (for me) case that might exceed this cap I'll pay $2/GB for additional traffic.
If I cancelled Netflix I'd probably come in just under the 25GB cap. Bell has effectively doubled the price of Netflix for me.
What do most people torrent? Movies and TV. And yet there you are doing lots of HD video while claiming you're not a heavy user ("I don't torrent", "I simply...").
Out of curiosity, what level of bandwidth usage do you think quantifies a heavy user?
My normal usage, downloading updates for my PCs (Arch Linux, so heavy ones come often), browsing, watching a handful of videos, doing git pulls, lots of text-heavy sites like HN and docs, etc. plus my wife's normal usage, which is YouTube and Facebook, usually ends up somewhere around 700MB-1GB of usage per day. When I torrented from home, the average consumption was maybe 2GB-4GB per day, so Netflix is even more taxing than that for me.
As the web becomes increasingly media intensive, the "normal user" threshold of <100 MB per day is going to shoot up to something around <10-15 GB per day, especially once everyone in the house gets TV and movies over web-based services instead of cable/air/DVD.
The cable companies, which incidentally are usually the only good residential ISPs, are going to lose cable subscriptions to Netflix subscriptions and on-demand rentals to iTunes rentals, and consequently we'll see moves like this one seeking to penalize net-based media providers since they take customers away from their TV offerings.
What really sticks out to me here is that the various ISP's have much less to compete with. The only real motivation for me in Montreal to switch to one of the smaller ISPs was the unlimited bandwidth option.
My fiancé was between semesters at school this winter, and decided to finish watching Battlestar Galactica, among a couple dozen other movies to occupy her time through Netflix. My router's bandwidth logs show that she consumed about 35GB a day for 12 of her 15 days off. We hit somewhere under 500GB of data that month. Using TekSavvy's upcoming rates listed in this thread at $32.00 per month for 25GB with $2.00 per additional GB, we would have had a bill approaching $1,000.00. How the fuck is that justifiable?
Our current model takes in account that occasionally, users will blow through their caps with no regard for the sky, but most other months are way below the cap. My current plan, of which was negotiated over 4 years ago and has not changed since, still serves my needs perfectly. I could cut out Netflix and my VPS backups and use 4GB a month, but why should I move to a service plan that is lesser than my 4 year old contract? Did I mention my current ISP service plan was negotiated 4 years ago? ISPs have had 4 years, in my case, to upgrade their equipment to accommodate an increase in users, of which they have been pushing, because as a company, they like having an increase in subscribers. Realizing now that they are at the peak and want more money for the increased traffic is entirely out of line since they have had years of growth in their subscriber base and years of blind profit, but none of that was spent ensuring that they would have additional room to grow.
I would gladly pay a flat fee per GB of data, since theoretically it is more fair. I will not pay a flat fee that is approaching a 15 times increase profit for my ISP from what they paid for that GB. They gave me and every single other subscriber 250GB to use per month, and for the past 4 years, my habits have evolved to be aware and use 250GB of data per month. Cutting it back to 25GB and additional at $2/GB is entirely ridiculous. Moving backwards is not a solution.
EDIT: I just read in another comment that it's Bell Canada metering charges for bandwidth resellers. That's a bit more complicated. Hm.
Thus there won't be any competition on the bandwidth side, and in fact the line owner has an incentive to maximize charges, which is exactly what we're seeing.
But as I said in another comment, ISPs got a whole 90 days to deal with this, which runs out about today. That's a pathetic amount of time to tender for alternative suppliers, especially over the holiday season, in Canada. (I hear it gets cold there???)
Since the smaller ISPs should simply be getting bandwidth from Bell, this is totally ridiculous. Their ability to compete with Bell on price or levels of service is almost totally eliminated. When my friends and family in Ontario were explaining this to me I kept having to ask them to repeat themselves because it boggled my mind how ISPs using bell's infrastructure could be subject to those sorts of restrictions.
What may not be so obvious, even to Canadians, is that the members of the CRTC used to work for Bell, Rogers, Telus etc. Much like employees of the Treasury Department in the US, these people go from private sector to public sector and back continuously. A running joke at Rogers used to be that whenever they wanted some sort of legislation changed, the VPs would draw straws to see who had to quit and join the CRTC.
No, not a conspiracy theory. If you're a publicly traded company capable of creating more wealth for your shareholders by creating an agreeable political environment it would be practically unethical to your shareholders not to take advantage of it... Regardless of the long term impact to your customers. After all, it's pretty hard to convince your board that you shouldn't do something that may negatively impact your customer base in 20 years, and should instead settle for less profit today.
So pretty much the same game as the states.
Typically, in rural areas the way to get broadband goes something like this:
A bunch of people get a deal with a small ISP to finally provide them broadband because Bell says they won't be doing it. Then two weeks after all the gear gets installed and the small ISP starts signing up customers Bell will swoop in with an offer to undercut them and suddenly all the things that made it 'impossible' to get broadband before are mere chalk lines instead of the hurdles they were made out to be before.
In Canada it is illegal (or was, this is 4 years ago, it may have changed) to have a satellite receiver that receives FTA programming and so on.
The biggest problem with these caps is that they are, plain and simply, anticompetitive. Probably illegally so.
Let’s take Bell’s internet service as an example. Bell recently rolled out their “Fibe” offerings, both for internet and IPTV.
Their most accommodating plan, Fibe 25, has a ludicrously low cap of 75GB. It would be pretty easy to exceed that with HD content from iTunes, Netflix, YouTube, etc.
Fibe TV, however, delivers TV over the same network. Bell even treats the IPTV traffic preferentially, as you can in this gushing review: http://www.benlucier.ca/work/tech/bell-entertainment-service...
There’s only one minor difference: Fibe TV is not subject to the same usage caps. You can stream as many movies as you like over Fibe TV, watch as much TV as you like, and never get charged extra for the bandwidth.
Well now, that’s funny. Didn’t Bell’s regulatory spokesperson say something to the contrary just the other day? Oh yeah!
“A bit is a bit is a bit. If you’re a heavy user, regardless of what’s causing the heavy use, you will pay more. That’s the concept,” said Mirko Bibic, Bell Canada’s senior vice-president for regulatory affairs.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/tech-news/net...
Yes, Mr. Bibic, it appears that all bits are equal – but some bits are more equal than others.
This is a textbook case of anticompetitive behaviour, one of a long litany of recent sleazy undertakings by major Canadian telecoms (e.g. Rogers’ suspiciously well-timed lowering of caps on their most popular plans when Netflix entered the Canadian market). It is also a textbook method for successfully stifling innovation, a problem Canadians are all-too-familiar with.
The Internet is now an essential service. While smart countries like South Korea, Australia, and Japan are making (or have made) large public investments in fast, ubiquitous, and unlimited Internet for all citizens, Canada continues to lurch backwards courtesy of myopic regulators, oligopolistic telecoms and a government that is unwilling to intervene for the good of all Canadians.
I'm thinking of a decentralized "movement" of geeks organizing what's required to get neighborhoods and villages online: an omnidirectional antenna high enough that Line of Sight can be provided to most residents, a high bandwidth fiber optics connection at the center, and subscriber antennas at the residences.
I've tried to find more information on Motorola Canopy technology in the past days -- look at this example deployment in Nova Scotia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_for_Rural_Nova_Scotia...
From what I'm gathering, Canopy can be deployed over unlicensed frequencies (2.4 and 5 Ghz), allows for hundreds of subscribers connecting to a single Access Point, can provide up bandwidth in the 5-10 Mbps range, etc.
