Net Neutrality Alive and Well in Canada
michaelgeist.ca
michaelgeist.ca
Even before this ruling we were in decent condition on home ISPs due to actions the CRTC had taken which greatly improved the competitive environment - I went from 30/10 to 300/30 in a matter of a few years at a very close price point. I'm now on gigabit at about 1.5x the cost. It's also interesting that among the people arguing in favor of net neutrality here included one of the biggest ISPs around, Rogers. It's also good that this regulation doesn't extend nearly as far as what the FCC proposed in the states - it keeps it fairly minimal.
Everything I've ever known about Rogers tells me to be wary of their opposition, but I still can't quite say what their play is here.
Bell is deep on Crave TV and stuff, Rogers killed their similar service just last year.
So they have a lot less to gain from the move and may get bad press for it... instead they'd rather get seen as the good guys.
> The discontinuation [of Shomi] was criticized by CRTC Chairman Jean-Pierre Blais, who remarked in an address that he "can't help but be surprised when major players throw in the towel on a platform that is the future of content – just two years after it launched. I have to wonder if they are too used to receiving rents from subscribers every month in a protected ecosystem, rather than rolling up their sleeves in order to build a business without regulatory intervention and protection."
All that coax they have lying around? A certain percentage of its spectrum is reserved for Rogers' digital TV service and the rest of the spectrum is dedicated to internet (that they are forced to sell to companies like TekSavvy).
So Rogers has a bunch of things going for them: a huge installed base of cable boxes across Canada with ability to provide demand video; they've had this for years. Bell and Telus don't have the luxury of dedicating a chunk of their copper spectrum to their (IP-based) TV services and thus want the same advantage Rogers gets by default over coaxial. This is why the other guys don't like net neutrality. Of course, they want priority for their content and want to pay less for it. But the CRTC says no.
Rogers, naturally, wants to keep their advantage over their competitors, and by supporting net neutrality they limit the possibility of Bell, Telus, and co from eeking out a little extra advantage. Cable and DOCSIS are starting to show their age and can't quite keep up with growing internet demand. So Rogers lays net neutral fibre to meet that demand while leaving their happy little slice of digital TV spectrum just as it is: wide open free of traffic and interference.
The idea of an uninterruptible stream for video content is a good one in principle but is perpendicular to a neutral network. One provider creates the stream and that's it. No buffering or packet re-transmission. It's exactly like radio.
I've missed quite a bit of nuance and history and glossed over important technical details, but that's my general idea of why Rogers doesn't really care, mostly because they may see their main market as, for the most part, competing with Bell and Telus on standard old-school TV.
To counter all that, Shomi (may it rest in peace) showed us that they cared about the Netflix threat but it didn't work out business-wise. If they're going to push IP video over their neutral tubes, why should they waste all that money managing and running a web streaming service when they can charge their sucker clients the same money for the same Netflix-sourced bits per second? Maybe their business plan includes charging exorbitant fees for co-locating Netflix cache servers in their city hubs.
I wouldn't count Rogers out yet. They're always up to no good.
Aside: my little day-dream is to start a municipal fibre-to-the-home ISP. Maybe Elon will bestow micro-tunneling upon us and we can say goodbye to Rogers for good.
Into the belly of the beats I go! ....
For Bell their 300Mbps plan is $121 with a bundle but then after three months "in market prices apply" which I guess is $300/month but after nearly 2 hours of looking I couldn't find it shown anywhere. And Bell just raised all Internet packages by $5 month in Jan 2017.
Bells' "Acceptable Use" is mentioned but I tried to see it I clicked "Terms of Use" at the bottom of the plan, new page, click to expand "Internet and Value Added Services" which has three links to PDF documents, "Bell Aliant Fibre Services" document, that document has a link in "Internet Acceptable Use" it opens a new page with Legal and Regulatory columns each with four links and each of those links go to new pages with several more links, those several links expand to show links to more PDFs. At several points on several pages and in the PDFs I was directed back to the Legal and Terms page.
I'm pretty sure that Bell Canada 300Mbps or 1Gbps plan is capped at 300GB/month over that exceeds their vague and seemingly non-existent Acceptable Use TOS. And those plans cost a lot $300 for 300Mbps which may be the vague "in market price" that's if you don't bundle them with Bell's TV and landline/cellphone.
There's two hours of my life I'll never get back. You win Bell.https://www.bell.ca/Bell_Internet/Products/Fibe-Internet-940...
Note the "included monthly usage" is unlimited. Unlimited is at least fairly unlimited - I burn over 5TB/mo sometimes (big nas and Plex server) and they have no problem with it. If you're willing to ditch the TV, check out some of the smaller time ISPs too, often good deals to be had there. Teksavvy is offering $89 for 250mbit unlimited.
I stream all my content including using iptv, hardly download anything, and hit under 500GB a month.
It has a cap, but quite generous.
I no longer hoard media downloads, and only stream what I went when I want... No pre-grabbing every download I could source.
I notice as the years pass, my ISP speeds are going up, but my demand for that extra bandwidth has gone down. I use to do several 100 GBs on a 1.5mbps DSL connectio with Usenet running 24/7 ~20years ago (got banned by both local ISPs temporarily... Times before they started charging or not caring)
I wouldn't download more data if I had 300 Mbps than if I had 25 Mbps. I would just not wait as long for it to download.