Bell to charge small ISPs by usage - Canadians rage

[gamehead200]

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has approved a request by Bell Canada to implement usage-based billing for its wholesale internet customers.

The decision, made on an interim basis, could result in lower download limits for customers of smaller companies such as Teksavvy and Acanac that rent portions of Bell's network to provide their own internet services.

Smaller ISPs, which typically allow customers to download hundreds of gigabytes a month, may be forced to lower their limits to Bell levels. Bell's most popular plan allows customers to download 50 gigabytes a month.

The CRTC on Wednesday also approved a request from Bell that will allow the company to charge small ISPs 75 cents for every gigabyte over 300 that their customers use.

Smaller ISPs had fought the requests and said if granted, their services would become indistinguishable from Bell's. The CRTC last year also allowed Bell to extend its traffic management practices, where certain uses of the internet such as peer-to-peer file-sharing are slowed or "throttled," to smaller ISPs.

Independent companies are therefore required to throttle their own customers as well.

Although the CRTC ruled in favour of Bell during the throttling dispute, it also launched an inquiry into the larger issue of net neutrality, or how much control internet providers should have over the connections they provide to customers. The regulator is expected to make a ruling on net neutrality by the end of the year.

Read More: CBC.ca

A discussion/rage session regarding one of the ISPs (Teksavvy) affected by this (I'm actually one of their customers and am pretty annoyed at the CRTC's decision right now): http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22854579-...-CRTC-Descision

Just take a look at the comments below the CBC.ca article to see how raged Canadians are at this decision right now.

[CoffeeFiend]

Canadians are really getting screwed over as far as ISPs go. Nearly all ISPs have fairly low BW caps:

Bell: 25 GB on their 6mbit plan

Cogeco: 30GB on their 7mbit plan

Videotron: 30GB on their 7.5mbit plan + $8/GB! (capped at like $120/mo), or other plans at $1.5/GB extra, with NO limits of how much extra they can charge.

Rogers: 60Gb on their 10mbit plan

and the handful that don't are usually throttled pretty heavily, and with that change in pricing you can be sure all the "resellers" (independent DSL ISPs) are going to change their pricing accordingly...

Low caps and/or throttling everywhere. Add to that the constant price hikes despite their rapidly decreasing costs (and record profits) and decrease in service (caps/throttling)... I wouldn't mind paying for what I use, but $8/GB is ridiculous. They can only get away with it because they're monopolies and that there's no competition whatsoever. It's at the point wish the gov't would do something about it, but the only thing we can expect is the CRTC to side against us as usual. Forget about ISPs rolling out DOCSIS 3 either, they have no reason to, and they'd rather keep charging us more for less every year.

[jcarle]

Forget about ISPs rolling out DOCSIS 3 either, they have no reason to, and they'd rather keep charging us more for less every year.

Videotron already offers DOCSIS 3.0, which I'm currently on at 50Mbps.

Regardless, I support the move to dissolve the CRTC.

[CoffeeFiend]

Videotron already offers DOCSIS 3.0, which I'm currently on at 50Mbps.

Yeah, but it's more of an exception (no others seem to have done that yet). And they didn't roll it out as a way to solve the bandwidth "shortage" they all whine about. The bandwidth cap is higher, but it's this part that bothers me:

$1.50 per additional gigabyte. No billing limit.

Ouch. At least, if you're going to charge unlimited, charge me a decent monthly fee for the service and base your profits on that (and they sure do), and then whatever it costs them for the extra or at least near that (a few percent overhead? sure). Here, they're happy to charge us over 10x what it costs them with no actual limits of how much they can charge (buy all the very overpriced bandwidth you want!) I can live with 1/10 of that speed (I don't need anything to finish downloading before I even clicked -- 7mbit is plenty fast for me), but the caps bother me, a lot.

If you use VPN to/from work a lot, have several people at your place checking high def movie previews at Apple's site (~150MB each, ~4 per movie) and who also enjoy streaming audio/video, if you have any kind of membership to sites like lynda.com (or kelbytraining.com or whatever else), if you like watching various large videos on Channel9/Adobe TV and such places (nevermind anywhere like hulu, or a netflix subscription), if you maintain a WSUS server, if you download many large packages (Win7 betas, VS 2010 beta, service packs, etc), if you use steam, if you have a VOIP phone line and countless other little things... You very quickly go over most bandwidth caps (with zero P2P usage). Some of us do more than check email, and it seems like ISPs expect us to keep paying more and more for faster pipes that we're not actually going to use.

On that 50mbit plan videotron has, you could hit the monthly bandwidth cap in 4 1/2h... If you were to max it out for a whole month (of 31 days) which is admittedly a bit excessive, you'd be paying in excess fees alone (on top of your plan) a hair over $28000 including taxes (you could likely have a OC12 for that much -- 622Mbps). Thanks god it's not at $8/GB like their other plans, otherwise that would be about $150000 for a month.