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Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Internet Losers.

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Re: Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Internet Losers.

#131

Post by Locke1689 »

axod wrote: post #61
jacquesm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a reason why lots of technical people from Canada seek to find their fortune in the United States.

Is the US really much better? As we saw earlier in the week from Netflix, slower average bandwidth than Canada... hardly any competition and so on. If you want decent internet connectivity, move to Europe or Japan or something. They're rolling out 100mbps broadband in the UK.

That graph was a useless piece of shit. I have a feeling there's a bimodal distribution there, but can't even get a feeling for it because the graph was so poorly made.

Seriously, a mean without a standard deviation? That's a failing grade in a first year statistics course.

Re: Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Internet Losers.

#132

Post by djorgensen »

pyre wrote: post #114
xxpor wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American, I'm not very familiar with the telco situation in Canada. Is Bell related to AT&T (the old one)? Do they have a approved monopoly over all phone service, ala AT&T way back when (by this I mean do they carry all calls at some point, even if its only as a wholesale co)?

As it was when I was living in Toronto, the last-mile lines are owned by either Bell (DSL/Phone) or Rogers (Cable). Both of those companies are the Canadian telecom heavy-weights. Rogers does: cable tv, ip phone over cable (ala Comcast in the US), cable internet (which IIRC it own the only coax last-mile lines in the areas where it is a monopoly -- I think that west Canada has a different cable monopoly), the only gs…

Out west, it is essentially the same except Telus owns most all of the phone/DSL/CDMA infrastructure, and Shaw owns all the cable infrastructure.

Re: Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Internet Losers.

#133

Post by ergo98 »

pyre wrote: post #102
ergo98 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The telecommunications situation in Canada is terrible. Your complaint is that some rural area has poor service. Is that not the case around the globe ? I've had high-speed cable service since long before it was available in most urban centers in the US (much less the rest of the world), including when I lived in a mid-sized town. Here in a suburb of Toronto I've had top-notch, leading-the-bandwidth (15Mbps around t…

> Here in a suburb of Toronto I've had top-notch, > leading-the-bandwidth (15Mbps around the clock) high > speed for a low cost for almost a decade. Toronto is the "New York City" of Canada. Do you look to New York City to be an exact replication of how the entire US looks, works, and functions? This reeks of "Windows never gave me a BSOD therefore all of the people that say they've had a BSOD are lying"-type of argu…

My anecdote was...anecdotal. Nonetheless Canada's broadband deployment rates are in the top quarter of the OECD, and it regularly ranks very well in bandwidth in the same comparisons. Empirically Canada isn't doing so terrible.

Really? I was under the impression that Bell was just selling access to their last-mile infrastructure

Your understanding is wrong. If TekSavvy were just terminating the loop, Bell wouldn't even have the technical ability to do anything to restrict or harm them.

The situation here is that Teksavvy has access to bulk wholesale Nexxia (Bell's backbone) rates that were forced upon Bell by the CRTC. Again, this was an agreement that was established when Bell was overwhelmingly dominant in certain areas of Canada. If those wholesale rates are "fair", however, then clearly Teksavvy can just arrange with another provider to handle that service. The reason they can't, of course, is that the rates they were paying were essentially monopoly subsidized.

Re: Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Internet Losers.

#134

Post by axod »

Locke1689 wrote: post #131
axod wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the US really much better? As we saw earlier in the week from Netflix, slower average bandwidth than Canada... hardly any competition and so on. If you want decent internet connectivity, move to Europe or Japan or something. They're rolling out 100mbps broadband in the UK.

That graph was a useless piece of shit. I have a feeling there's a bimodal distribution there, but can't even get a feeling for it because the graph was so poorly made. Seriously, a mean without a standard deviation? That's a failing grade in a first year statistics course.

Fair enough, but my anecdotal evidence suggests broadband in the US is nothing to be proud of by any means.

Re: Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Internet Losers.

#135

Post by ergo98 »

jacquesm wrote: post #66
ergo98 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, again, what choice do they have? Twisted-pair sucks , actually, and Bell's monopoly is on dead technology. We only use it as a backup line in a worst case situation. We actually had a number of options, which is what we used for our primary line. Though I'm not even sure what your point is. If that were really true don't you think these ISPs would switch to those competitors with their 'competitive options' inste…

> Twisted-pair sucks, actually The reason we're having this debate is because twisted pair easily does 20MBit these days. > and Bell's monopoly is on dead technology. Not quite dead. Maybe not on par with fiber to the home, but not all that bad either. ITU G.992.5 Annex M: 24 Mbit/s down, 3.3 Mbit/s up. > Though I'm not even sure what your point is. I think we can agree on that :) ISPs on metered billing is going abo…

The reason we're having this debate is because twisted pair easily does 20MBit these days.

Easily? Hardly. Over an absurdly short distance from the switching station, with perfect copper, as a tech trial sure. In the real world most ADSL users find that their experience is nowhere near that.

ADSL sucks. ADSL has always sucked. It is a dead technology that is constantly simply being replaced.