Are there particular advantages to Canopy over 802.11x? Could it become viable, with infrastructure costs spread over some years, to run a small local WISP? I'm thinking of a "Real Internet" designation/"certification" that could be given out to any ISP that follows a basic code of conduct: offers at least one unlimited transfer connection plan and does not throttle traffic.
Is starting an ISP, regardless of the physical layer, overly regulated by CRTC? The Wikipedia page says "The CRTC does not regulate rates, quality of service issues, or business practices for Internet service providers" -- is that in effect true?
How can anyone manage with 25 GB per month? Are Netflix or the NFB going to do something about this? If not, can "we"?
I'm not opposed to usage based billing - users who use more should pay more, but the rate should be commensurate to actual costs. Regulation is meant to protect the public from potentially unfavorable actions by authorized natural monopolies. Perhaps the ISPs should be selling bandwidth on a market, like with electricity.
Until now I thought it was crazy that Austrlia was getting a censored internet and wondered how such a thing could happen in a pretty modern democracy. But now I feel like something worse has happened here... While new internet applications that use more and more data are coming out all the time and the cost of moving a byte on the net is going down rapidly, caps are getting smaller and smaller here just so the big telecoms can protect their on-demand TV businesses and keep internet service minimal without having to worry about competition.
This is so anti-competitive that it sickens me.
High-Speed Internet Data Usage: 17% 43GB of 250GB
They sure hide that fact when you signup, not that I have any options, as Comcast is the only provider where I live. This is a horrible direction we are heading. And, if you go over the limit, they call and warn you. If you go over again, they cancel your account.
I've been considering not getting Internet at my new place when I move (which is coincidentally the end of the month, when this regulation takes effect) for productivity reasons, and this cements the decision. I've been pretty happy as a Teksavvy customer otherwise.
Not sure if the Rogers infrastructure was publicly funded (I suspect it was in part).
Even though it appears sinister, the mobile operators do this to attract young customers who use these sites the most on the move. Personally, i don't agree with this setup.
As far as I can tell, the issue is that the big ISPs (tells, Rogers, bell) all have caps/overage, but the smaller ISPs that piggyback on their network can offer unlimited data transfer. This new ruling seems to 'even the playing field'.
I want the Internet to be free and unlimited as the next guy, but I have yet to understand what the big deal is here.
They have their own DSL centers and hence aren't going to be affected by this new proposition. I think we might see more companies starting their own DSL centers.
If you don't care to skim the whole thing, the bottom line is that Bell is now able to force usage-based billing onto third-party ISPs, but must offer them a discount of 15% under the retail price at which Bell sells those services directly to customers.
Some other interesting tidbits found in there:
Unsurprisingly, Bell was against the idea of any discount, saying that even without a discount it would still be possible for independent ISPs to differentiate their services on price and "other methods". It's not clear how they'd actually do this, however. Oh, and PS there's way to determine an acceptable discount rate even if those assertions weren't true, so we shouldn't have one.
There's a nice note in there that "[the] Commission also received a large number of comments, mostly from individuals, that almost unanimously opposed the Bell companies' applications [to force usage-based billing]" - thanks for pointing that out, CRTC.
Bell is only required to provide third-party access to their legacy ATM networks, and not their new fiber-optic networks. This makes sense - as I've never seen the service advertised - but I hadn't seen that in writing anywhere.
If Bell ever does some form of promotion where they let people sign up on unlimited plans, they have to let third-party ISPs do this as well - although the mechanics are unstated ("[The] Commission finds that...to the extent that each company chooses not to charge UBB rates to any existing or new retail customer, it is required to treat GAS ISPs on an equivalent basis.").
Bell was about ambitious as you can get in the list of things they requested from the CRTC in these decisions. I'm not saying that I like this decision (as of March 1st I'll be paying TekSavvy more for less), but the CRTC did OK for the little guy when you see what else Bell wanted.
No one - not Bell, not the CRTC - says this is a technical issue. It's not that Bell can't handle all the bandwidth people use (which require a technical ITMP, in CRTC-ese), but that they see this as a way to increase profits by charging people who use more bandwidth more money (hence it's an economic ITMP).
Australia has had data caps since broadband first came out; for the vast majority of of users a basic plan provides all the data they need, techy users with heavy usage patterns get higher plans, and people with the compulsion to torrent every TV in existence get plans with unmetered periods (a few ISPs don't meter traffic during the quiet periods at night)
The usual behavior once you're over your data cap is to drop the internet speed down to ~64kbs for the rest of the month so even if you kill your data cap you can still access email and other low bandwidth services, you're not off completely.
In australia you get ripped so badly for broadband it is not funny.
This affects not only consumers, but also the whole tech ecosystem.. For example business models that rely on unmetered internet (think netflix, or offsite backup).
It also affects people like me who have to host services in Canada (for regulatory and/or data security reasons). If I get nailed on wholesale bandwidth, I have to pass that cost onto my customers.
This ruling appeared out of the blue.. Without much time to prepare contigencies.
http://news.dmusic.com/article/4580
As I recall, this backfired since the levy eventually meant that they couldn't sue people for pirating content - they had already paid for it via the levy. Like double jeopardy.
Anyway, it proved that levies like this don't actually change behaviour much. Canadians drove to the US to buy their MP3 players. Telcos benefitted by online media consumption and competed heavily for broadband subscribers. Digital lifestyles in Canada flourished.
Ironically, it's now the telcos that are complaining for the same reason. The key difference now is that big telcos can use this decision to squeeze their competitors (who they also supply.) Though I can see ways that this will backfire too.
The good thing about the Canadian government is that they have a history of continually watching, listening, adjusting and even backtracking if they feel they made the wrong move. I hope this keeps the telcos from abusing their new rights, and from stifling digital innovation in Canada, which hurts them too in the long run.
Can anyone tell me if this is specific to bell? If so, how would this affect us out west where our wholesale provider might be telus, shaw or allstream?
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/91228/crtc-ruling-could-mean-da... (2010 Nov 3)
Sounds like the regulator really dropped the ball on this one, giving small ISP's only 90 days to investigate possible alternatives, plan for them, and implement. 90 days?! That's insanely short. 9-12 months would have been reasonable. 90days? I'm stunned.
A systematic breakdown on how this affects all ISPs and phone providers across all of Canada would really clarify the issue!
New services such as Netflix and who knows what else is coming down the line (3D Netflix movies?) are going to use up your overpriced bandwidth faster than your ISP can evolve, they'll just charge more for the same service.
This will be like when video became popular when everyone was still on 56kbps modems, the web developed faster than the hardware meant to use it and it will stall development. Why develop when there isn't anyone using it or able to use it?
In the end people will do what they have to when they only have a limited amount of disposable income, ISPs will see people spend $50 for 10Mbps service and when the ISPs increase the monthly bill by a $1 here and a $1 there (to serve us better) consumers will get the 5Mbps service for $50.
I'd be all in favor of this kind of pricing if it was anything resembling an open market, like how the cell phone industry had/has major downward price pressure, but there are far fewer choices when it comes to wires into your house, so the local monopoly effects are very strong.
Yet they've completely paved the way for competition to be swallowed into oblivion. They're standing aside saying "it wasn't us - it's not our fault" and yet snickering behind our backs while they rake in the dough.
Disgraceful.
In Canada, the telecoms own most of the major media assets (Shaw, rogers, bell).
Owning critical communications infrastructure is not Bell Canada's god given right.
I want endless bandwidth as well, but this is absolutely the decline of this site, with "what I want" and "the way I present the world to support my bias" crowding out "what is real" and "actual fact".
Isn't that sort of tactic best left on reddit?
I'm Canadian but I have been out of the country for a longish time now. The whole debate made no sense to me.
