Category Archives: Bell Canada
Fine Print, Market Power and the Big ISPs
This post is a merge-and-rewrite of my earlier 2-parter, Why are incumbents so afraid of being truthful? My thanks to Tim Wilson, publisher and managing editor of Telemanagement, for reprinting this in his next issue – containing opinions with which the publisher does not necessaily agree! I’ll be providing other comment pieces to Tim over the coming months. Telemanagement is a great resource. Check it out here. And past the jump, listen to a terrific speech given earlier this month by Larry Lessig on America’s Internet woes.
The other day I got a piece of unsolicited mail from Bell Canada, promoting its Novatel U998 wireless modem, aka the Turbo Stick. It runs at speeds “up to” 21 Mbps.
The front of the card talks excitedly about “One extra-large, super-fast, anytime, anywhere connection – to go.” The back of the card then throws the Legal Dept’s wet blanket all over the deal, in nearly 200 words of fine print, enough for a short blog post. Sign up now and you’ll get a $20 Starbucks Gift Card – free!
Let’s start with this moronic giveaway, the world’s second most annoying marketing gimmick after Enter to Win. Here’s the math.
The card says you can get the Stick free if you sign up for a 3-yr term (to save the $174.95 retail hardware cost). The minimum plan goes for $30/month – but that’s with a Bell Bundle and without the extras. No bundle: according to footnote #2, that’s $35 over 36 months or $1,260. Then add the $35 activation fee and ballpark the 911 fee at $1/month (“Subject to change without notice”), making the total $1,331. If you don’t happen to know about the paper bill surcharge, add another $2/month for the 36 months: $1,403. Add taxes: $1,571.36.
10 minutes later, an additional $3,000
How do you like that Venti Frappuccino now? The Starbucks giveaway represents 1.3% of the value of what you’re committing yourself to on a 3-year plan. According to the baristas in my Starbucks office, the average customer ticket is about $4 a pop. So this free gift might last you a week, on a deal that commits you to Bell for 156 weeks. Read the rest of this entry
Why are incumbents so afraid of being truthful? (part 2)
How fast is your broadband?
Six reasons North Americans are going to stay trapped in connectivity hell
#1 – Rates. Retail rates for broadband, wireless and cable-TV aren’t regulated. How about some form of re-regulation of wholesale and/or retail rates? Any such initiatives would land the CRTC in a never-ending morass of appeals to Cabinet or the Federal Court, or both. Too bad incumbents aren’t nearly as good at their day jobs – providing retail communication services – as they are at litigation.
#2 – Competition. Competition is almost non-existent – except the inter-modal competition between the duopoly from hell, the telcos and cablecos. Now even that bad thing is going to get worse. Thanks to its industry-wide DOCSIS 3.0 platform, cable providers are becoming the leading providers of ultra-high-speed connectivity – i.e. in the range of 50 to 100 Mbps. I remember way back in 1998-99, cable led the telcos in penetration, briefly, by a margin of nearly 10 to 1, in both Canada and the US. Now that xDSL is running its course, and FTTx is way more expensive than cable upgrades, Rogers and Comcast may soon start looking like the territorial monopolies they were in the good old days. Read the rest of this entry
Why are incumbents so afraid of being truthful? (part 1)
The Novatel U998 wireless modem "Up to" 21 Mbps
Passive eyeballs staring blankly at the TV screen from potato-like, humanoid forms draped across the couch are part of the cool business models no longer. Welcome to the Age of the User Experience. Unless you happen to be an ISP.
The other day I got another piece of junk unsolicited mail from Bell, this one promoting its Novatel U998 wireless modem, aka the Turbo Stick. (Apparently you are deemed by Canada Post to have “solicited” a piece of mail as long as it’s addressed to you as “The Resident.”)
The front of the card talks excitedly about “One extra-large, super-fast, anytime, anywhere connection – to go.” The back of the card then throws the Legal Dept’s wet blanket all over the deal, in nearly 200 words of fine print – enough for a short blog post. Just in case you actually read all the footnotes (which among other things make it clear the Stick does not work anywhere), take heart. Sign up now and you’ll get a $20 Starbucks Gift Card – free! Read the rest of this entry
Battle of the broadband studies (3)
If this is “affordable,” I’m giving up my citizenship.
