Rumor : Excessive Charge

From my understanding of reading the new tarriffs (GAS) proposed by Bell for wholesalers (which have to match or be better than retail offerings):

25GB cap on the 6/7 Mbps tier
$2/GB over up to $60 (takes you to 55GB)
From 55GB to 300GB no extra charge because traffic management is the issue and the bandwidth hogs are those using from 25GB to 55GB not those using 250GB
Over 300GB is $1/GB

These rates are absolutely insane and I'm suprised the uproar is so muted here compared to some other boards. Write to your MP, Tony Clement (Industry Minister), the PM.

Most users don't know these limits or what is going to happen. I have friends who pay max penalties until I ask them and then they realize they are paying premium prices for lowest tier speeds.

This is no rumour. The tariffs are filed with the CRTC just waiting for their usual rubber stamp. The old proposed tariff was 60GB with $22.50 max overcharge, but they've decided to make that look good with this draconian cap.

They also have speed matching tariffs which offer wholesalers pennies discounts on their retail offerings of the same speed. They've left no margin for competition in the internet market.

Yeah, this has me pretty worried about the future of Canadian broadband.

The way it stands right now, I'm on Fibe25 with a 75GB cap per month, and I have 3 usage insurance plans to take me to 195gb/month of usage. For that usage insurance I pay $15 on top of the $60/mo I pay for the internet itself.

A lot of you might just think this is only going to penalize pirates and they deserve everything they get, but you need to think about the legitimate uses of bandwidth, Steam, Playstation Network, Xbox Live. These services offer full games for their respective platforms which can measure in the 2-10GB+ range. Services like Netflix, if someone likes to watch a lot of movies in their off time, they could approach their usage cap fairly easily. Also something to consider is that the caps we have now, are not likely to stay as what they are. Bell is already filing with the CRTC to lower the caps on their lower speeds to 25GB/mo, and this will likely get approved since lets face it, the CRTC doesn't give a damn about canadian customers.

Consider also, the possibility of something like this happening:

Users in our Videotron forum direct our attention to the fact that a customer of the Canadian cable company is now facing a bill for $1,800 because someone hacked into her password-protected router. Like many Canadian broadband companies, Videotron imposes the low cap, high per gig overage model, their usage tiers sporting caps as low as 3GB a month, and overage fees up to $4.50 per gigabyte. In this case the user had a 30 GB cap, and the network intruder wound up using hundreds of gigabytes in bandwidth. According to the report, Videotron refunded some of the charges, but ultimately directed the user to Linksys (we'll go out on a limb and assume she was just using WEP, not WPA):


"It's a case where Videotron showed some understanding and listened to what happened," she said. "We're well-renowned in the industry for our technical support team. We credited her account for $313, but at a certain point, we need to share the responsibility. We don't like these kind of situations." She added that Hunter was referred to Linksys, the company she bought her wireless router from, to take steps to make her wireless network more secure.

The user however complains that Videotron wasn't particularly helpful, and failed to notify her when her account repeatedly incurred large overage fees. Videotron insists a real-time monitoring and alert tool will be implemented before the end of the year.

Click to expand...

Granted we don't know the full details about her network's security (WPA2 vs WEP, whether her password wasnt something simple like "1234" or "password"), but I still think that this is something to be concerned about. Breaking wifi security can be done by those with the initiative to do so, and what's to stop your neighbor from breaking into your wifi, or a random guy driving around in a van "wardriving".

Unlike concerns about people stealing your cable or electricity, wifi theft requires no physical interaction, merely being within range can let someone stick you with a pricy as hell bill. Having no cap on overages is the worst possible thing that can happen IMO.

Just for a monetary example, if someone were to drive in front of my house one night, and get into my wifi network, and rake my usage up to to say 500gb, a number easily attainable with 25Mbit/7Mbit connection speeds. The way Bell would bill me is thusly:

Internet service itself (75GB cap): $60
Usage insurance (125GB extra): $15
Overage charge for going over 195GB (total usage 225GB): $60
Overage charge for going over 300GB (total usage 500GB): $200
Total Bill that I'll be stuck with: $335

Sure the odds of someone breaching my internet arent very likely, but all it takes is it to happen once, for you to basically be SOL.

The CRTC's job is to protect the existing players in the Canadian media, internet and communications markets, plus requiring those protected Canadian companies to carry some Canadian content as part of the quid pro quo for being protected against foreign competition. Two recent major CRTC decisions underline where the CRTC's loyalties lie: the UBB decsion licensing Bell to extort money from all users of their copper and fiber networks, and the decision late in 2009, swiftly overturned by the federal cabinet, to bar Wind Mobile from the Canadian market.

I think it's becoming more apparent every day that the CRTC, protectionism of Canadian media and communications companies at increasing cost to the consumer, and mandated Canadian content are all dinosaurs whose days are numbered. I've read more than one newspaper article speculating that the feds would love to do away with the CRTC altogether. We see more and more uses of the internet for media distribution, ranging from standalone operations like Netflix to high quality video streamed from sites like Rogers and CTV. These ridiculously low bandwidth caps imposed by Canadian internet companies fly in the face of reality and exist solely because the CRTC and the protectionist laws they enforce allow it.

I think the federal government, and federal politicians in general, are rapidly swinging around to siding with the Canadian media and internet consumer and against the existing cozy oligopoly of Bell, Rogers, Telus, Shaw, Videotron and the like. By overturning the CRTC's Wind decision, the feds said in effect that the Canadian ownership rules the CRTC enforces are bad for Canadians as individuals and shield the oligopolists from the competition they should rightly be exposed to. The Wind decision was about wireless, but I think the principle is going to apply across the board. The feds have promised a rewrite of the rules to put a legal framework under their decision. I'll be very interested to see it.

I suggest we do our part to get federal politicians on the right side of this issue, no matter what party they belong to. I think this transcends party politics. Write your own MP to let him know how you feel about the CRTC, protectionism, and Bell's UBB extortion. Let them know that this will be an issue in the next federal election whenever it takes place. And it _will_ be an issue because we will make it one. I'm pretty sure of that.