Yeah it sucks to be charged per byte, but surely Bell has the right to charge however they like. In the linked article, The Tyee's conspiracy theory that they wanted to force people back to television seemed inane.
But if it's about imposing a user-based rate structure on Bell's competitors that use them as a bandwidth provider, that makes perfect sense.
Bell infrastructure (phone lines) is basically a regulated monopoly the same way that a water utility is. They certainly shouldn't have the right to charge whatever they like and crush competition as they please, making things worse for everybody except themselves.
There was this quote in the Globe & Mail today (national paper):
"download caps in Canada have become so low that they are beginning to look less like traffic management measures and more like a defensive manoeuvre, by which companies such as Bell, Rogers and Shaw try to protect profits at their TV distribution and broadcasting units."
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/tech-news/int...
Rogers does: cable tv, ip phone over cable (ala Comcast in the US), cable internet (which IIRC it own the only coax last-mile lines in the areas where it is a monopoly -- I think that west Canada has a different cable monopoly), the only gsm carrier in Canada+, a chain of video rental stores that competes with Blockbuster Canada.
Bell does: phone, DSL++, and the only CDMA cell carrier in Canada+++.
+ At the time I was living in Canada, there were many smaller GSM players, but they had all been bought out by Rogers, so you largely just had different branded GSM services from the same provider. More recently there have been at least two new GSM players (Wind and Mobilicity) though I believe that their coverage area is mainly just the Greater Toronto Area. [Of note is that Bell and Rogers use the same 3G bands as AT&T does in the US and Wind/Mobilicity use the same 3G bands as T-Mobile does in the US.]
++ The last-mile DSL lines were being sold to 3rd-parties ISPs as well as Bell itself being an ISP on those lines. See me ascii-art diagram in the other thread.
+++ Similar to Rogers, IIRC there were a couple of smaller players that were bought out by Bell so that all of the CDMA carriers were under the Bell 'umbrella.'
Not any more, as far as I know. But because there are plenty of restrictions on infrastructure installations and because Bell simply owns all the infrastructure that was invested in in the past Bell effectively has a finger in every pie and as a provider it is almost impossible to get around them.
Your complaint is that some rural area has poor service. Is that not the case around the globe?
I've had high-speed cable service since long before it was available in most urban centers in the US (much less the rest of the world), including when I lived in a mid-sized town. Here in a suburb of Toronto I've had top-notch, leading-the-bandwidth (15Mbps around the clock) high speed for a low cost for almost a decade.
I think our situation is quite good, actually. Broadband penetration is very high, average caps are competitive with the world, and bandwidth numbers lean very high on the curve.
There is so much misinformation about this whole situation (not helped by people making "incremental cost" calculations that assume that the infrastructure for infinite bandwidth is already in place): The best is the other post where someone talks about it being Soviet-style central control. The humorous aspect is that CRTC is essentially unwinding that central control, put in place back when Bell was the big, untouchable monopoly. It was then that many of the "unlimited cap" companies were basically given leave to leach off of Bell in the name of competition.
Bell is far from alone in providing bulk bandwidth in Canada. If the economics are so straightforward, clearly Teksavvy and the like will just run a Cogent or the like to their distribution. If they don't, ask yourself why not.
Ultimately this is a lot of people up in arms because they want their free lunch.
> Your complaint is that some rural area has poor service. Is that not the case around the globe?
No.
> I've had high-speed cable service since long before it was available in most urban centers in the US (much less the rest of the world),
Good for you :) I had four bonded 28.8 modems and four landlines giving me crappy bandwidth where a simple baseband modem would have done the job but Bell simply refused to remove the chokes from the lines.
> Here in a suburb of Toronto I've had top-notch, leading-the-bandwidth (15Mbps around the clock) high speed for a low cost for almost a decade.
Toronto is but one very small part of Canada and one of the most populous areas at that.
If you run a monopoly you should provide all your customers with equal access to the system, otherwise you should open up the market and get the hell out of the way.
> I think our situation is quite good, actually.
your situation is quite good.
> The best is the other post where someone talks about it being Soviet-style central control.
That was pretty poorly worded but the author makes a much better case further on. Also, state propped up monopolies were very much a feature of communist countries.
> The humorous aspect is that CRTC is essentially unwinding that central control, put in place back when Bell was the big, untouchable monopoly. It was then that many of the "unlimited cap" companies were basically given leave to leach off of Bell in the name of competition.
They'd gladly put their own infrastructure in to the ground, only they're not allowed to.
Just like you're not allowed to hop across the border, buy a satellite receiver that receives 'free over the air' programming and operate it legally within Canadas borders (because that would deprive the government sanctioned operators of their subscription fees that they can charge you for that same content).
> Here in a suburb of Toronto I've had top-notch,
> leading-the-bandwidth (15Mbps around the clock) high
> speed for a low cost for almost a decade.
When I was living in Toronto the quality of internet service (at least with Bell) depended very much on the area. In some areas the lines/infrastructure was really crappy and rather than fix it Bell would just blame the end-user (you need to reboot your computer, that's why the bandwidth is so slow) or acts of god (I know that you've been complaining about the bandwidth for months, but it was really caused by that large storm last night. It should be fine now.).
> Bell is far from alone in providing bulk bandwidth in Canada.
+------------------------------+
| THE INTERNET |
+------------------------------+
|| ||
|| || <-- Peering arrangements
|| ||
+--------+ +----+
|TekSavvy| |Bell| <-- ISPs
+--------+ +----+
\\ //
\\ //
\\ //
_ ______
Bell-owned | / || \
infrastructure | / || \ <-- last-mile infrastructure
|_ / || \
+--+ +--+ +--+
| | | | | | Residences/Customers
+--+ +--+ +--+
I have intimate knowledge of this issue and it really was just bad timing on Rogers' part. They had been planning on rolling this out well before Netflix's announcement, at least 8 months, but they just chose to pick the absolute worst time to make their announcement.
It may not have been the case in this instance, but it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility. I can tell you that reduced caps are, broadly, an attempt to make alternatives to Rogers' content services like Rogers on Demand less attractive.
The other bits that they are charging for are ones that go "outside" of their network.
Usage based charging will become the norm, just like with electricity, water, oil/natural gas, food. Some supermarkets carry loss leaders, why should Bell.ca not be allowed to too?
But back to the issue at hand: it should not be allowed because it's anticompetitive and flies in the face of the entire idea of net neutrality. Can Netflix get around the caps? iTunes? No. But because Bell is both in the business of content and in the business of infrastructure, they are in a unique position to abuse their power. And they are doing so.
Further to that is the example of third-parties being forced to pass on Bell's usage-based-billing. They make use of the last mile infrastructure, graciously provided to Bell courtesy of the Canadian taxpayer, but are responsible for providing their own DSLAMs and peering arrangements. Why should Bell be able to dictate terms to third-party ISPs? How does that promote competition?
A lot of public money went into building out the infrastructure that Bell apparently believes it owns. Internet infrastructure, especially the last mile, greatly lends itself to a monopoly or at most duopoly. This is bad for Canada in a mindboggling number of ways - the internet is an economic necessity, and our digital economy is just barely starting to turn into something with real legs. Just like we regulate electricity, water, oil/natural gas, and food, we should be regulating this.
1) Does Bell really pay money for their peering arrangements? Is Bell paying for all of the bandwidth between their network and the rest of the Internet? Or are their peering arrangements much like other backbone providers' peering arrangements where it's a handshake and no money changes hands? Is the 'cost' that Bell says that it pays for outside internet access really the cost of maintaining their links to other peers/networks (and not payments made directly to those peers/networks)? If so, then the difference between the outside internet and their internal networks should be minimal. The only real difference would be the most of the bandwidth is leaving the network vs staying inside of the network just due to most of the content that people want being on the wider internet (not because it's somehow 'cheaper' to use the internal network b/c they are paying for bandwidth that leaves the network).
