Reactions to the UBB decision: The capacity model, competition, and a call from Shaw

Image from Kozzi Inc. on Flickr

I'd be caught in a lie if I were to write that this week has been anything less than hectic. I'm not sure exactly how I handled this amount of media attention and policy analysis this past spring, but today it was all on adrenaline. But now that things have calmed down a bit, it's time to take a sober look back at today's events.

Tuesday the CRTC published this thing, and it made waves. OpenMedia.ca's Executive Director Steve Anderson went to Toronto and spent an hour in a room, without access to a phone or Internet, as he participated in the stakeholder lock-up. I (Lindsey Pinto—OpenMedia.ca's Communications Manager) stayed in Vancouver and played the role of mission control. My phone rang almost continuously all day, but paused mockingly for a few minutes at 1 PM Pacific, the time Steve and the other official stakeholders were released back into the world.

At the moment the silence was broken by a ring, I answered: "What's the decision?"

I didn't pause to check who called and was lucky that Steve's voice was the one that came through the airwaves and said, "It's capacity-based. Higher tariffs than we want. But we got it."

The conversation continued a little while longer but our sentences remained fragmented. The press release went out, we posted it to the website and social media to alert our supporters, and then I ran out of the office toward my first broadcast interview of the day.

So What?

Tuesday's decision means that, while there's still a lot of work to be done to stop price-gouging, Big Telecom won't be able to impose metered billing on Canadians using their independent competitors. It also means that ridiculously low caps are far less likely to become the norm for the Internet in Canada.

We wanted and received a capacity-based pricing model: While the number of bytes passing through a link over the course of a day or month may bear some relationship to congestion on that link, it is the density of bits (on a per-second basis) that determines whether congestion will occur. Bell's volume-based costing model, on the other hand, derives its per-GB rate based on end user costs, not based on indie ISP aggregate costs, meaning that indie ISPs would pay more.

The costs that indie ISPs face in the wake of the CRTC's decision are still higher than we want them to be, but the model being used to calculate those costs is now much more reasonable. This is solid ground from which to continue the fight.

Moving forward, we're asking that the CRTC monitor the extent to which this decision encourages competition and lowers prices. This is a good first step, but we need stronger measures to prevent Big Telecom from price-gouging. We need to shift policy so everyone has affordable choices for Internet access.

Now we're asking Canadians to pledge to make the switch from Big Telecom at http://openmedia.ca/switch. If enough of us take the pledge, we'll be able to show that Canadians want affordable and independent choices for Internet access. OpenMedia.ca will bring Canadian voices to Ottawa to push for policy that enables a diversity of ISPs and a more open, affordable Internet.

The Call From Shaw

This was a surprise. At first, I thought they were calling to yell at me.

I wouldn't blame them for it: All day I had been using them as an example of what Big Telecom will do when there's no competitive check—when widespread UBB was first introduced, Shaw spared no time lowering their caps and raising their prices. After Canadians revolted, Shaw tried to escape their PR nightmare by holding customer consultations on pricing packages.

They didn't yell. They didn't even recognize my name. After a great deal of Internet service frustration earlier this year, I ended up reluctantly using Shaw as my ISP. Today, they called me to try to retain my business.

A pleasant-sounding rep named Jason explained that, for just under a month (coincidentally the same amount of time we knew the CRTC decision was coming), Shaw had been calling up their "long-time" customers and offering them better deals. Why? This is Shaw's response to the threat of competition.

If I hadn't already believed that the presence of indie ISPs alone plays a role in making the Internet more affordable, this would turn me in that direction.

Onward

Usage-based billing, or Internet metering, is an issue that affects all Canadians. Diversity of carriers means that more Canadians can have unlimited access to everything the Internet has to offer.

Let's keep moving. Keep spreading the word about the possibilities of more open and affordable Internet access; pledge to make the switch, and get excited for the future.