I’ve been lamenting the state of Canadian telecommunications for quite a while now, but today marks a real significant step backwards for this country’s telecom industry.
Rogers, a major Canadian internet service provider, has decided to limit their once-unlimited service to 60 gigabytes per month, and charge users a fee of up to $5 for each additional gigabyte they download (up to a maximum of $25).
While Rogers defines this as download capping, it’s really just a $25 rate increase for their users who are getting the most out of the service they provide. It’s a cash grab, plain and simple.
Bell’s not doing much better, as Michael Geist points out. It looks like Bell has extended its traffic shaping (where the ISP limits certain types of traffic, such as BitTorrent) to companies that resell Bell bandwidth — which the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) had ordered Bell not to do in order to maintain competitiveness in the ISP market.
These, however, are merely symptoms of a much more malignant problem. The real issue is that telecommunications’ major players compete only with each other — and even then, competition is hardly fierce.
Take the “system access fee” charged by mobile phone carriers in Canada. Most people have been led to believe it’s some sort of government fee that pays for network towers or something similiar — nope, it’s just a standardized fee that’s been made up by the telecoms and goes directly into their pockets.
While these issues are currently merely a financial inconvenience for consumers, the real risk is that ISPs are deciding what and how much we are allowed to download on the internet based solely on maximizing their profits.
Endeavours such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)’s distribution of content through BitTorrent is directly threatened by both traffic shaping and download caps, due to the fact that Rogers and Bell offer their own content distribution channels.
Ultimately, that’s what this is all about — who makes the decision about how content gets to you, and what that content ends up being. Among the G8 in 2006, Canada had the highest rate of subscription to broadband internet service (at 70% of all households) — which will hopefully mean more than just increased revenue for Canadian ISPs.
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March 28th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Brace yourselves for more bad news. So long as these companies have free rein to stick it to the public they will continue to jack up rates and reduce access. To my way of thinking the three largest criminal organizations in this country are a) the big banks b) the big drug companies c) the big telecommunication firms. And the common denominator among all three is that they are federally regulated which means that their underhanded practices are abetted by the bureaucracies that are supposed to serve as the public watchdog.
March 31st, 2008 at 8:00 am
I think banks provide an interesting analogy for telecom in Canada — until very recently there was very little competition among banks. Interest rates for things like savings accounts were unabashedly awful, and putting your money in a savings account was pretty much just a waste of time.
It wasn’t until online-/telephone-only banks started showing up and providing consumers with an alternative that the major banks started having to really compete, and offer their customers similar fee reductions and better interest rates.
In a sense, we can’t blame the companies themselves, as a company’s main interest, of course, is to make money. You’re right that it’s government regulation that must step in to ensure that companies can make money without infringing on the rights of the consumer.