Canada still wants to "discipline the use of the Internet"

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/metered-internet-in-canada-isnt-quite-dead.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

by solipsist • 15 years ago

30 25 15 years ago

arstechnica.com

naner• 15 years ago

Companies like Netflix are "putting a great stress on the Internet and there's no incentive for companies to invest in maintaining the Internet." Usage-based billing would encourage people to adopt more bandwidth-efficient technologies

Charging more for less won't provide incentive for companies to "invest in maintaining the internet", though.

Charuru• 15 years ago

Actually, yes it will. It'll set a low standard for cheap internet, thus making it economically viable for new boutique entrants to the ISP market, bringing with them new technologies and strategies. Google? Wireless?

I don't believe in government interference.

Giving more incentive for better encoding is also a valid point. Netflix offered 10 million for better recommendations. I'd like to see them offer the same thing for better encoding.

mschwar99• 15 years ago

I'd have more sympathy for this argument if government interference didn't play a large part in the construction of the status quo.

In Canada, government regulation and taxpayer money played a significant role in building the infrastructure. In the US, government granted monopolies built the infrastructure and still serve to squeeze out competition.

Government interference isn't a shiny new monster imposing itself on private sector infrastructure. Rather it has been a key player since the beginning and shaped the market in ways that need to be accounted for.

pyre3• 15 years ago

  > I don't believe in government interference.

But that's just it. Most of the telecoms in the US and Canada were built off of government subsidies, guaranteed (regional or nation-wide) monopolies, and/or guaranteed profits (see AT&T in the US). How can you then say that the government needs to be 'hand off' with a market that they've already skewed in favor of certain players? Not to mention that Bell in Canada is regulated this way by the CRTC because they control the last-mile telephone lines for DSL. Legally they are the only ones allowed to lay such lines, so should the government allow them to do whatever they want with their government-granted monopoly?

tyhjnmyh• 15 years ago

Have you seen the selection from netflix Canada ?

Nobody is downloading that crap - there is no way there is any bandwidth

awakeasleep• 15 years ago

I couldn't believe the gall behind the claim that the Internet is as limited a resource as electricity.

The whole article seems ludicrous. "Discipline" internet usage? As if it's inherently bad or something?

rfugger2• 15 years ago

Well, obviously everyone can't download at full speed at once and expect any kind of performance from the shared network, so some kind of sharing arrangement is needed. The usual method is to price the scarce resource somehow. The spectre of usage-based billing was already motivating third-party ISPs to investigate building their own routing infrastructure. Seems like the market will sort it out, no?

MichaelGG• 15 years ago

Billing by total bytes transferred over the month has got to be the worst way to get a "sharing arrangement". Given the prices for exceeding the limit (a couple dollars per GB), we can sort of rule this out as just an idea to help avoid congestion.

The issue, AFAIK, with the market "sorting things out", is that there are few companies that have gotten government permission to build out end networks. I'd guess it's near impossible for a new company to get access to actually lay out copper everywhere.

Devilboy• 15 years ago

But it's not a scarce resource. When you get more clients you have more money and can build more interwebs.

pasbesoin• 15 years ago

I believe the majority of the problem exists in "the last mile", or three or five.

Eventually, the last stretch will get (yet) fatter. In the meantime, I've not seen discussion of possible interim workarounds. Such as e.g. Netflix enabling, on devices having sufficient storage, time-shifted, queued downloading. For example, during the work/school day, when residential usage is low, they could pump down the next film or three in your queue.

Similar to electrical power generation, efficiencies are gained by leveling demand.

Perhaps we're too impulsive in our choices. Also, it would place entire (DRM-ed?) movies at once onto local media -- possibly a concern. But it seems to me to be one approach, if "last mile" really is a problem and the different parties could actually cooperate instead of simply hoarding the pie.

Side benefit: No congestion interruptions and artifacts.

jerf• 15 years ago

The weird one to me is the recurring claim that there's no incentive for companies to invest, as if it's just a given that there's all sorts of greedy companies out there somehow coming up with free bandwidth they aren't paying anything for to anyone. Can someone point me to this free bandwidth? I'd like to get in on this action.

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

The internet is not a truck, you can't just dump a crap ton of movies on it and expect no consequences, you'll clog up the tubes!

guelo• 15 years ago

Actually, in a way, they have better internet in Canada then we do down here in the US. Most people here have one or at most two monopolists they can turn to for broadband. At least in Canada the government has tried to add some competition.

pyre3• 15 years ago

There was a similar period in the US when regional phone companies were required to lease lines out to 3rd parties, but I believe either the policy was changed or a court case deemed the rule to be invalid.

redthrowaway• 15 years ago

And again the true concern of Bell et al is apparent: they want to protect cable. They don't care about internet, as the incremental costs of adding more bandwidth are negligible. This is simply more confirmation that they either want to a) force netflix to pay a tariff, passing the buck on to consumers to make it less appealing, or b) force consumers to pay extra for the bandwidth used by streaming video.

drdaeman• 15 years ago

Unmetered costs more. I don't know about Canada or US, but in Russia it's certain that your ISP pays for their uplink channels several times more than you would for the same bandwidth. Partially, that's because there are completely different SLAs, but that's also because a good share of users are consuming moderately (like web browsing) with only accidental high-traffic spikes. If every customer online will try to get their promised bandwidth at the same time - ISP will literally choke - and nobody would get even remotely satisfying connection. That's why ISPs have to impose bandwidth limits. Here, they're commonly shaping down the line after the traffic cap's hit.

