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Canada Imposing Usage Based Internet Billing?

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Apparently Canadians are going to be hit with usage-based billing for their internet access and the good people of Canada aren't too happy about it (who would be?). Instead of taking to the streets with pitchforks and hockey sticks, this page has been set up so you can tell Canadian officials what you think about usage based billing. Thanks to Matt A. for the heads up on this one.

This means we're looking at a future where ISPs will charge per byte, the way they do with smart phones. If we allow this to happen Canadians will have no choice but to pay MUCH more for less Internet. Big Telecom companies are obviously trying to gouge consumers, control the Internet market, and ensure that consumers continue to subscribe to their television services.
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In a telecom decision handed down yesterday, the CRTC has mandated that Bell Canada and other telephone carriers must offer wholesale internet access service providers a 15% discount on retail usage Billing rates beginning March 1, 2011.

Wholesale or third-party Internet access (TPIA) providers, such as Primus Canada or Teksavvy, lease internet capacity from Bell and other telcos and resell Internet services to consumers, typically at rates and service levels superior to the phone companies.
The federal regulators decision means that starting in March, third-party Internet access providers will be required to cap internet usage for consumers in Ontario at 25GB. The regulator has set the cap in Quebec at 60GB.

Beyond the provincial cap, the government is now forcing TPIA providers in to charge internet users a Usage Based premium for any usage beyond the 25GB cap. Beginning March 1st, TPIA customers who exceed their cap will be required to pay $2.00/GB to a maximum of $60.00/month for any additional usage up to 300 GB per month. Usage in excess of 300GB per month will be charged a further $1.10/GB. Usage plans where consumers can purchase blocks of additional date will be offered. The current rate will $5/month for an additional 40GB.

Yesterday’s ruling means TPIA providers will pay the phone companies 85% of the retail rate.
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http://www.digitalhome.ca/2011/01/crtc-firms-up-pricing-rules-on-usage-based-billing/
 
You'd think that that sort of crap would happen here before it happened there. Wonder how the corporations forced through their agenda on the government.
 
do these TelCos own every single square foot (er meter :D) where a telephone pole, or wire crosses over? Do they pay for leasing these areas? Any argument that "its a private company they should do what they want" is really invalid.
 
The CRTC is the most bloated, fat cat, government organization in Canada. They care nothing for Canadian's or artists, only for corporate protectionism and pocket books. The CRTC needs to go, it has no place in the lives of real Canadians anymore, even before they did this.
 
so um. if I ever formatted and all my steam games are gone from my hard drive, I'd have to pay for the bandwidth to download them again?? it's like paying for a second copy but it's not going to developers. Online game distributors should be outraged as it's pretty much ISPs taking a cut of downloaded games.
 
A 60GB a month cap. Thats 2 GB a day. That's not a lot at all. Wow, you guys really are getting the shaft up there.

Sorry to hear it, hopefully some alternative, or a politician with a goddamn brain steps forward for you and corrects this travesty. Aren't we, as the leaders of the western world (yes Canada is a huge part of that, not just the US) supposed to advance technology, not retract it?

This is basically a reduction in growth for so many technologies. Dumb idea, simply dumb. UNLESS you get that first 60GB free, and you pay after that, but we all know that would never happen :)
 
MrGoodbar said:
so um. if I ever formatted and all my steam games are gone from my hard drive, I'd have to pay for the bandwidth to download them again?? it's like paying for a second copy but it's not going to developers. Online game distributors should be outraged as it's pretty much ISPs taking a cut of downloaded games.
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Unless off course you plan to distribute TV over the internet. That way you make extra. Like getting paid twice. And yes the ISPs, sells TV, Mobile, and Home telephone also.
 
I'm still on a "grandfathered" Unlimited plan with Bell Canada despite that plan being wiped out years ago and there's no alternative. You can't even pay for unlimited it's just not out there that's how corrupt the CRTC is forcing ISP's to offer only what Bell offers. I wish I could just take my cash and go elsewhere but there's only 2 choices and they offer the same pathetic usage plans. It's harsh but I wish the guys at the CRTC would burn in Hell for their corruption.
 