2) As cal5k states, the third-party internet providers that are using Bell's last mile lines are also being forced to pay these usage-based charges, even though they are not using Bell's connections to the internet. These providers have their own peering arrangements to the internet and are just hooking into Bell's last mile infrastructure. So if the real reason for usage-based billing is because Bell needs to recover the costs that it pays for bandwidth that leaves it's network through it's own peering arrangements, then there should be no reason to force third-party providers to be on a usage-based billing model as well.
Really there's no competition to cable. Comcast is the only decent provider around here, it's much faster than DSL. Sucks.
Also, what's the distance from the ISP to you?
Very, very happily thanks. I used to "manage" quite happily on 1.5GB/month (Wireless in Australia).
Now I'm in the UK, I'm doing about 25 (thanks to BBC's streaming, which I could cut out a lot of I was PVRing more). It would only become a pain when I want to download something like a VM image.
It was simply a(n emotional?) reaction (has been said many times, etc.) to the reality of bandwidth being reduced in Canada over the past... 15 years.
I used to have the-nicest-DSL-in-high-school, provided by Bell, in the late 90's -- 74$/month for 2 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up, unlimited traffic.
Today, their "Fibe" offering (it sounds like "Fiber" as in FTTH! but it isn't! %^&^%$#!!) is 55$/month for 25 Mbps down, 7 Mbps up.
The speed is definitely better -- but the 100 GB transfer limit means that your effective average monthly speed is 38 kB/sec (100 Gb / seconds in 30 days...)
Why doesn't signing up for 5 Mbps mean that you get a full constant 5 Mbps, and that you can use up to the full 1.6 TB of transfer per month (5 Mbps * 30 days...)?
Isn't the reason because customers are sold oversubscribed connections?
The vast majority - more than 99% - of our customers will not be impacted by a 250 GB monthly data usage threshold. If you exceed more than 250 GB, you may receive a call from the Customer Security Assurance ("CSA") team to notify you of excessive use. At that time, we will tell you exactly how much data you used. When we call you, we try to help you identify the source of excessive use and ask you to moderate your usage, which the vast majority of our customers do voluntarily. If you exceed 250 GB again within six months of the first contact, your service will be subject to termination and you will not be eligible for either residential or commercial internet service for twelve (12) months. We know from experience that most customers curb their usage after our first call. If your account is terminated, after the twelve (12) month period expires, you may resume service by subscribing to a service plan appropriate to your needs.
I don't mind limits, unlimited is impossible, but when the limit is the same for everyone regardless of how the service is used and then tout it as unlimited... it's ridiculous.
Tell that to Virgin. Pay them enough money and they give you real unlimited (as do several other ISPs). BT sucks, but that's pretty widely-known now. The UK is certainly not in the same position as Canada, as we have several options that are genuinely unlimited.
Also, Bell/Rogers/Telus have the advantage of offering bundles if you use them for cable/satellite+cell phone+Internet, whereas a lot of smaller ISPs would not able to do such things. This screams anti-competition.
FYI, I don't mind paying per usage as long a the rates are reasonable. How about charging us $10-15 for connection fees, and then $0.25/GB of transfer?
Are they? I have the fastest plan from Telus and over the years they have upped the speed without upping the price, several times.
>Also, Bell/Rogers/Telus have the advantage of offering bundles if you use them for cable/satellite+cell phone+Internet, whereas a lot of smaller ISPs would not able to do such things. This screams anti-competition.
agreed, to a point. However all of the little guys I am aware of offer some kind of an Internet/phone bundle
There are several wireless Internet providers here in Alberta and I'm watching them with interest. They've built their own network run along natural gas lines or old railway tracks (where it's easy to obtain right of way rights) and are beholden to nobody (other than their backbone providers). If the big three go crazy with fees, I think these tiny wireless providers are poised to jump in and beat them down.
Not only have caps been introduced but the wholesale discount is alarmingly small, so small ISPs aren't free to compete on features or price. Small ISPs can't go and find another backbone because they're all owned by this group of companies.
Note that in Quebec the cap is higher (60GB/month instead of 25GB/month). In most of Canada Bell/Rogers/Shaw own the DSL and cable networks. In Quebec, Bell mostly own the DSL lines but Videotron (Quebecor) own the cable network, so it's almost like competition. Also Quebecor has unshakable ties to the provincial government.
The end result: everyone gets overcharged for internet access as these companies try to make up lost sales in phonelines and television by killing everyone on internet.
Heck, open it up, and McDonald's might get out of selling soft drinks and start up a telco instead.
Someone at Telus once mentioned (anecdotally) that Telus plain doesn't enforce caps, and that the cap is written down only in case they need it.
Ask for the moon - ask for really ridiculous things, but expect to only get half of those things. The CRTC, wanting to seem "reasonable" and "balanced", meets Bell halfway. Unfortunately, halfway towards Bell's ridiculous agenda is still absolutely terrible for consumers, a perspective that the CRTC has utterly failed to consider.
This is a classic problem, one that recently contributed to the Gulf oil spill as well (and resulted in the disbanding of the regulator, just as the CRTC should be disbanded or, at the very least, stripped of its ability to regulate the internet).
The CRTC is just a stooge pretending the play the part of opposition, while they are actually a collaborator.
I came to Canada from the UK and I reckon it's about 50% more expensive for DSL/cable data over here, but faster speeds are more common (in the cities at least). Usage caps are not unusual with the larger ISPs in the UK, nor is traffic shaping/blocking, but at least the carriers are obliged by law to resell to other ISPs at a reasonable rate.
Mobile phones are, IMO, in a completely different ballpark though. Canada is literally years behind Europe and the same companies that are monopolising the landline networks have been abusing their mobile monopoly for years. For the end user, the phones are old, the networks creaky, the contracts long and the cost astronomical.
A mobile contract costs 2-3 times what it would in the UK for less: Caller ID, voicemail etc. all come as standard in the UK, I don't know of any exceptions. Not only that, but a contract locks you in for 2-3 times as long and the phones still cost more.
Without a meter system in place the flat rate will penalize small bandwidth users and let high bandwidth users get the bargain.
I agree that if the pricing were completely up to the telecoms they would ravage our wallets until we are eating ramen noodles 7 days a week. However, given their position of power they will have to openly defend their claims to raising unit prices in court.
And when I said Bell has the right to charge whatever, I was making a distinction between their consumer packages and their wholesale rates, both of which are regulated but obviously the wholesale rate should be as close to the actual cost of bandwidth as possible.
There's arguably a lot of room for MVNOs only offering data. (In Australia DoDo offered such for the lowest price per GB).
von Finckelstein (Chairman) was the head of the Competition bureau and implemented NAFTA.
Katz (Vice-Chair, Telecommunications) was at Bell and Rogers until 2001.
Morin (Secretary-General) was a career bureaucrat.
Cugini (Ontario) was with Alliance Atlantis, a film and TV company.
Lamarre (Quebec) was with the CBC.
Duncan (Atlantic) comes from various small players in the Cable TV industry.
Molnar (MB and SK) comes from Customer Service and Regulatory Affairs at SaskTel.
Menzies (Alberta) ran the Calgary Herald, a large newspaper.
Denton was on the board of CIRA and was the solicitor of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers (the industry group of independent ISPs).
Patrone, Morin, and Poirier were journalists.
Simpson was an ad exec.
