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Comment by JeffJenkins | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't explaining what's going on very clearly. Small Canadian ISPs are allowed to use the infrastructure of Bell Canada at wholesale rates in order to foster competition. This has been reasonably successful. What has happened now is that the CRTC ruled that Bell is allowed to impose the same per-user bandwidth caps on its wholesale customers as it does on its own users.

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.

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The situation is much more complicated than that. Smaller ISPs only piggy back on Bell's telephone lines only in the so-called last mile of the connection. The resellers have their own DSLAM equipment at the switchboards and they have to make their own peering arrangements to the rest of the internet. Bell's telephone lines have been (still are) heavily subsidized by the government, which is why the government is requiring Bell to share the last mile in the first place. This last bit of regulation nullifies any pro-competitive effects of sharing the last mile.

Owning critical communications infrastructure is not Bell Canada's god given right.

The parent sits at 38 points while being almost entirely wrong.

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?

1. It is within the realm of technology to profitably provide unmetered bandwidth at standard rates, with minimal shaping during peak use hours. To borrow the phrase seen used on here with reference to nuclear power, bandwidth is almost "too cheap to meter." That's what is real.

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.

Arguing against "ridiculously overpriced internet access" is not bolstered by, pardon the expression, bullshit. 99% of what has been written here, and in the mirror ravings on Reddit, is just pure, unadulterated crap. It's factless nonsense that immediately makes the speaker just look like a selfish twit, desperately trying to spin a reality where only their needs are served.

This is not the standards for HN. It is, if anything, the antithesis of HN.

I agree with you. The days of endless fixed utilisation are over.

a nuclear power plant costs 6-8 billion up front, before you get a dime back and takes 2-8 years to build. Nobody in the US except the government will loan utilities the money to build or upgrade a nuclear power plant. I'm all for nuclear power, but it ain't cheap.

The electric generation system is actually a remarkably apt comparison because in most districts the cost of consumables is marginal. The real cost is in the capital expenditure needed for the system to supply a given load. Many of the same principals apply (e.g. "why do they charge me per kWh when they're overgenerating and they have all these nuclear power plants sitting around....")

>"The parent sits at 38 points while being almost entirely wrong."

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.

Do you have any evidence that he's wrong, an argument why he's wrong, or even a different assertion of the facts?

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.

>It is not a separate discussion, is THE discussion right here.

"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.

Now I feel pretty bad for being wrong about TekSavvy et al being DSLAM terminators. Please accept my apologies.

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.

The Canadian government has a long history of propping up the monopolies operating inside its borders, especially when it has a stake in them. For additional entertainment read up on the LCBO and the Egg Board (no, that's not a joke).

Not to mention the Canadian Wheat Board, perhaps the most egregious of all monopsonies (apparently it's not a "monopoly" because it is the only BUYER of wheat).

Monopsony.

I... believe that's what I said?

And the dairy board. And the turkey board. And the beer store.

Don't forget Tim Hortons.

Thank you.

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.

> 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.

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...

My bandwidth cap is almost the same now on Bell as it was when I first got a cable modem back in 2000 on Videotron. It's ridiculous. 25GB is a joke.

Well, I left Canada in 2000... before Harper et al. Forgive me for being behind the times.

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.

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