Canadians, fight Internet Usage Based Billing (UBB)
antoniocangiano.com
antoniocangiano.com
If you live in even the least-remote rural area you're likely stuck with the choice of Bell or one of the ISP's that piggy backs off of Bell's network. The example here is TekSavvy, their speed on the Bell network is capped at 5mbps despite (in certain areas) Bell can provide 16mpbs to its own customers, however TekSavvy provides unlimited bandwidth for a very reasonable price. $30 for 200gb, $40 unlimited with TekSavvy, but Bell offers 100gb for $80 and thats the best you'll ever get. What Bell is trying to do is make sure all the smaller providers, like TekSavvy, will have to charge their customers more per GB than Bell does.
Bell wants you to have to pay $1/GB or more for any other ISP on their network, or you can choose $0.80/GB with them. When currently you can pay $0.15/GB or less with their competitors.
Back in the UK BT, who owns almost 100% of the lines, tried to do a similar thing, but regulators stepped in and now you can get internet access from dozens of different providers. You can buy it from your grocery store for god's sake!
I used to pay for $30 per month for 20 hours of dial-up access, with an extra $1 per hour charged after that. Market forces reduced that cost significantly as new entrants with new technologies emerged to tap into a growing customer base, and that will happen again if bandwidth caps are imposed by existing service providers.
The last thing I want is for legislators to decide how much my service providers can charge and for what services they'll do so. As with any give-and-take, existing providers will ask for some protectionist advantage in exchange, and that will block new entrants and slow the adoption of new communication technologies.
Ten years from now, this argument is going to sound as stupid as if I had demanded my MP legislate a whopping 100 hours of dial-up access for my $30.
You can't suddenly impose laissez-faire capitalism on an industry so closely tied to government regulation. Continued regulation is needed so that corporations can't take advantage of the infrastructure privileges granted to them. There's plenty of bandwidth to go around.
No one had a monopoly over dial-up, the difference with broadband is that there is a legislated monopoly.
Pretty much every time it's been tried, you get a ton of innovation and rapidly falling costs.
The US, ICC trucking regulation led to much cheaper trucking.
Telecom deregulation led to an explosion of services, cell phones, and drastically lower prices.
Airline deregulation led to a falling fairs, making air travel accessible to more than just the upper and upper middle class (and, because air travel is much safer per mile traveled than car travel, deregulation has saved tens of thousands of lives).
> this is just profit-mongering
Oh, horrors - we wouldn't want people to try to provide services in order to make money!
I believe what rms is saying is you can't apply laisse-faire capitalism to a government instituted monopoly. You either need to remove the monopoly and allow capitalism to do its thing, or you need to institute regulation to prevent them from ripping off the customer.
> Oh, horrors - we wouldn't want people to try to provide services in order to make money!
As everyone has said, there's plenty of bandwidth to go around, so why are they doing this? They're doing it because there is no competition to prevent them from doing so. They certainly aren't hurting for money. They're simply taking advantage of the lack of competition provided by government mandate.
(Josh is my internet comment argument ringer)
Except that, in general, instituting regulation to fix the problem that the monopoly caused doesn't actually fix things, but only partially fixes those problems, and introduces different problems. Removing the monopoly grant is by far the better solution.
If there's plenty of bandwidth to go around and existing providers impose caps, then new entrants will lease that bandwidth and provide residential customers with unlimited bandwidth plans.
Telecom regulations should prevent new entrants from being blocked from doing just that. If they are blocked (and the Canadian system isn't laissez-faire, so they shouldn't be), then you'll have an issue to gripe about.
Currently here it is the opposite - it is cheaper from other providers than from Bell directly. Now, it wants to be able to also cap those other providers to prevent them from offering unlimited services.
Bell wants to do what it does in the mobile space and nail everyone with massive overage fees after the tiny limits are exceeded. Until mid 2008, the largest cell phone data plan you could get from Bell or Rogers was 5 MEGS. They charged by the kilobyte after that.
In Canada I can spend $80 on Bell's best package, get 100GB bandwidth, free unlimited wi-fi access at 650 starbucks, which you can get 2 hours free anyway! You also get 5MB (not GB) online storage (yet they give you 10GB of email storage to keep you off of hotmail or gmail). The only, supposed, advantage with this package is 16mbps, which I contest as fucking useless with such a low bandwidth cap, and I know for a fact (told by one of Bell's very own technicians this nice little fact) that our connection cannot get more than 1mbps (he said in a few months we might get 1.5mbps because they were upgrading the lines) and they're trying to fucking sell me 16mbps like I can actually use it!
The thing I want most is for service providers to choose how much my service providers can charge me, because I can pay $80 for shit I cannot even use! When we canceled our service with Bell they happily kept trying to charge us for wirecare (this is some moronic charge for faults in their lines, which in the UK they have to service for free cause it's their property) because we hadn't specifically canceled it. They wanted to charge $20 service termination for the wirecare, this despite it being free to cancel at any time if you're their customer... which brings their crazy logic into play. I'm not their customer when they're charging me $10 a month?!
When the Better Business Bureau got involved, all the magical charges they'd created for us (including new accounts that never existed, and thus legally cannot exist as they were never signed into existence, this included an entire change of name to someone who hadn't even created an account with bell!) amounting up to $80 a month magically disappeared.
People have no choice but to go with Bell in certain areas, and their business practices are fraudulent and the Better Business Bureau gives them an F because they avoid resolving the complaints.