If you're counting obvious (perceived) biases there, you'd say Katz is representing Big Telco and Denton is representing independent ISPs. Molnar would count as a half-vote for Big Telco (as SaskTel is an ILEC), but it's a minor one. The rest, as I see it, have no obvious perceived biases in this case.
As for the high-ranking staff, that's a lot harder to figure our their backgrounds - although most of them should be civil service positions, which means they're relatively impartial.
If we check out our lobbying disclosures (always interesting when it comes to this), we see that in the past year there have been 18 registered conversations between lobbyists and the CRTC on the issue of Telecommunications - and of those, I'd guess that the two from Bell and one from SaskTel were probably focused on Internet-related issues, whereas the Quebecor/Globalive/Shaw/CMPA ones weren't.
Why are we allowing broadcasters, journalists, former telecom execs and bureaucrats to rule on a topic and culture they clearly don't understand?
Furthermore, where are the consumer advocates? Clearly the companies they're regulating are well represented. Where's the other side of the picture?
Besides, doesn't Adblock work client-side? You'd still download and pay for the ads, you just wouldn't see them.
I have 110/10M (cable-tv network) in Finland for $53. More widely available 24/1M DSL goes for $46. Usage caps are unheard of in cabled internet.
Cheap, non-capped mobile internet has recently exploded - caps will be introduced. Our biggest telco TeliaSonera has only capped versions since the launch of iPhone (they were were forced and willing to pay extra). Other companies haven't introduced restrictions, but since Android-based smartphones became popular in 2010 and currently log the most data usage per unit, this will soon change.
Mobile internet is also very popular with plain computers by using 3G usb-dongles, which telcos give free of charge when you sign up for 12/24 months. Typical offer is uncapped 384k for $6.7 or 1M for $12 (actual rates vary often due to congestion - p2p users are a major pain in the butt with 3G networks). These are available nationwide with no geological price differentiation.
In Sweden broadband is quite much cheaper. The government has been heavily involved in building fiber with subsidies, tax breaks and legal requirements to municipal providers. (IT Bill 2000) http://www.broad-band.gr/content/events/docs/Swedish_broadba...
But it's a good way of solving some of the challenges. But more and more people will start hitting that throttling soon, as people start using LoveFilm streaming, etc.
2) I think there is some misunderstanding. The way I read all these articles, the problem is the link from the exchange to the provider PoP, and not in the local loop.
Bell got the nod from the regulator 3 months ago to do capacity based charging on links from the exchange to the ISP PoP. If it follows the same model as elsewhere in the world, this is usually on a wholesale, per customer basis. If the ISP in question used a 3rd party supplier then they bypass this cost. Unfortunately it appears that Bell can say no to the ISP leasing fiber capacity from exchange to PoP, which IS abusing their monopoly position.
The point is they are establishing a precedent. Even if their network is not overloaded at the moment (I suspect it's getting there) it will be soon. If a web company has to pay per GB of transit from Amazon EC2, but not within the AWS network, why should charging at a communications provider be different?
Bell cannot enter the TV market (one it's already in, albeit Satellite TV), because Netflix can't enter the ISP market?
I'll think you'll find that Netflix can enter that market if they so desire.
Bell are abusing a monopoly position? No, they are exploiting efficiencies of scale. Surely Rogers and Shaw, who provide cable TV and Internet are stiff competition in this area?!?
The pivotal argument in terms of anti-competition, to my view, is: Could someone else build out the infrastructure to allow them to compete? Yes, they could install a CDN close to the DSLAMs, and create their own backhaul. Are Bell making the cost of doing this prohibitively expensive? I don't know the answer to that.
EDIT: OK, it appears they are, by not allowing 3rd parties to their fibre backhaul. That really stinks.
Bell being allowed to set it's own pricing on the backhaul - exchange to ISP PoP? It's reasonable, the way the regulator let it be implemented? Despicable.
I'm going to argue yes to the first point and no to the second. The internet is absolutely necessary to be competitive. As prices continue to ratchet upwards, even as the number of legitimate uses for large amounts of bandwidth rise, it is fast becoming increasingly more unaffordable.
With those two criteria met, I would say it's time to regulate access to the internet. In particular, I would like to see the last mile and backhaul infrastructure owned independently of any content business and available to any reseller at the same wholesale rates. Content and infrastructure MUST be separated if we are to effectively create fair pricing conditions and net neutrality.
Or at least strongly regulated. The more I read about the situation there, the more it sucks.
Especially because I remember 10 years ago I was boggling at guys in Canada with 10mbit cable connections (getting 4mbps), whilst 512/128 (getting 200mbps down) ADSL or cable was just becoming a reality here.
- Shaw is the cable monopoly in the west. Shaw used to have a presence in Ontario but they did a big asset swap about 10 years ago.
- A few areas have different cable monopolies but they're vastly smaller than Rogers/Shaw. Cogeco and Videotron, I think.
- Beyond Rogers (who bought Microcell a.k.a. Fido) and the smaller players, Bell and Telus actually teamed up and built their own GSM network. I think it went live shortly before the 2010 olympics.
- As far as I know Bell and Telus both operate their own CDMA networks across Canada. In Ontario, at least, you've been able to get CDMA service from both for a long long time.
- I heard about the GSM network, but IIRC there is some sort of transition period going on right now. Also, I've heard varying reports about it. I wasn't sure if they actually had a GSM network or if people were talking about them not using CDMA for 3G internet.
Re: the GSM network, I thought it was kind of ridiculous at first for the two carriers to build an entirely new 3G network when their CDMA works just fine. The speculation I heard was (1) they wanted to sell the iPhone (2) roaming revenue for the 2010 Olympics. Neither seemed like enough reason for such huge expense though. I can't find much solid information but I'm willing to bet you're right and their GSM network is available in a few places nationwide.
As to Bell being a monopoly, that's a bit laughable of a concept now. I haven't used any Bell services for personal use in well over a decade, despite being in the center of Bell territory.
As to Canada's situation, it regularly ranks in the top tier of broadband penetration and broadband speeds. It sounds like you're the one using your anecdote inappropriately, because actual metrics refute you.
They'd gladly put their own infrastructure in to the ground, only they're not allowed to.
You're conflating issues. Because of the in-the-ground angle, companies are allowed to terminate twisted-pairs at the switching station, providing their own voice or data services. We recently hooked up a business backup high-speed ADSL line, the line provided by Bell, with the data provided by Cogent. Our primary data service, by the way, is provided by the electric company who have a distribution network of fiber.
What is changing is if Bogent terminated that line, but instead of providing their own infrastructure they simply leached off of Bell's. That was put in during the "Soviet style" control.
Again, this is all a bunch of people inventing a reality where they can have their free lunch. It is a tiny percentage of people making a loud noise, trying to burn it all down to get their way. I'll happily endure the down-arrows while a rallying mob tries to construct some ridiculous perception of reality.
> Your complaint seemed to be entirely based upon the difficulties in getting broadband in a sparsely populated area.
No, it is mostly centered around Bell playing dirty. Getting broadband in a sparsely populated area is just an example of how they use their resources. Using the legal system to put the squeeze on other ISPs is another.
> And then some big telco coming in to try to undermine it.
If the big telco is the only game in town then that changes matters considerably.
> We've seen the same story again and again, over the globe. There is nothing unique to Canada in that.
I live in a rural European area right now, where I live I can choose from > 10 broadband providers with packages up to 20 Mbit/sec.
> As to Bell being a monopoly, that's a bit laughable of a concept now.
Bell still has an effective monopoly on infrastructure and that is what this article is about, charges that Bell levies on ISPs that are more or less forced to do business with Bell, we're not talking about a consumer monopoly, even though they still profit plenty from their former monopoly in that field.
