Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UBB overturned - Canada no longer biggest internet loser.

thestar.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 83 posts

Re: UBB overturned - Canada no longer biggest internet loser.

#31

Post by memetichazard »

I'm annoyed that I didn't even know about UBB until earlier today, when I stumbled across Reddit Montreal and saw something about the organization of a protest.

Then again I'm getting all my news from here and Slashdot these days - haven't watched any TV in ages.

My ISP already posted up new rates conforming to UBB - if it does get overturned, I hope they'll return to the old rates: $29 a month for unlimited bandwidth (soft capped at 100GB). I'm due for renewal at the end of this month, so there's not much time to figure out if I need to be switching to TekSavvy.

Somewhat offtopic - I never visited Reddit except when it was linked via posts on Hacker News, and I'd always heard complaints that HN was becoming Reddit, but finding out today that they have forums for my city and other interesting things like a fitness subforum - why did I never go there earlier?

Re: UBB overturned - Canada no longer biggest internet loser.

#33

Post by Cyndre »

gamble wrote: post #8

The second half of this article reads like it was written by Bell or Rogers. The problem with UBB is not caps, per se, but the fact that the caps were absurdly small and overage fees grossly exceeded the cost of bandwidth. Not to mention that they were introduced at the same time as Netflix launched in Canada, and the providers' own TV-over-IP services were exempt. I dumped my $120/mo Bell Expressvu subscription last…

I definatly agree, wrote an article about it already - http://adamdomoney.posterous.com/bandwidth-problem-metered-g...

To sum it up - Extra bandwidth does cost money, but $2 a gig is outlandish. If the crtc is to be involved, it should be involved in regulating the price - maybe a $20 access fee and $.25 per gig.

Re: UBB overturned - Canada no longer biggest internet loser.

#35

Post by rfugger »

AgentConundrum wrote: post #29
gamble wrote: post #8

The second half of this article reads like it was written by Bell or Rogers. The problem with UBB is not caps, per se, but the fact that the caps were absurdly small and overage fees grossly exceeded the cost of bandwidth. Not to mention that they were introduced at the same time as Netflix launched in Canada, and the providers' own TV-over-IP services were exempt. I dumped my $120/mo Bell Expressvu subscription last…

The second half of this article reads like it was written by Bell or Rogers. Indeed. There were a few lines which particularly stood out to me as having been written by someone who doesn't really get the situation: > To encourage competition, major telecom operators that have spent heavily on infrastructure are required to lease bandwidth on their networks to small providers. I get that the system is maintained by th…

I agree that the caps were low and the overage rates seemed high, but it's not actually about the incremental cost of delivering the next gigabyte, it's about the cost of building an infrastructure that can handle hundreds of thousands of people using Netflix all at once at peak capacity. That's an entirely different calculation.

Also, at Bell you can buy 40GB extra for $5 if you pay in advance, which equals $0.125/GB.

http://www.bell.ca/shopping/popups/personal/internet/usage_e...

Re: UBB overturned - Canada no longer biggest internet loser.

#36

Post by rfugger »

gamble wrote: post #21
cal5k wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's safe to say that, with two major reversals in a year, the CRTC has lost any credibility it may have had (although it did not have much to lose). My vote would be for dissolution - maybe then they can create a regulator that actually employs people who understand what they're regulating.

They know what they're doing. The problem is that they're biased. It's fundamentally the same issue that plagues financial regulation. The people who are the most qualified to understand the technological and regulatory issues are the most biased, because almost by necessity they're products of the same industry they're supposed to regulate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Re: UBB overturned - Canada no longer biggest internet loser.

#37

Post by rfugger »

pyre wrote: post #25
warrenwilkinson wrote: post #10

I don't understand what happened. Why was the government able to set internet rates at all? Is there a monopoly here or not? Why weren't we (I'm Canadian) paying per usage before -- was it a law or did a flat rate grow from convienience?

You can reference the diagram in my post here (and the more detailed one in the response to my post): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2158888 This was mostly about Bell's ability to bring UBB to bear on the 3rd party ISPs that are leasing their lines (and thereby forcing all of those ISPs' customers onto a usage-based-billing model). Thought if you read that full thread you'll see that there's was a bit of debate…

Right, so this decision changes nothing for Bell's own customers, who will still face UBB, unless competition from 3rd party ISPs forces Bell to change its billing structure.

