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Title: 200GB to 25GB: Canada gets first, bitter dose of metered Internet - AND NOT ONLY IN CANADA
Source:
arstechnica
URL Source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/ ... f-metered-internet-billing.ars
Published: Feb 4, 2011
Author: By Matthew Lasar
Post Date: 2011-02-04 14:15:21 by HAPPY2BME-4UM
Keywords: None
Views: 173
Comments: 13
Metered Internet usage (also called "Usage-Based Billing") is coming to Canada, and it's going to cost Internet users. While an advance guard of Canadians are expressing creative outrage at the prospect of having to pay inflated prices for Internet use charged by the gigabyte, the consequences probably haven't set in for most consumers. Now, however, independent Canadian ISPs are publishing their revised data plans, and they aren't pretty. "Like our customers, and Canadian internet users everywhere, we are not happy with this new development," wrote the Ontario-based indie ISP TekSavvy in a recent e-mail message to its subscribers. But like it or not, the Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) approved UBB for the incumbent carrier Bell Canada in September. Competitive ISPs, which connect to Canada's top telco for last-mile copper connections to customers, will also be metered by Bell. Even though the CRTC gave these ISPs a 15 percent discount this month (TekSavvy asked for 50 percent), it's still going to mean a real adjustment for consumers. Starting on March 1, Ontario TekSavvy members who subscribed to the 5Mbps plan have a new usage cap of 25GB, "substantially down from the 200GB or unlimited deals TekSavvy was able to offer before the CRTC's decision to impose usage based billing," the message added. By way of comparison, Comcast here in the United States has a 250GB data cap. Looks like lots of Canadians can kiss that kind of high ceiling goodbye. And going over will cost you: according to TekSavvy, the CRTC put data overage rates at CAN $1.90 per gigabyte for most of Canada, and $2.35 for the country's French-speaking region. Bottom line: no more unlimited buffet. TekSavvy users who bought the "High Speed Internet Premium" plan at $31.95 now get 175GB less per month. "Extensive web surfing, sharing music, video streaming, downloading and playing games, online shopping and email," could put users over the 25GB cap, TekSavvy warns. Also, watch out "power users that use multiple computers, smartphones, and game consoles at the same time." Here's the "good" news: TekSavvy users can now buy "insurance," defined as "a recurring subscription fee that provides you with additional monthly usage." For Ontario it's $4.75 for 40GB of additional data (sorry, but the unused data can't be forwarded to the next month). There are also "usage vault" plans—payments made in advance for extra data. Consumers can buy vault data for $1.90/GB up to 300GB in any month. Where once TekSavvy consumers could purchase High Speed Internet Premium at a monthly base usage of 200GB for $31.95 a month, now they can get about half of that data (if they buy two units of insurance) at $41.45 a month. Starting to hate this? TekSavvy hates it, too. "The ostensible, theoretical reason behind UBB is to conserve capacity, but that issue is very questionable," noted the ISP's CEO Rocky Gaudrault on TekSavvy's news page. "One certain result though, is that Bell will make much more profit on its Internet service, and discourage Canadians from watching TV and movies on the internet instead of CTV, which Bell now owns." Given these dramatic changes, and the fact that ISPs around the world have made clear they wouldn't mind implementing similar schemes, it's no wonder that high-bandwidth businesses are fighting back. Last week, for instance, Netflix started publishing graphs of ISP performance in both the US and Canada, and it plans to update them monthly. Netflix is also stepping up the war of words against ISPs who try to implement low caps and high overage fees: "Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber. The ISPs' costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced." The big question now is how these kind of billing changes will impact 'Net consumption patterns. Many subscribers use minimal data, but that's changing as Internet video becomes the norm. If these new plans simply discourage data hogs from backing up their 120GB pirated movie collection over the 'Net every night, there's no sleep to be lost. But if they scare consumers away from legitimate non-ISP affiliated movie and content sharing sites, that should be a firebell concern to consumers, entrepreneurs, and regulators. And not only in Canada. 200GB to 25GB: Canada gets first, bitter dose of metered Internet
This is going to hurt
You need "protection"
Very questionable
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#1. To: All (#0)
================================================= NETFLIX and movie downloading both have been huge internet suckholes. BOHICA
U.S. Constitution - Article IV, Section 4: NO BORDERS + NO LAWS = NO COUNTRY