> As to Canada's situation, it regularly ranks in the top tier of broadband penetration and broadband speeds.
The situation here is somewhat skewed because a large amount of the Canadian population lives in a very small total area of the country.
> It sounds like you're the one using your anecdote inappropriately, because actual metrics refute you.
No, it just underscores the issue. For the record, I've also lived in Toronto (King Street) and it is the contrast between the two that strikes me as placing the rural areas at a deliberate disadvantage. If anything Bell should do everything in its power to level the playing field given the monetary advantages they've been allowed to have.
> You're conflating issues. Because of the in-the-ground angle, companies are allowed to terminate twisted-pairs at the switching station, providing their own voice or data services. We recently hooked up a backup high-speed ADSL line, the line provided by Bell, with the data provided by Cogent. There is nothing changing in that.
Exactly. So how much choice did cogent have in using Bell infrastructure in order to reach you?
> What is changing is if Bogent terminated that line, but instead of providing their own infrastructure they simply leached off of Bell's. That was put in during the "Soviet style" control.
They did not 'leach of Bells', they have very little choice. Bell owns the roads, if you want your cars on them you'll have to pay toll.
> Again, this is all a bunch of people inventing a reality where they can have their free lunch.
I really disagree with you there, if they were free to lay their own fiber then that would be one thing but as long as they have no way around Bell they should not be squeezed like this.
The case here is that these small ISPs are not only terminating the loop, they're also using Bell's pipes beyond the termination, with contracts that were enforced when Bell really was a bonafide monopoly. There are actually a lot of competitive options when you're looking for bulk bandwidth, will Bell being a small, small player.
The only thing keeping me from doing that is that I don't think people would make the connection and understand the reference.
I don't know how Jews feel when they hear someone say that they've been "jewed" by their ISP or some other company ripping them off. Probably something like that.
http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/High-Spee...
($2.00/GB for each GB used above plan’s limit)
AFAIK, Telus isn't doing yet, but I've heard that this is a technical limitation rather than lack of desire to do so.
That's a somewhat naive view of things. It only works if all the upstream equipment has infinite capacity. If you (and others like you) use 275GB instead of 10GB then it absolutely does cause more equipment to have to be installed upstream, which I don't think is an insignificant cost.
I'm like the GP - I wish every connection was metered, the problem is not metering, but the rate which invariably seems to be way above what is reasonable. Metering seems to always just be a cynical strategy to exploit naive users who don't know how much bandwidth they consume (bill shock, etc) rather than a rational economic way of sharing a limited resource.
After the connection hits the DSLAM it goes onto fiber, which starts at 1 Gbps capacity and goes up to either 40Gbps or 100Gbps per port. Only in the smallest markets would they use a T3/DS3 connection.
Actual bandwidth costs for 200GB (which is about 1Mbps) over the course of a month are about $1 USD in almost any major US city.
Even assuming 4x the cost for Canada's smaller market size, we are talking about a ($4 into $55 upcharge) 13 times markup once the cost of the basic connection, tech support, marketing, etc. is covered by the initial $31.95.
Pure nonsense. ISPs have to pay data by volume to upstream providers.
Yes, they do. The question is how much. Chances are it's nowhere near $2.... charging whatever you want is fair game in a free market, but not when you're a monopolist.
It isn't necessarily about the size of the pipe, but rather unnecessary restrictions that negatively impact the way people use the internet. Here I'm on Comcast and have a fairy generous cap (250GB). If people start penny-pinching what they do with their bandwidth it will be the end of web-based industries as we know it.
More accurately for Canada - it never began. Folks like myself who specialize in web-related development, either frontend or backend, basically have no future in our home countries.
I hate to be so down about my own country, but it's the damned truth, though many Canadian developers are too proud to admit it. The software industry in Canada is anemic, grossly underpaid, and that goes doubly for anything web-related.
Seriously, a mean without a standard deviation? That's a failing grade in a first year statistics course.
Not quite yet. http://www.eclipse.net.uk/fibre-broadband/what-is-fttc-
Some already have it. (My brother for one)
Schedule of when areas will get it from Virgin: (Other providers may be different).
http://shop.virginmedia.com/content/dam/allyours/pdf/100Mb-r...
This is excellent news, most places covered by the end of this year. Sadly Bristol is lacking!
Do you have any evidence that he's wrong, an argument why he's wrong, or even a different assertion of the facts?
This has actually been a fairly fact-filled, low-whine conversation, with reason-filled arguments. It's a topic (proper regulation of state-granted monopolies) that goes back hundreds of years (to American Colonial times, at least). The fact is, you need a monopoly on last mile connections because it's not feasible to let 3-4 ISPs run last-mile connections, even if it could be made profitable. To prevent the company with that monopoly from owning the whole telecommunications industry (at least in that region), governments sometimes force them to lease those lines to competitors at agreed-upon rates, so that those competitors can keep the monopoly (in this case, Bell) in check. But Canada's change has let Bell impose restrictions on those competitors' plans, so that those competitors can't offer better plans (at least in terms of cost/GB), which basically circumvents the whole reason to make Bell let competitors lease the lines.
This is a futile discussion. It is an embarrassment for HN and, honestly, an embarrassment for the Canadian tech community.
Download caps are way too low, no doubt about it. Providers are protecting their own self interests by undermining businesses like Netflix, no doubt about it. However that is an entirely separate discussion.
It is not a separate discussion, is THE discussion right here. For the life of me, I can't figure out what discussion you're trying to have or what it is that you find so disgusting/disgraceful.
2. What the ISPs and/or infrastructure owners are charging is orders of magnitude beyond covering costs. Bandwidth is getting cheaper as technology advances and old lines are paid for, and yet they are raising prices.
3. Many of the hackers on this site are developing cloud-based solutions to computing problems, solutions which can advance the well-being of the human race and provide new value to the marketplace. ISPs' greed has stifled and will continue to stifle this economic and societal growth.
Given these three points, I think it's clear why commenters are arguing against ridiculously overpriced Internet access.
This is not the standards for HN. It is, if anything, the antithesis of HN.
The ruling last year: http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2010/2010-802.htm
The result of consultation on the ruling, and dates for its application: http://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2011/2011-44.htm
This affects the "Gateway Access Services (GAS)" customers. Wholesale Bell customers. (Product details here http://www.wholesale.bell.ca/pdfs/GASDSL.pdf)
And "Third Party Internet Access (TPIA)" customers. Rogers & Shaw Wholesale customers.
The GAS is not local loop unbundling. That is "(ADSL) Access Service" (http://www.bce.ca/en/aboutbce/regulatoryinformation/tarrifs/...)
There are essentially three options for an ISP. Diagrammed below.
PoP = Point of Presence. This is the handover from the access network to the provider network. The equipment found here is often called a BRAS.
------------The Internet------------
| | | |
----------Peering Location----------
| | | | <-.
ISP1 ISP2 TekS BELL \
| | \ / <---- Private network.
PoP1 PoP2 PoP3
| |# |**
Priv.Fiber LeasedLine Bell
| | |** <---- "Backhaul" "Transmission Network"
Priv.DSLAM Priv.DSLAM -Bell DSLAM-
|~ |~ | |* <-- "Local Loop" "Last Mile"
CPE CPE TekSCPE BellCPE
* Bell's retail capacity based pricing.
** Bell's wholesale capacity based pricing.
~ ADSL Access Service
# Bell does actually lease lambdas on its fiber.
This is Bell's transit network. Whilst technically the UBB is on the individuals and not what is transited, it is essentially what is being billed for.