We're having this discussion because Bell, due to their ILEC status, was forced into agreements that favored some businesses that pandered to, essentially, the "problem users" who were kicked off every other network. Teksavvy didn't go to ADSL because it's such a great technology. They went to it because the CRTC cleared a sweetheart deal for them.

Re: Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Internet Losers.

#136

Post by pyre »

ergo98 wrote: post #133
pyre wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here in a suburb of Toronto I've had top-notch, > leading-the-bandwidth (15Mbps around the clock) high > speed for a low cost for almost a decade. Toronto is the "New York City" of Canada. Do you look to New York City to be an exact replication of how the entire US looks, works, and functions? This reeks of "Windows never gave me a BSOD therefore all of the people that say they've had a BSOD are lying"-type of argu…

My anecdote was...anecdotal. Nonetheless Canada's broadband deployment rates are in the top quarter of the OECD, and it regularly ranks very well in bandwidth in the same comparisons. Empirically Canada isn't doing so terrible. Really? I was under the impression that Bell was just selling access to their last-mile infrastructure Your understanding is wrong. If TekSavvy were just terminating the loop, Bell wouldn't ev…

Is that really the reason why? I find it also possible that they haven't been able to setup the infrastructure to peer with other providers yet, as it seems they were only given 90 days before this went into affect. I don't know what sort of timeline is reasonable for them to be able to hook-up with other providers as I've never worked on that sort of infrastructure before.

Re: Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Internet Losers.

#137

Post by pyre »

Swannie wrote: post #125
pyre wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a number of issues here: 1) Does Bell really pay money for their peering arrangements? Is Bell paying for all of the bandwidth between their network and the rest of the Internet? Or are their peering arrangements much like other backbone providers' peering arrangements where it's a handshake and no money changes hands? Is the 'cost' that Bell says that it pays for outside internet access really the cost of…

1) Does it matter if they pay for their peering arrangements? (See who they peer with here: http://www.datacentermap.com/as/577_upstreams.html ). They still need to carry this traffic to a peering location. That's not free. They still need to support their peering agreements with staff & seriously expensive routers. Not free. They need to support the ISP's whose traffic they are carrying - arguably they ISP's have pa…

I think the issue with respect to Bell providing IPTV should be framed around whether they should be allowed to enter that market at all seeing as they have an unfair advantage over competitors. If ISPs can enter any market and just under-cut the existing players, then it we're basically stating that any content-provider on the internet needs to also be an ISP just in order to compete with the players that are just waiting to enter the market (as soon as someone else proves that there is a market).

Re: Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Internet Losers.

#138

Post by slavak »

citricsquid wrote: post #52
ronnier wrote: post #36

This really disturbs me. I just moved to Seattle where I signed up for Comcast internet. A couple of days later, my connection stopped working until I activated my account on comcast.com. I did, and the first thing I saw was High-Speed Internet Data Usage: 17% 43GB of 250GB They sure hide that fact when you signup, not that I have any options, as Comcast is the only provider where I live. This is a horrible direction…

Same here. I'm with BT in the UK and I'm on an unlimited* plan with a fair usage policy. This is fine by me, I held off downloading until night time (for both my own convenience and others) but because I had 2mb/s download and a Steam library of 200+ games, I figured I may as well DL my entire library at once. After a couple of days I'd downloaded over 300GB, one night I get an email saying blah blah fair usage cap h…

Wouldn't that be considered a breach of contract? I know that if this happened to me (Israel) the first thing I would do is call up my ISP and threaten a lawsuit unless they provide me the service I signed up for.

Re: Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Internet Losers.

#139

Post by ergo98 »

pyre wrote: post #136
ergo98 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My anecdote was...anecdotal. Nonetheless Canada's broadband deployment rates are in the top quarter of the OECD, and it regularly ranks very well in bandwidth in the same comparisons. Empirically Canada isn't doing so terrible. Really? I was under the impression that Bell was just selling access to their last-mile infrastructure Your understanding is wrong. If TekSavvy were just terminating the loop, Bell wouldn't ev…

Is that really the reason why? I find it also possible that they haven't been able to setup the infrastructure to peer with other providers yet, as it seems they were only given 90 days before this went into affect. I don't know what sort of timeline is reasonable for them to be able to hook-up with other providers as I've never worked on that sort of infrastructure before.

Yeah, that's the reason why. Just to be clear, Bell has been making their intentions clear for a long, long time. They were packet shaping "reseller" connectivity as long as two years ago.

There ARE DSL providers that locate hardware in Bell switching centers and don't use the Nexxia network. Primus is an example. Funny thing about Primus is that they, too, are implementing UBB, but it isn't because of Bell: It's because they don't want the ultra high throughput users that are being punted from TekSavvy from all migrating to their network.

Re: Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Internet Losers.

#140

Post by nl »

We have this in Australia.

Here at least the situation isn't too bad, because we have competitive resellers at the ISP level[1].

The ISPs compete on service, bandwidth, data limits and inclusions. For example, many (most?) ISPs arrange peering with video providers like Tivo so video streamed on their services don't count towards the data cap.

[1] There are laws to ensure that any ISP can install their equipment in the exchanges, or get access to the dominate telco's equipment at close-to-cost. Most of the time, these laws work, if slower than ideal.

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