Industry Minister Clement and Prime Minister Harper had a change of heart when a 400,000 thousand email partition was emailed to them and a few others. They have postponed the CRTC ruling for two months and told the CRTC that what they proposed was unacceptable and the government will not be except it. This is what I sent to all 304 MP's in government. It will give you an Idea of what this is all about. The CRTC's UBB ruling ..: Another example would be a standard hard drive I can buy. $55.00 =500 gig hard drive. In other words Shaw would charge me $500.00 dollars for the same hard drive at a $1 gig, if it was a person on Shaw lite they would pay $1000.00 for the same hard drive, and in Quebec its even more if UBB kicks in. I could send that same hard drive overnight by courier for $10.00, the total would be cheaper then what they want to penalize us for. Please stop using the silly (Telco) term "data hog"! How is someone a hog for using all, or even just a lot of, the bandwidth they rightly pay for?! Also, since bandwidth is not a finite resource, at last not in the sense that oil etc is, the term data hog becomes even more silly. This vilification of people that use and pay for their service, simply because they take advantage if it more than others is annoying me. I know they would love for everyone to pay for 50 Mbps and only use 8 MB a month, but that's just too bad. This is to inform you that I have just about had it with the CRTC and their decision making process. I am forwarding the following to all my email contacts and asking them to pass this on to their friends and neighbors. They need to know that some more of what was left of some form of free enterprise is gone. I consider the internet as a utility, same as electrical, phone, water, etc. When looking for employment some Businesses insist you email them your resume. Most companies are wanting to send your bills by email to save postage etc, etc,. The internet is becoming a neccessity not a luxury or strictly for entertainment. For a government to allow three large corporations to control all the media that flows into peoples homes is outrages. Where is the competition when Shaw has a monopoly into my house. I thought the The Competition Bureau of Canada would have stepped in by now if the CRTC isn't going to protect consumers. Unless their funding has been cut to the bone, at a time when people are using more and more bandwidth for services. Just a reminder that taxpayers funded much of the cable and fiber lines. Wasn't it just recently that our Conservative government gave out billions to the cable industry to help connect all Canadians in rural Canada to the Internet because all Canadians should have access. Now you allow the Foxes to look after the Chicken Coop. UBB 1) .. is anti-competitive. It will bring in massive amounts of unearned revenue for the big service providers, while making it impossible for firms such as Netflix or Skype to operate here. The consumer is a big loser with this ruling. 2) .. effectively kills Internet service in this country. Anyone that enjoys playing online games, or watching HD videos on YouTube, or legally downloading HD movies from iTunes can basically forget about doing this stuff in the future, unless they're prepared to pay ridiculous fees for it. My Kids buy games online. Games are bought and downloaded using Steam because game developers want to move away from the cost of packaging. If for some reason your hard drive fails you would have to down load everything again costing a fortune. 3) Companies are switching to cloud computing and are wanting consumers to join in on the new technology. Who will be able to upload gigs of data when your being capped and charged UBB. However, I would be okay with usage based billing if the CRTC did not protect the telecommunications industry which restricts competition, because a competitor would pop up offering high caps or unlimited usage, it is the nature of competition. But as it is now the big players can collude to fix pricing because no other are allowed to enter. Either block usage based billing or open up the industry to all competitors. The CRTC is supposed to be a consumer protection group, not an oligopoly protection group. This is not a joke. This crosses all political lines. These Cable companies already censor your connection, so if they don’t like where you go and download they slow your connection speed by THROTTLING(old terminology) or as they now call it, Line Management which you the CRTC allowed. Please pass this on to all your email friends and aquaintances. Phone or email or write to your mp and tell them you will be voting for some other party but not the Conservatives (Steven Harper). They will only listen if you tell them your not going to vote for them. Thank you for listening to my concerns. "...managing network traffic is an important way to prevent high-bandwidth applications such as P2P sharing from slowing traffic for all users..." I call shenanigans on that statement. Can we kill it already. If a user has a 1Mb down .75Mb up connection to the net and they are only running a bit torrent client it may consume the entire 1/.75 connection. It's not going to magically eat all the bandwidth on the internet, it's not even going to consume all the bandwidth of their ISP. No 'traffic shaping' is required. If I have a 1Mb connection and you have a 1Mb connection the fact that I'm actually using