Bell is claiming that it's links on the transit network are being crippled by heavy users. This may actually be true during busy hour. But in reality this shouldn't happen, as Bell can increase the bandwidth of most these relatively cheaply, as most are fiber. There are probably a few 100 that aren't fibered, causing the biggest problem.
But OK. The more I read about this, the clearer it becomes that the problem doesn't really exist at the moment. This is Bell's way of sabotaging the GAS product that it has been forced to sell by the regulator.
I hope this is a move that will force the independents to group together to purchase their own DSLAMS and transit. And then Bell faces much stiffer competition. In the UK, BT is facing real and consistent competition, thanks to our regulator getting tough in the last few years. BT now even have to allow competitors to lease it's ducting to roll their own fiber.
EDIT: I found this: http://www.vaxination.ca/crtc/ADSL_intro.pdf
Which suggests that the only bit that could conceivably have contention, which the wholesale customer does not control, is the connection between the DSLAM and the BAS. From the BAS's to their handoff PoP/CO, they have to pay for these "AHSSPI/AHSSL (Aggregated High-Speed Service Provider Interface/Link)" in 1gbps increments.
Really? I was under the impression that Bell was just selling access to their last-mile infrastructure
Your understanding is wrong. If TekSavvy were just terminating the loop, Bell wouldn't even have the technical ability to do anything to restrict or harm them.
The situation here is that Teksavvy has access to bulk wholesale Nexxia (Bell's backbone) rates that were forced upon Bell by the CRTC. Again, this was an agreement that was established when Bell was overwhelmingly dominant in certain areas of Canada. If those wholesale rates are "fair", however, then clearly Teksavvy can just arrange with another provider to handle that service. The reason they can't, of course, is that the rates they were paying were essentially monopoly subsidized.
There ARE DSL providers that locate hardware in Bell switching centers and don't use the Nexxia network. Primus is an example. Funny thing about Primus is that they, too, are implementing UBB, but it isn't because of Bell: It's because they don't want the ultra high throughput users that are being punted from TekSavvy from all migrating to their network.
Yes, that's because they own all the lines and Cogent has no other way to sign you up as a customer in a way that would be worth their while.
> The case here is that these small ISPs are not only terminating the loop, they're also using Bell's pipes beyond the termination, with contracts that were enforced when Bell really was a bonafide monopoly.
So, again, what choice do they have?
> There are actually a lot of competitive options when you're looking for bulk bandwidth, will Bell being a small, small player.
If that were really true don't you think these ISPs would switch to those competitors with their 'competitive options' instead of waging silly lawsuits?
Bandwidth is cheap. So cheap that it's hilarious to see the rates that Bell now charges these ISPs for transit.
Really, Canada just took a giant step backwards in time and you are cheering it on and I can't see what reasons you would have for that other than that you perceive Bell to somehow have a god given right to a chunk of the turnover of each and every bit of data that gets moved in Canada.
It really should not be that way, the sooner it ends the better. Every company that can afford it should be allowed to put in 'last mile' connections, and every company that can afford it should be allowed to use the former monopolists infrastructure at a cost-plus basis (and not a metered basis). That's the only way the situation will ever get to normal.
Canada is hurting it's citizens interests and the interests of Canada as a player in the global economy by putting the population at a disadvantage as compared to other countries.
Have a look at Korea for what's possible.
Twisted-pair sucks, actually, and Bell's monopoly is on dead technology. We only use it as a backup line in a worst case situation. We actually had a number of options, which is what we used for our primary line.
Though I'm not even sure what your point is.
If that were really true don't you think these ISPs would switch to those competitors with their 'competitive options' instead of waging silly lawsuits?
IT IS TRUE. Accept that as a reality, because it is reality. If bandwidth is as cheap as you claim, they WOULD use those alternatives, now wouldn't they? They have an economic model based upon basically an agreement that was punitively pushed onto Bell because of their monopoly, back when being the big telco made them the top dog.
I'm not cheering on anything but reality. You have ignored or sidestepped every reality I have presented, and keep up with this ridiculous illusion that Bell has any ounce of a provider monopoly in Canada.
The reason we're having this debate is because twisted pair easily does 20MBit these days.
> and Bell's monopoly is on dead technology.
Not quite dead. Maybe not on par with fiber to the home, but not all that bad either.
ITU G.992.5 Annex M: 24 Mbit/s down, 3.3 Mbit/s up.
> Though I'm not even sure what your point is.
I think we can agree on that :)
ISPs on metered billing is going about 10 years back, I really can't see any justification for it.
> keep up with this ridiculous illusion that Bell has any ounce of a provider monopoly in Canada.
You've provided more examples of that than I have actually.
So, a sensible approach by the government would be to review the actual access costs - whether it's $2 / 100GB or some other figure - then fix the price at that level. Review it every year. Fair for all. I am sure the guy using 275GB/month wouldn't mind paying $4 for it.
Unlimited access is unrealistic, as is gauging the public for 10x the fair value _when you're a monopolist_.
"GAS" providers like TekSavvy are not DSLAM terminators -- they use Bell's final mile, plus their DSLAM, plus their Nexxia network, etc. THAT is how they are vulnerable to this sort of action.
Providers who have their own DSLAM equipment, which Bell has to host for them, have no such limits: Bell can't shape their packets, nor can they impose any pricing being the CRTC regulated last-mile charge. That has nothing to do with this recent decision.
People are pretending that we're talking about the latter when we're actually talking about the former, which is all this applies to. Did anyone ever wonder how TekSavvy -- some micro operation in Chatham -- magically became a Canada-wide DSL provider? Hint: Because they aren't.
If I may be so bold, I'd still like to say I wish you had made this correction directly to my post above. I think people would not have wrongly upvoted it so much in that case. Either way, thanks for the correction. Your point is well taken.
Do you think all ISPs are running off the ancient network equipment they were originally set up with back in the day?
I'm honestly surpised that on /Hacker News/ of all places, so many people thing that the only thing contributing to their bandwidth cost is in-ground copper.
At /my scale/ I can buy bandwidth at around $1 per megabit/sec. 1Mbps is, uh, around 320 gigabytes of data. Even at half utilization that's less than a penny per gigabyte, and any but the smallest of local ISPs are going to dwarf my bandwidth usage. This is the sort of market where cost scales down quite a lot as you scale up, so I would bet quite a lot of money that comcast pays less than I do.
sure, if I wanted to double my usage, I'd have to buy some new network equipment, and spend some network admin time, but generally speaking the cost of your network equipment (at least at my scale) is fairly small compared to the cost of buying the transit in the first place. It certainly doesn't double the cost of bandwidth; and even if it did, bandwidth would still be cheaper than the local loop to your customer's home.
So yeah, uh, your average dsl is what five megabits/sec on a really good day? are you seriously trying to tell me that you can buy a copper loop for less than five bucks a month?
(Actually, I've been in the industry all my life and I've never been involved in buying copper loops; I guess it's possible they are that cheap; If they are, and I find out (oy, the costs of almost everything in this industry are guarded like state secrets. It's such a pain in the ass.) I'll start a DSL ISP. but I'd be very surprised if that were the case. )
Easily? Hardly. Over an absurdly short distance from the switching station, with perfect copper, as a tech trial sure. In the real world most ADSL users find that their experience is nowhere near that.
ADSL sucks. ADSL has always sucked. It is a dead technology that is constantly simply being replaced.
We're having this discussion because Bell, due to their ILEC status, was forced into agreements that favored some businesses that pandered to, essentially, the "problem users" who were kicked off every other network. Teksavvy didn't go to ADSL because it's such a great technology. They went to it because the CRTC cleared a sweetheart deal for them.
That's sort of the whole idea ADSL is founded on.