The recent study entitled Lagging or Leading: the state of Canada’s broadband infrastructure was financed by Bell Canada, Bell Aliant, Cogeco, Rogers, SaskTel, Shaw and TELUS. It says over and over that, once you root out the incompetent studies, Canada looks great, belying those over-simpified headlines about a “crisis” in the house. It returns often to how affordable broadband is in Canada:
“Canadians have access to some of the most affordable services, while also benefiting from some of the world’s fastest connection speeds for both wireline and wireless broadband services” (p.4).
Leave aside the sophistry in disconnecting affordability and speed (we have some of the former and also some of the latter; how about affordable and fast?). And let’s not quibble about USD PPP, weighted averages or whether anybody at the Berkman Center can run a decent regression analysis. Let’s just look at a few humdrum retail prices: what subscribers in France and Canada are actually paying today for broadband on its own and in bundles. Read the rest of this entry
Memo to Michael Hennessy on the CRTC, broadband data and ICTs
Dear Michael – I’ve just had a look at the last two blog posts on your page: “Hard rain falling on CRTC” and “Let’s spend as much on ICT as Obama is spending on cash for clunkers.” I have a couple of thoughts I couldn’t pack into tweets.
The first thing to strike me was the post you wrote on August 11 on Canadian spending on ICTs got zero comments, whereas the piece you posted Thursday on blowing up the CRTC is at 38 comments and counting. It’s not just the number, it’s the tone: comments full of vitriolic ad hominems about other ad hominems (“Shut your Pie Hole…”). Ironic on a blog written by a corporate guy who lets the dogs run free and isn’t embarrassed to say he owes his living to the Evil Regulator (okay, that was an ad hominem, but bear with me). Read the rest of this entry
Broadband politics in Ottawa and Washington (Part 2)
If you’ve really been paying attention, you may have noticed Bell Canada is trying to institutionalize user-based billing, UBB, by making 60 gigabytes the bandwidth cap that defines the Internet experience.
This wouldn’t be such a big story were it not for the fact they want this cap extended to all of us who get our DSL in Ontario and Quebec from a reseller. If you really must know, clicking here will take you to the CRTC page where you can download the Bell tariff filing in question, TN 7181, a stunning piece of technocratic obfuscation that guarantees any “public” comment will be pretty much confined to the Beltway boys. The substance of this anti-competitive grab for money, and the closed-door way in which we handle these issues in Canada (witness said tariff filing), are a national embarrassment.
The TWC blowout
Meanwhile, down south, another happy-go-lucky ISP, Time Warner Cable, has been trying to pull the same stunt – though at least the damage they wanted to inflict was confined to their own customers. And they had the guts to tell their subs publicly, on a company blog no less, that they intended to screw them with UBB. And that story has had a more or less happy ending: they had to back off, after a shitstorm of public – and political – outrage. And therein lie the two reasons why our American friends will win back their once glorious position as Internet leaders – and Canada won’t.
- One: the Yanks conduct these mission-critical debates about broadband in a very public way.
- Two: they’ve stopped pretending they’re still “global leaders” in broadband.
TWC began doing “tests” of bandwidth caps in Beaumont, Texas on June 5, 2008. Maybe they were actually testing something, like the ability of the CMTS equipment at their headend to do the metering thing. But it doesn’t require much ingenuity to see that what they were really doing was floating a trial balloon – i.e. testing public opinion. The test didn’t go well. The criticisms began before the tests began and covered a remarkably wide spectrum of opinion – from the usual suspects like the geeks at Ars Technica, all the way to Business Week, not exactly a bastion of anti-capitalist, pro-consumer advocacy.
Fast forward to April, when TWC announced it was planning to expand its knee-capping bit-capping trials to several other markets in Texas, North Carolina and New York. Overnight, the trial balloon turned into a lead balloon. In a brazen, or maybe brave, attempt to assuage furious customers, COO Landel Hobbs posted an open letter explaining why tiered broadband is such a great deal for customers, plus TWC is so broke, bla bla. Then on April 16, the company caved. In his public statement, CEO Glenn Britt took the usual don’t-blame-us position when he said it was “clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans…” Yeah, our plan was great, too bad you customers, journalists, public interest advocates, regulators, politicians, webheads and bandwidth hogs are just too fuckin dim-witted to understand how great it was. Read the rest of this entry