my entire connection _only_ effects you if our ISP only has 1Mb that it's reselling. That's the rub with P2P and other high bandwidth applications. Before the advent of P2P and HD video streaming users rarely used their entire allotment of bandwidth and the few times they did was relatively short lived. Overselling at the rate of 1000 to 1 or 10000 to 1 is a thing of the past if people actually get to use the bandwidth they are paying for. If the ISP has 100 Mb of capacity and their users are using all of that bandwidth, if they go out and acquire another 100 Mb of bandwidth, some evil P2P application isn't going to somehow gobble it all up. If the user still has a 1 Mb / .75 Mb connection that's the most bandwidth they will consume. So please, kill that meme already. The problem isn't evil P2P applications, it's ISP's overselling their network. They want the ability to throttle or otherwise 'network manage' your connection so that you only use 0.1 Mb of the 1.0 Mb connection you are paying for. In that way they can continue to oversell their network without actually having to invest in improving their capacity. Do they charge people who watch TV longer than other people more? No, and digital TV is all 0s and 1s just like internet data is so why this BS? U.S. Constitution - Article IV, Section 4: NO BORDERS + NO LAWS = NO COUNTRY
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The relationship between morality and liberty is a directly proportional one. "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." - Ben Franklin
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The relationship between morality and liberty is a directly proportional one. "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." - Ben Franklin
This blogger hits paydirt on the subject, IMO. They want the ability to throttle or otherwise 'network manage' your connection so that you only use 0.1 Mb of the 1.0 Mb connection you are paying for. In that way they can continue to oversell their network without actually having to invest in improving their capacity. U.S. Constitution - Article IV, Section 4: NO BORDERS + NO LAWS = NO COUNTRY
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The relationship between morality and liberty is a directly proportional one. "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." - Ben Franklin
If they don't want you on the wire, they're sure as hell not gonna let you on the bird. Better start looking into lo-tech. I'm thinkin' soup cans & string, at least until the jew MFers outlaw string. Or soup. Or both.
Better start looking into lo-tech. ============================================= The Egyptians stay on facebook and twitter by dialing up modems in the United States from their cell phones. Dial-Up Modems - Without Internet, Egyptians find new ways to get online U.S. Constitution - Article IV, Section 4: NO BORDERS + NO LAWS = NO COUNTRY
Netflix is right here. They are just trying to rip people off.
God is always good!
I'm beginning to think you might have a minor "pig" fetish !
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces. Etienne de la Boetie
Somewhere in Kenya, a village is missing its idiot.
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The relationship between morality and liberty is a directly proportional one. "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." - Ben Franklin
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The relationship between morality and liberty is a directly proportional one. "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." - Ben Franklin
"Usage-Based Billing"
#2. To: All (#1)
http://win7vista.com/index.php?topic=23567.0
#3. To: HAPPY2BME-4UM (#0)
#4. To: HAPPY2BME-4UM (#0)
(Edited)
#5. To: Eric Stratton (#4)
The problem isn't evil P2P applications, it's ISP's overselling their network.
#6. To: HAPPY2BME-4UM (#5)
#7. To: Eric Stratton (#6)
Time to look into Satellite access options.
Mike Flaherty: Yeah, it's been there a long time. I wish I knew which corner.
My Man Godfrey (1936)
#8. To: Esso (#7)
If they don't want you on the wire, they're sure as hell not gonna let you on the bird.
Score: 34
Post Date: 2011-01-29 09:40:09 by HAPPY2BME-4UM
1 Comments
Without Internet, Egyptians find new ways to get onlinePeople around the world are offering dial-up modem numbers and other primitive tools for people in Egypt IDG News Service - "When countries block, we evolve," an activist with the group We Rebuild wrote in a Twitter message on Friday. That's just what many Egyptians have been doing this week, as groups like We Rebuild scramble to keep the country connected to the outside world, turning to landline telephones, fax machines and even ham radio to keep information flowing in and out of the country. Although one Internet service provider -- Noor Group -- remains in operation, Egypt's government abruptly ordered the rest of ...
#9. To: HAPPY2BME-4UM (#0)
"Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber. The ISPs' costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced."
#10. To: Eric Stratton (#3)
Put another way, it's pure pigshit!
#11. To: HAPPY2BME-4UM, 4 (#0)
test your speed -
#12. To: Esso (#7)
#13. To: noone222 (#10)
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