Words By Nowak | Metered internet a colossal failure

By Peter Nowak

The final word on usage-based internet billing in Canada came down yesterday and it’s pretty much as everyone expected: so long unlimited internet, it was good knowing you.

The issue, in brief, if you’re not familiar with it: small internet providers lease the networks of big companies such as Bell and Telus to sell their own internet plans. But while the big companies like to set modest usage caps and charge extra for more, the smaller guys have been selling big buckets, if not unlimited. Bell asked our regulator, the CRTC, to allow it to implement those same caps on its smaller wholesale customers and, after much ado, the company got what it wanted. The small guys are therefore going to see their ability to offer unlimited usage buckets severely curtailed.

The CRTC did throw the small ISPs a bone yesterday – it gave them a 15% discount on whatever the big guys want to charge them for usage. By most accounts, that might be enough to keep some of the smaller ISPs in business, but it doesn’t give them much room to differentiate their services or make any actual money.

Interestingly, there was an op/ed in The Globe and Mail yesterday from David Beers, editor of The Tyee website. The headline pretty much said it: “A metered internet is a regulatory failure.”

I’d go a step further and suggest that by allowing this to happen, the CRTC has actually failed to do its job as enforcer of the Telecommunications Act and it has failed to follow the government’s 2006 policy direction. Read more »

--
Read more at wordsbynowak.com