Goverment wants 2 things: more of your money and more control of your life. This is just one more way for it to find it. The corprations that play ball with the goverment get their way with goverment. Just ask General Electric, JPMorgan and the list goes on.
 
TechLarry said:
Why is the Government even involved in this?
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To protect Canadians.

Sort of like when some people are offered protection for a price! :mad:

I really would love to know what would happen if the FCC did the same thing in the US.
 
i live in canada and know about this for a while
it's quite stupid and they charge wayyyy to much for internet already and now they want to charge more for it

they started Usage Based Billing (UBB) around the time netflix moved up here
they can't compete but wants a share of the profit so they started charging ppl that uses internet to watch media online
think there was a research done where a 2 hour HD video on netflix will be around 4GB so if you go over your limit and my ISP charge $1/GB then i'll have to pay $4 extra for each netflix movie i want to watch
the limit is so low too
the package i have from my ISP allows for 100GB limit a month (upload and download combined) they bumped it up to 150GB at a time for a trial run in one of the city and found that only 2% of the users went over that limit so they bump it back down to 100GB so that around 10% of the users will go over that limit and make more money

i agree that CRTC is useless
they pretty much pass any laws that cable/telephone companies forces them to
which is why cellphone and internet is so expensive up here
having an oligopoly market with regulators doing anything the producers want doesn't work well for consumers
 
This has been on the minds of many Canadians for the last 6 weeks or so.
the 3 largest ISPs in Canada are already, or are about to start charging Usage Base Billing. On top of that they have lowered bandwidth caps just before implementing this scheme.

Shaw Communications offers a few different price packages for internet. the most popular being Extreme. A 20Mbit cable connection. They used to not bother advertising caps. Then they started advertising a 125GB/month cap. After about 6 months of running a radio commercial that said "and we over plenty of bandwidth, 125GBs worth", they pulled the 125GB part and now they don't say what the cap is. The cap has been lowered to 100GBs/mth.

The whole thing stinks of something rotten. They are dropping caps, imposing charges on customers, all while admitting that when they charge you $1/GB over the cap, it only costs them pennies for the data that your being charged for.
In my eyes this is nothing more than a way to stifle companies like Netflix from really establishing themselves in Canada.
At a time when people are using more and more and more bandwidth for legitimate servicess, and people are struggling more and more to make ends meet do to economic pressure, it's downright deplorable what ISPs are trying to do to consumers in Canada.
 
Providing 1GB of bandwidth costs about 1 cent to the ISP. The concept of UBB is not based on economic reality, it's just a pure profit motive or misguided attempts by copyright holders to stop "piracy." Even a high cap like 250GB or 400GB is more than covered in monthly ISP rates.

Other than during Steam sales a few times a year, my monthly usage is in the low tens of GB per month. I don't have a cap at all, due to the type of service I have, and it's still cheap. Poor Canadians got steamrolled on Internet usage rates. There's no reason for it.
 
Being a Canuck, and knowing that this is from aggressive lobbying by the Telco's, etc., it surprises me that other lobbyists with their own agenda didn't offer a counterpoint. With the upcoming big push for "cloud" computing now means that you would have to "buy" your own data each time you wanted to view it ! I can't see the "Cloud" gaining traction here with these kind of rates !
 
It's no wonder countries like South Korea have much better ISP service then we get in North America. If the FCC ever tried something like this then the Four Horsemen better come and take me away.
 
Sounds like you guys could borrow some lessons from Tunisia. That would force the government to clamp down on this ludicrous business monopoly rather than abetting it.
 
The gov't MANDATING a cap?! Holy crap...I guess I've found the issue that I would actually miss work for and go protest. Rather sad that it's not over the US blowing up poor brown people, but I guess it's better to recognize one's failings.
 
Everything financially related to this country is going to hell; the worst being the intense arrogance of every private and industrial sector, and the prejudice our people have against things we know nothing about.

Go Canada. I'd rather be an ignorant American than an arrogant Canadian.
 
