Category Archives: Internet

I recently received and posted a comment from Phil Daumier, editor of the advocacy site Stop the Cap! Since comments tend to get buried, I decided to post it here as a free-standing item (trusting this will pass as friendly promotion rather than infringement).

Phil has an important message to convey – all the more topical given the story posted on theirsite yesterday: Confirmed: Charter Cable About to Ruthlessly Enforce Usage Caps. These are the Charter caps as they stand at the moment:

• Base Service: 100GB per month
• Plus & Max: 250GB per month
• Ultra: 500GB per month

I’d say these caps should make Canadians green with envy, when compared to the Draconian limits imposed by Rogers and other Canadian ISPs. Rogers’ four lower tiers (of six) are capped at 2, 15, 60 and 80 gigs respectively (see my earlier post here). OTOH, I see Charter staff are going after “violators” with a vengeance, not just over-charging for alleged over-use, but potentially threatening to cut off their subs in certain circumstances. Read the rest of this entry →

[This is an excerpt from my November Comment piece for Telemanagement, published under the title Data Caps: Traffic Management Tools or Easy Money?]

The anti-competitive twist

Unlike the other four tiers, Rogers’ Lite and Extreme tiers underwent a dramatic and widely covered change this past July. The caps on them were decreased – from 25 to 15 GB for Lite, a drop of 40%; and 95 to 80 GB for Extreme, a drop of 16%. On July 22, Rogers announced the lower caps and in the case of Extreme, a higher speed. A number of commentators drew a causal connection between the July 22 announcement by Rogers and the announcement four days earlier by Netflix that its streaming video service was coming to Canada.

A report in Telemanagement offered the view that Rogers could look forward to making more money from subs who decided to upgrade to a more expensive tier in order to keep the higher cap they once would have enjoyed. The same report also argued that Rogers was making a play to keep its subs away from Netflix – exactly the kind of cheap, over-the-top platform that’s threatening cable’s online future. Read the rest of this entry →

Part the nth. Here’s the late lamented Part 5 of my data caps series. I’m not sure how helpful this numbering system is in capturing the big picture, but I think five is enough for this round.

This post continues my analysis of Rogers’ caps and rate card, and adds a more general look at the myths served up by the industry as to why subs should pay on a usage basis.

We begin with an interesting (anonymous) comment I got about burn rates…

Not so fast!

Last time we covered two of the four Rogers access tiers (Ultra-Lite and Express) and the effects on burn rate of data caps and line speed. Then, using tracking data from Ipsos Reid, we estimated that Canadians now spend on average about 85 hours a month online, or 2.9 hours a day. We took average time online as a proxy for “customer needs.” (In its 2010 CMR, the CRTC notes that as of 2009, Anglophone Canadians were spending 14.5 hours online weekly, or about 2.1 hours daily: CMR chart, p.100.) Read the rest of this entry →

In two previous posts (here and here), we discussed bandwidth cost estimates, especially in the form of data caps, and their overall relation to the CRTC’s mandate to protect the public interest. The story continues, with a few more plot twists…

Stefan Kühn

This is nominally the third segment in what may turn out to be four, though new gems keep popping out of the woodwork. (Btw, I’ve decided to go with “data cap” rather than “bit cap” since it’s clearer to most people and more accurate). My main aim is to show further evidence of the bankruptcy of the CRTC’s economic ITMP strategy, through an analysis of Rogers’ Internet rate card, along with data from the OECD and some press commentary.

Gobbledygook

Let’s start with my favorite linguistic hobby horse. One of the greatest obstacles to consumer protection is bafflegab, be it the product of sinister plots to pull the wool over our eyes or just plain stupidity. If you have no clue what you’re buying, then you’re buying a pig in a poke and you’re an ideal customer for an incumbent service provider, which will ARPU you till all the farm animals come home. In a survey it fielded earlier this year, the FCC found 80% of its respondents were unable to say how fast the broadband connection is in their own homes. Read the rest of this entry →

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The current issue of Scientific American, not exactly famous for its polemics, has some very unkind things to say about the current state of broadband:

“The average Canadian household has to pay an exorbitant amount of money for an Internet connection that the rest of the industrial world would find mediocre. … Broadband Internet service in Canada is not just slower and more expensive than it is in tech-savvy nations such as South Korea and Japan; Canada has fallen behind infrastructure-challenged countries such as Portugal and Italy as well. Read the rest of this entry →

canada’s Internet traffic management regime: find the hogs, set the dogs on them, poke until they go back to watching cable TV

I promised to interleave new material into the original piece I wrote for Telemanagement on broadband costs (now online). But I found myself writing a whole other post, so here’s part 2 of the original, with a couple minor edits (and a couple funny pictures!). Part 3 is on its way … OECD data to boggle the mind! Rogers lowers bit caps! Unjust discrimination alleged! All new episode!

Sleuthing out costs

Let’s stick with bit caps as an example of why the large ISPs are happy to keep you in the dark. Bell offers a “Performance” tier which at 6 Mbps downlink is the closest option to what I get from my reseller, National Capital Freenet, at 5 Mbps. Not only is this Bell tier more expensive per month than NCF’s. It also comes with a stunning extra feature: a bit cap of 25 GB a month. And equally astonishing, the over-usage charge is $2 a gigabyte. Meanwhile, NCF has a cap of 200 GB, which comes with an over-usage charge that’s 75% less than Bell’s – 50 cents/GB. Read the rest of this entry →

I'm pasting in below my October Comment for Telemanagement, which will be published shortly (now online). I'm splitting it into two parts since it runs over 1,800 words, though I tend to have doubts about the assumption that visitors don't like to read more than a few hundred words in a single post. My Google Analytics says average time on the site is creeping up, so maybe readers are getting used to my verbose style.

The OECD ranks Canada as the 6th most expensive broadband jurisdiction among its 30 member countries, based on average monthly price per advertised Mbit/s (adjusted for purchasing power).

The discrepancies get worse – i.e. Canada gets more expensive – as we go from lower to higher speed tiers. This trend is confirmed in the Berkman Center’s Final Report to the FCC (Next Generation Connectivity), which combined datasets from the OECD, TeleGeography and PointTopic for its custom pricing analysis. For next-generation speeds (over 35 Mbps), Canadian retail prices are the second highest out of the 19 countries with NGN offerings – only the United States is worse (Berkman, pp. 73-77). Read the rest of this entry →