Stop The Meter On Your Internet Use

[TheCheez]

Jake,

You're right if the cost was less than $0.25/gb there's no way this would be on anyone but the hardcore user's radar. $2/GB beyond a 25gig cap will change how Canada interacts with the internet and I for one am glad that the geeks could make enough people wake up (and conveniently it's election season) that the government will look into it. Also of note is that if Bell and its friends hadn't been so greedy this would have passed much easier - probly could have slipped it through without too much fuss at a buck a gig.

I would also be willing to bet that in a fictional scenario where the big player was standalone ISPs, without the connection of TV services and owning TV Networks, the entire issue would have never come up because it's not actually about the pennies they're losing from power users on unlimited plans.

[xsbank]

Look at how the internet has exploded in the last 20 years. Does anyone here have a wide enough imagination to even guess what it will look like in another 20 years? Any restrictions to internet access are the worst kind of censorship and are largely pointless. Remember when "the government" succumbed to pressure from the music industry and imposed taxes on blank cds ("...um daddy, what's a cd?") which I think still exists?

Governments don't understand the internet and are largely afraid of it, but communications are going to revolve around the internet for the foreseeable future, using devices we haven't even thought of yet, and messing about with restricting access is just wrong.

[Hedley]

IMHO it's sad that in 2011, Canadians are trying to discourage people from using the internet. Instead, we should be designing and building an infrastructure to deliver ONE GIGABIT sustained bandwidth, to every house in Canada. Well, if you live within 100 miles of the border, anyways

That said, someone's gotta pay for it. I personally prefer a two-tier price structure: one flat rate for light users, and another flat rate for power users.

X dollars per month for less than Y GB of data, and Z dollars per month for more.

People can understand that, and if you just use the internet to use email, you should pay less than someone who downloads 100GB per day.

[Brewguy]

Just came across this article:
CRTC will delay the change to Internet billing practices for 60 days

A couple of interesting points from it:

Commission Chairman Konrad von Finckenstein told a House of Commons committee on Thursday that the introduction of usage-based billing for wholesale customers will be delayed for at least 60 days beyond the proposed March 1 start date.

Von Finckenstein said the review will seek to verify that the decision protects customers and penalizes only the minority of people who are heavy consumers of Internet services.

"We are convinced that Internet services are no different than other public utilities and the vast majority of Internet users should not be asked to subsidize a small minority of heavy users," he told the committee.

"For us, it is a question of fundamental fairness."

Most residential Internet customers already have usage-based billing.

Major companies like Bell and Rogers place a cap on how many gigabytes a person can download for a set fee, before additional charges are tacked on.

But smaller providers were able to offer unlimited plans because they didn't pay by the gigabyte for the data they buy off the larger companies.

The CRTC ruling changed that.

That's sort of the entire point here folks. If one of Bells' own customers has to pay based on usage, why should a small ISP be able to offer unlimited access to the Bell network; often while paying less than the Bell customer is paying for a mid-range package (with limits)?

"We believe there should be choice," Clement said.

"If an Internet service provider wants to offer unlimited access for a flat fee, they should be allowed to offer that in our marketplace. And what this CRTC decision was doing was eliminating that possibility and that's what we found unacceptable."

I really don't get the logic of this.

To me, this is like saying that a member of your flying club can rent one of the clubs aircraft at 'x' dollars an hour; but non-members can fly all they want so long as they bought a municipal bus pass.

[Beefitarian]

Sorry, the content you requested is not available in your region.

[. ._]

This is all I know about the internets.



Man, why won' this embed?

Will this embed?



So I guess some do and some don't.

I blame this guy.



-istp

//embedding fixed by Sulako - your first link had extra junk after the link (ie '&feature=related') which doesn't parse