Coming soon to a country near you...

[Mr S]

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200GB to 25GB: Canada gets first, bitter dose of metered Internet
By Matthew Lasar | Last updated about 23 hours ago

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.

This is going to hurt

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."

You need "protection"

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.


TekSavvy's DSL rates: now and after March 1
Very questionable

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

[The_Adventurer]

I doubt something like this is going to overtake the world. In Korea, you get 100Mbps connection and unlimited bandwidth for about $10 USD per month, and they are only trying to make it faster, and give more, not cut their own throats.

[Mr S]

I doubt something like this is going to overtake the world. In Korea, you get 100Mbps connection and unlimited bandwidth for about $10 USD per month, and they are only trying to make it faster, and give more, not cut their own throats.

It's hard to say what the future will be for the Internet but from what I have been researching behind the scenes there is a great push for the Internet to change from it's current form to something else where individual governments and corporations have more control over it and its contents. I don't think the Internet will continue to exist in its current form, it will be very different 10 years from now.

There are people in the Philippines talking about metering the Internet and I'm sure other counties are considering it also. It won't happen overnight, but it will be a slow process over a number of years. There will be countries like Canada that will test the waters and depending on how that fares then more may follow.

Remember most corporate online media in the old days was pay then it became free and now they are moving back to a pay scheme again. The Internet is too free and unregulated at the moment and the powers would prefer that not to continue...

It's all about control in the end...

[ExpeditionSailor]

Right now, there's a huge fight going on in Canada over metered Internet, or Usage-Based Billing (UBB).

Over 400,000 people have signed an anti-UBB petition at stopthemeter.ca http://stopthemeter.ca/ and tens of thousands more have e-mailed their elected representatives and the Prime Minister. The government has told the CRTC (Canadian Radio Television Communications Commission) that it is going to reverse approval of the decision to allow Bell and Rogers (the country's two largest ISPs) to start UBB. The only reason why the government has bothered to do this, in my estimation, is that an election is looming, and it knows it will lose votes if it doesn't.

I predict that the reprieve for internet users will only be temporary. Once the election is over, or the threat of one passes (the current government has only a minority position in the House of Commons), Bell and Rogers will be allowed to do what they want.

Bell and Rogers say they're trying to use UBB to reduce the numbers of people who 'hog the bandwidth'. Horseshit. Bell and Rogers have not invested properly in internet infrastructure at all, not since day one. By saying so, they have created a non-existent boogeyman to divert attention away from the real issues. Then they try to tell consumers they need more money to pay for service improvements. When it costs them maybe one or two cents per GB to handle traffic, but they want $1 - 2 per GB if you go over the limit, it should tell anyone with an inkling of intelligence that there's going to be a shitload of profit, and precious little improvement in service.

They really have four aims here: gouge consumers in a market devoid of real competition, kill off their competitors, especially streaming services like Netflix, force people to buy their expensive and worthless cable TV and satellite packages, and finally, kill off free speech by making the Internet so expensive that only the rich can afford to use it for more than fleeting amounts of time.

This sort of bullshit is one of many reasons why I'm seriously considering emigrating from Canada. For chrissakes, you can get a 160Mbps connection in Japan dirt cheap with no caps on data, but the best you can get in Canada is 7Mbps (and that's a big maybe) for $75.00 - 100.00 per month with caps on data.

[Winston]

Whatever happened to that bill in Europe that was threatening to censor the internet and only allow people to see corporate approved sites? Did that ever pass? What was the outcome of that?

[momopi]

I have no issues with ISP's that impose a reasonable & high monthly usage cap, while maintaining the high broadband speed in local service. i.e. Comcast has a 250 GB/month cap and I think that's quite reasonable for today, but it should be adjusted UPWARDS over time (not downwards) as technology improves speed and increase size of data.

Bandwidth hogs do exist (they're not mythical unicorns) where a very small % of users consume a very large % of the total bandwidth. I worked in IT field for over a decade and can see it clearly from usage reports. You'd be shocked at what companies (and their sys admins) let their employees get away with. When I managed Altiris Recovery Solution servers, we had guys downloading GB's of MP3's and movies at work and actually storing them on the company servers with daily backup. One guy's excuse was that he had to fly to London office often and it was boring on the plane, so he needs to download (pirated) MP3's and movies at work to watch on the company laptop while he's on the plane. >_> I'm like, um... let me give you an external HDD, please move your bootlegged crap off my server, thank you very much. Oh and, please stop downloading bootlegged movie rips at 8am in the morning, you're slowing everyone else down.

Whatever happened to that bill in Europe that was threatening to censor the internet and only allow people to see corporate approved sites? Did that ever pass? What was the outcome of that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship

Each country has its own laws on what is legal or illegal. Check the list above. i.e. in Denmark >3,800 internet sites are filtered/blocked by the local ISP by law.