> with perfect copper, as a tech trial sure. In the real world most ADSL users find that their experience is nowhere near that.
Actually, in the 'real world' it's doing pretty good. If there are limitations it is more often than not because of oversubscribing of pipes further down the line.
> ADSL sucks.
So you keep saying ;)
> ADSL has always sucked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_high_speed_digital_subscri...
Seriously, that does not 'suck', that's a pretty impressive technological hack. To take lines that were meant to carry voice and to get them to function at bitrates that a HF transmitter would be jealous of is not all that bad.
ADSL is constantly being upgraded to supply a market demand, it is not being 'replaced because it is dead'.
There is an awful lot of copper in the ground and will remain like that for a long time, ADSL has in this sense been a great enabler in bringing broadband to the masses, the other side of that coin has been internet over the TV cable.
From that wikipedia article:
"VDSL2 deteriorates quickly from a theoretical maximum of 250 Mbit/s at source to 100 Mbit/s at 0.5 km (1,600 ft) and 50 Mbit/s at 1 km (3,300 ft), but degrades at a much slower rate from there, and still outperforms VDSL. Starting from 1.6 km (1 mi) its performance is equal to ADSL2+."
1 km is not an 'absurdely short distance' for a maximum of 50 Mbit. In practice at that distance VDSL2 (which is currently only available from a select few providers where I live) does anywhere from 20 to 40 Mbit, not all that shabby, in fact I can hardly imagine what I'd use that for and I'm a pretty big consumer. Oh, and I live about as far away as you could possibly get from the nearest POP.
> We're having this discussion because Bell, due to their ILEC status, was forced into agreements that favored some businesses that pandered to, essentially, the "problem users" who were kicked off every other network. Teksavvy didn't go to ADSL because it's such a great technology. They went to it because the CRTC cleared a sweetheart deal for them.
The bandwidth charges that Bell is trying to levy here are not based in reality, regardless of the position of Teksavvy, and I don't see any reason why people that simply use 'dropbox' or 'netflix' should be punished for that with these outrageous charges. No other developed country has such a backwards system. 'Problem Users' don't exist, that's simply people using the capacity of the bandwidth that was sold to them. If you don't want users to use a fat pipe: don't sell them one.
Anyway, this thread is becoming ridiculously indented, I'm going to let it go with this. Thanks for the exchange!
If I were Teksavvy I'd be doing a projection on the costs of rolling out my own DSLAMs, and the value of reselling that on to other customers, really really fast. Probably approaching some UK companies like TalkTalk to buy in their experience for 2 weeks of consultation and costing models. Then contacting Huawei, and getting their army of Chinese engineers to come out and install these DSLAMs, or train Canadian engineers how to do it.
If its no trouble, could you please contact me at warrenwilkinson@gmail.com?
It was made because I was planning on writing a book on immigrating to Canada from the perspective of someone that has gone through the whole process, and this was to become one article (a blog post) and / or a chapter in there.
The whole thing had as working title 'movingtoca'.
Canada is a fantastic country but some things there are just - how to say this without insulting Canadians - peculiar.
The system works for the most part but if you don't dig in to Canada's history and do your best to understand the way the various interests interlock there is no way you're going to understand how things got to be the way they are.
To an outsider they'd make no sense at all and to people living there that do not have the historical perspective they probably also do not.
Some of these things date back all the way to the prohibition days of Capone!
How do you explain to an American that the same bottle of wine costs 50% more in rural Canada than in New York City :) ?
Shipping cost? If anything, I'd have thought the LCBO, keeping prices uniform across the province, helps rural areas at the expense of higher density areas (though perhaps not strict downtowns where store lease cost might be significant).
That the latter company somehow gets 'cheaper' overalleven though it requires newer network equipment to handle the load?
That the light internet users cause as much support issues as the heavy internet users?
Of course they don't - for the same number of users, heavy internet use increases backend costs. Those 100k users aren't causing congestion with torrents or video, for example. And just like in-ground copper, exchanges, datacentres and the like aren't cheap to install or maintain. Sure they get a bit 'cheaper' with scale, but they're still not 'cheap' - especially if you've got to keep upgrading your equipment to handle load.
Costs in a business rise in things other than directly-related items. Take an example: I've spent the morning doing an emergency repair on an RMA'd item that the service boys don't have the time to do. This has meant that the other critical tasks I've had to do have been pushed back. Sure, you can say that the repair of the RMA'd item is just my wages + spare parts, but you'd be wrong. It's had knock-on costs elsewhere in the system.
Assuming the same customer port speed for both? actually, yeah. costs would be almost the same, ignoring upstream bandwidth costs (really, costs would be pretty similar including upstream bandwidth.)
1000 customers, 10Gigabytes a day, you are looking at something like 1 gigabit, if that 10gigabit is even, and anymore, all modern networking gear does at least one gigabit.
edit: I'm assuming a smooth distribution and that you are willing to run the thing full on, both of which are bad ideas. give yourself 50% headroom, and buy two. Gigabit hardware is so cheap, you might as well.
You seem to imply that older networking equipment is cheaper. It's not. Sure, if you come by the office, I'll offload some crap on to you for free. This doesn't mean that it's cheaper than new stuff in production. There are many places in my network where a 10mbps switch would be plenty fast, hell, I even sell 10Mbps ports to some people. but I don't want the headache of dealing with ancient crap. I'd rather pay the up-front costs to get new(er) stuff than deal with the operating expence inherent to using old hardware. If I sell someone a 10Mbps port, I'll take a gig switch and step down the port speed.
Anyhow, I guess at this point we're just arguing to personal authority, and I don't even know who you are or what you do. If you have knowledge of what the cost of a copper pair is, let me know.
Really, running off old kit is the sysadmin equivalent to the "technical debt" talked about here in the context of messy spaghetti code. It's cheaper now, but will have to pay later. Usually with usurious interest.
You should keep servers closer to 3-5 years Your SysAdmin will say 3, the IRS says 5. It's generally agreed that after 5 you should give it to your little sister or use it in the test lab. I mean, I know people who run old servers for fun; a good friend of mine runs his website off a .com era 10 CPU sun enterprise. but that's hobby work, and even so his co-lo provider is loosing money on the deal he's getting. If he was paying for his own power, he'd probably step down to a single-socked 12 core opteron which would have more compute power and more ram, and use approximately 1/10th the power.
At my company, I estimate a reboot to cost me about a thousand dollars, that is, if everything comes up cleanly afterwards. Right now, we're debating if we should extend the servers out to four years rather than throwing them out after three. But in this case, I own the whole thing, rather than one department, so I feel it on both ends; both the problems caused by old garbage and the cost of buying new stuff.
Network hardware, generally speaking, lasts longer than server hardware, but depending on the badness of downtime on that particular network, a 5 year cycle still isn't bad, and running 10 year old kit is kind of crazy. (and if we are talking 100Mbps stuff, you are starting to talk about 10 year old kit.)
I remember at another contract gig, I was getting paid around seventy five bucks an hour (this was really a full time job in all but name, so they paid closer to full time job rates than short-term contract rates)
A lot of my time was spent repairing or cleaning up after 10 year old servers. Most of the time when I touched something? for what they were paying me alone, not counting downtime costs, they could usually have bought new kit. And half the time, these were critical dev servers; one of the hard drives failed years ago, and now the second was returning read errors. It was absolutely crazy that they didn't just replace all of this garbage at once.
I mean, they eventually did, I was actually hired on to help virtualize all these tiny 10 year old servers on to much larger, newer servers. But the job would have been quite a lot easier if they had replaced these servers after 5 years rather than 10. I suspect that the downtime and cleanup ended up being more expensive than the capital cost of new servers would have been.