In fact, I believe almost every ISP - unless they're monopoly - would be happy to drop the prices while keeping the satisfable service quality. Unfortunately, most of time they just can't (and when they can, they surely do).

Also, while it's certainly none of my business, I sometimes wonder why some individuals download terabytes of information per month. Considering the most heavy application I know of - downloading raw BD rips - they have to watch a movie every single evening. Must be quite a bad taste for a videophile, to say the least. For less traffic-heavy content, they just won't be able to consume it in time. I'm not saying that terabytes are not needed - sure there're cases where even petabytes might be necessary - but there're too many users who download whole day and night every month. Well, at least the Internets are backed up...

cal5k2• 15 years ago

Counterpoint: Free.fr in France. While the incumbent telecoms were charging out the nose, Free.fr charges a moderate price for unlimited access and all sorts of awesome features. Clearly it's working for them.

Canadian telecoms are some of the most profitable companies in the country. The "no incentive to invest" has been because they can charge whatever they want for their service, milking the aging infrastructure they "own" that taxpayers heavily subsidized.

Why invest early and often if you can just crank up your rates when things eventually break down?

nl• 15 years ago

This simply isn't as one sided as many seem to think. See, for example http://eaves.ca/2011/02/03/why-the-crtc-was-right-on-user-ba... ("Why the CRTC was right on Usage-Based Billing")

henrikschroder• 15 years ago

> If you make it so that fixed bills are the only way to bill customers then what incentives do internet providers have to improve capacity?

To grab customers from the competition of course?

Consumers will move from congested ISPs to unccongested ones, this provides incentive for all ISPs to be as uncongested as possible if they want to keep their customers and revenues.

Of course, this presumes there's actual competition between ISPs and that consumers can choose freely, which is why this inherently stupid discussion is only present in parts of the US and Canada.

cal5k2• 15 years ago

I have a lot of respect for David Eaves, but in this particular case it looks to me like he doesn't understand the nuances of the argument. He's simply equating internet to electricity as if they were really similar things.

What he utterly fails to account for is the fact that the costs to provide a certain level of bandwidth have been dropping dramatically. You could simply be making regular, equal investments every year and that would be enough to see bandwidth rise in line with consumption. Yes, a 50% year-over-year increase in consumption is matched be a 50-60% year-over-year cost decrease.

Furthermore, Bell (for example) has little incentive to upgrade early and often if they can charge whatever they want. They can simply milk their creaky infrastructure until it breaks down (infrastructure that was heavily subsidized by the taxpayer), and then simply increase their rates to cover the costs of investments they should have made a long time ago if they didn't act according to perverse incentives.

From another angle, fast, ubiquitous, unlimited (for all intents-and-purposes) internet should be a policy objective for our government. Countries that have made heavy investment in internet infrastructure, like South Korea and Japan, are reaping the rewards. This will only become more important.

Canada also has THE most expensive internet access among OECD countries. Period. Full stop.

Finally, this ruling was about imposing UBB on 3rd-party providers, not about UBB in general. Teksavvy already had caps at 200GB and a more expensive plan that offered unlimited access, and as many people don't seem to understand, they're not using Bell's backhaul. They operate their own - they just need to access the last mile infrastructure because it's a bloody duopoly.

I could go on and on and on, but suffice it to say that David is just plain wrong here. It IS as one-sided as we think.

troels• 15 years ago

Could someone explain to me what this is all about? Do the Canadian government want to prevent its citizens from using the Internet, and why?

smokinn• 15 years ago

Actually every party in the government that was actually elected is against it.

The only people that want this are Bell and the CRTC whose job it is to regulate Bell but whose members essentially rotate in and out of the CRTC and the companies they regulate. It's corrupt to the core.

bryanlarsen• 15 years ago

UBB would make a lot more sense if the rates reflected actual costs rather than being based on what Bell charged the customer.

For instance, if Bell charged the ISP's $7 for renting that "last mile" + 5 cents for each gigabyte, charging the same for 1st and the 500th gigabyte, it'd be a lot harder to argue against UBB. But when they charge $2 per gigabyte but then allow you to pay $5 for 40 gigabytes a block, but only a maximum of 3 blocks, it's obvious to everybody that those prices are bogus and pure gravy.

Canada still wants to "discipline the use of the Internet"

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