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Steve CDM
What do you think of cell phone service in Canada?
Pro-Internet community,
We're hearing a lot about the Big Three cell phone giants' terrible treatment of customers, and about their plans to take more control of the market. We’re getting more active on this file as result: we at OpenMedia.ca are preparing a response to Big Telecom’s stranglehold on the cell phone market.
We met with the Industry Minister’s office last year and made it very clear that Canadians expect them to fix our broken telecom market. They seemed to hear us, but we’re worried that they may be poised to hand off newly-freed wireless spectrum to Big Telecom, thereby killing independent options for cell phone/mobile Internet service.
Categories: Steve Feeds
Why Canadians should be upset about the back door Internet price hike
In November, many in the pro-Internet community rightly celebrated the CRTC’s decision on usage-based billing (Internet metering)—it was a major milestone.
The Internet metering decision was fundamentally a step forward towards an open an affordable Internet in Canada. The structure and policy both make sense: the CRTC clearly made an attempt to apply a pricing model that is based on costs, and they rejected usage-based pricing outright.
The only issue is with the underlying infrastructure costs applied to independent Internet Service Providers. Indie ISPs now say Big Telecom (of course) has snuck punitive and greatly inflated costs into the CRTC’s new pricing model. They did this through complex policy submissions to the CRTC.
Categories: Steve Feeds
Industry minister’s office report back: Canadian voices echo through Parliament
OpenMedia.ca spoke with Industry Minister Christian Paradis’ office via teleconference earlier this fall. We also brought one of our public interest lawyers, David Fewer, from CIPPIC with us. We asked you to help set the agenda by filling out our pro-Internet survey and sharing your thoughts via our FacebookPage and on Twitter, and we did our best to hit as many of your points as possible. Our two-hour conversation was largely successful. One high point came when Paradis’ senior policy advisor indicated support for the idea of imposing financial penalties on internet openness violators.
I’m writing this blog to report back to you, the pro-Internet community, on the meeting’s details. Read on to learn more about how our industry minster’s office sees digital policy in Canada.
Categories: Steve Feeds