SpeedyVV said:
I really would love to know what would happen if the FCC did the same thing in the US.
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Absolutely nothing, the government has gotten too big to be controlled by the people or held accountable for it's actions.
 
Paul_Johnson said:
Absolutely nothing, the government has gotten too big to be controlled by the people or held accountable for it's actions.
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Correct. And you'd have plenty of people in support of it, making excuses for it, and talking about how "fair and better" it is and "for the greater good" and the rest of it.
 
Matrices said:
You'd think that that sort of crap would happen here before it happened there. Wonder how the corporations forced through their agenda on the government.
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Don't worry it's on the way. You think it's a coincidence that the first of the major 4 wireless providers to go tiered data here was AT&T and it's Bell Canada pushing through caps of $25 and $2 overages in Canada?

This is how it started in Canda. Bell Canada had tiered data on wireless. Once that became 'normal' and expected, and people bought into the 'Well, there are bandwidth hogs out there, and you don't want to be supporting them with your money right?' to turn people against each other rather than against Bell Canada.

Then once it was expected, and normal for wireless to have tiered data they moved on to wired internet. Start with high caps, then slowly lower the caps and raise overage fees. At first that pits users against each other as again they fell for the 'Well you don't want to be paying for somebody else's excessive usage do you?' Now look at the, 25GB cap, $2 overages....
 
FragMagnet said:
Unfortunatly there is a lot of arrogance up here :(

Since you were insulted by one Cdn., please accept an apology for him, from another ! :D
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I've known plenty of nice Canadians. Beautiful country. I should try and visit it sometime. :)
 
How long until the first lawsuits start saying that unwanted advertising is causing unecessary bandwidth usage that in turn raises the cost of internet access to the consumer?

If I have to pay by the byte, I don't want my bytes going to the 20 annoying flash advertisements on most sites today.
 
unfortunately, this is because the ISPs are also the only tv / cable / satellite providers, this is their way to keep netflix out, because here, even for basic cable / sat, which doesn't include the movie channels, etc, costs $30/month.
 
This is ridiculous. I live in the US but I signed the petition anyways.

Only about 70k signatures so far which just makes me sad. If we got 25% of the [H] readers to sign that thing it would at least make the thing less pitiful.
Wish some other tech sites would pick this story up.
 
Jeremy C said:
How long until the first lawsuits start saying that unwanted advertising is causing unecessary bandwidth usage that in turn raises the cost of internet access to the consumer?

If I have to pay by the byte, I don't want my bytes going to the 20 annoying flash advertisements on most sites today.
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how about the 2-300 spam emails we get a month =)? who pays for those!
 
I'm waitin for America to rise against the g... oh wait, fat chance :p

I'm just along for the ride. Wouldn't have phone if my job didn't require it (Damn you on call employers, pays good though)... not so sure about internet... I like my monthly non contract DSL.
 
I already pay $170 a month for 400Gigs bandwidth

Personally I think its worth it, even 100gigs a month you can only blow through if you spend all day torrenting, before torrents came out I was maybe using 40gigs a month
 
Another reason to hate Canada, pretty sad over all that the people would allow this to happen.
 
Uh oh, people paying based on how much they use? People who use 1GB of bandwidth no longer subsidizing those who use 100GB. Oh the humanity!
 
Valagard said:
I already pay $170 a month for 400Gigs bandwidth

Personally I think its worth it, even 100gigs a month you can only blow through if you spend all day torrenting, before torrents came out I was maybe using 40gigs a month
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It is not hard to blow through 100GB in a month without every dowloading a single torrent.
Let say you reformat your hard drive and you redownload your steam library.
I don't know about you, but my current steam folder is 170GBs and I only have about 2/3rds of my games installed.
Add netflix into the picture at 2GB/hr for HD content and its very easy to push beyond the caps imposed.

Last year I bought about 2 games a month on Steam. At an average of over 7GB and up to as much as 15GB for a single game, just the games i was buying were eating up over 10% of my now monthly cap.
I'm not the only person using the internet in my household. My brother is just as high a user as me. The usage builds up really fast! I've been watching what I've been doing lately and we're still sitting at over 120GB for the month of January.
 
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