Re: UBB overturned - Canada no longer biggest internet loser.

#38

Post by reedF211 »

jeffreyrusso wrote: post #7

In some ways, I'm envious of Canada's swift reversal of this horrible idea. In the US, we wouldn't have the populist outcry to force action, and even if we did, it would be met with only a token change to the legislation that would succeed at shutting most people up.

No need to be envious, threat of an election is a powerful motivator. Liberals are itching to bring the government down and have a new election, there are rumors that the opposition is gonna bring the government down in late-march/early April. Conservatives don't want to be on the wrong side of the public opinion on a populist issue like this going into a potential election. This is pure politics at work. I hate to be cynical but if an election did not look imminent I doubt the government would have acted so quickly.

Re: UBB overturned - Canada no longer biggest internet loser.

#40

Post by AgentConundrum »

rfugger wrote: post #35
AgentConundrum wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second half of this article reads like it was written by Bell or Rogers. Indeed. There were a few lines which particularly stood out to me as having been written by someone who doesn't really get the situation: > To encourage competition, major telecom operators that have spent heavily on infrastructure are required to lease bandwidth on their networks to small providers. I get that the system is maintained by th…

I agree that the caps were low and the overage rates seemed high, but it's not actually about the incremental cost of delivering the next gigabyte, it's about the cost of building an infrastructure that can handle hundreds of thousands of people using Netflix all at once at peak capacity. That's an entirely different calculation. Also, at Bell you can buy 40GB extra for $5 if you pay in advance, which equals $0.125/G…

Absolutely, and I'll freely admit that I don't know how to calculate that. I made a major assumption in my last post, that I'll explain here:

Most quotes I've heard recently put the cost of bandwidth at around 1-2c/GB. I assumed, quite possibly erroneously and I'll go hunting for the source in a moment to confirm/refute said assumption, that when TekSavvy's CEO said that a conservative estimate (read: "highest reasonable estimated price") of bandwidth could be 30c/GB, I was assuming that he was taking things like administrative costs and possibly infrastructure costs into consideration. I made this assumption because of the extreme disparity between the two cost points - 1c/GB from some versus 30c/GB from him.

I realize that I didn't make this clear in my original post - I didn't even hint at it, actually - so I apologize for that.

Also, when I just now checked my wording in my original post, I noticed that you edited your comment to include a back-of-the-napkin estimate of Bell's incremental cost of delivery to be around 13c/GB. In my opinion, this only strengthens my assumption, since I sincerely doubt Bell would provide additional bandwidth for less than cost.

Looking at Bell's website right now, I see that their "Performance" plan in Ontario lists 6mbps speed with a 25GB cap for $31.95 per month.

Using your calculation of cost of bandwidth being 13c/GB, this means that full utilization of the cap would cost them $3.25 per month, leaving $28.70 for administrative costs and upgrading.

In a completely unfair comparison, I'll mention that Rogers charges me $6.95 per month (last I checked, anyway) as a usage fee/basic fee/system access fee. Let's nearly double that up to $12.72 (to make the next calculation easier) and call that the cost of doing business (tech support, paper pushing, general administration). This brings the total up to $15.97 a month, which is HALF of what Bell charges for this plan.

Bell then gets to choose how much of their 100% profit they want to use to upgrade their network, and how much they want to use to give their CEO a raise.

As far as the overage is concerned, let's note that when I called bandwidth costs 13c, that was on the assumption that Bell made no profit from their "insurance" option. Anyone who doesn't pay insurance gets to pay $2/GB, of which at least $1.87 is pure profit. Their overage would be 1538% of cost - a nice markup.

Edit: I just noticed[1] that the true cost of this plan is actually $41.95, but they offer $5 off for the first twelve months and an additional $5/mo discount to be used towards their satellite service. I'm not going to bother doing more calculations, but I thought it was worth noting.

[1] http://www.bell.ca/shopping/jsp/pageblock_styles/Pricing/fle...

(I had to disable JavaScript to get that link. The JS-Enabled version requires you to drill down two links to get the full details to appear, so it was impossible to get a direct link to the JS-Enabled version of these details)

Post reply on HN