I woke up this morning to the news on Michael Geist’s blog that the Canadian Association Of Internet Providers will file a Part VII application with the CRTC asking it to direct Bell Canada to cease and desist from throttling its wholesale Internet service. Their argument is:
“Bell’s traffic shaping measures have impaired the speed and performance of the wholesale ADSL access services that it provides to independent ISPs and other competitors, to the point where the quality of the service has been degraded beyond recognition.”
and
“it seeks to restrain anti-competitive behaviour on the part of Bell. Thus, the relief requested. . . is intended to ‘ensure the technological and competitive neutrality’ of the interconnection and and wholesale services provided by Bell to independent ISPs and to promote competition from new technologies that are enabled by the Internet and ADSL access technology.”
This hasn’t been posted onto the CRTC Website as of yet. But when it is, I’ll add a link to it.
Quite simply, this is a very positive development. The sad part is that it took an industry group to get this ball rolling rather than the politicians elected to deal with this sort of thing. (Industry Minister Jim Prentice, are you listening?)
UPDATE: There’s a plot twist to this story. The Globe And Mail is now reporting that CAIP has documents in its possession that indicate that Bell Canada on its Sympatico service is going to charge for access to the Internet on a per byte basis with no maximum cap to those charges:
“Included in the application is a document, dated Mar. 13, which CAIP says is an internal memo that was circulated among Bell employees. The document lays out a plan for Bell to phase out a maximum $30 charge that customers could incur for going over their 30 gigabytes of allotted bandwidth. Under the new plan, there would be no maximum over-use fee, meaning there would be “no monthly billing limit.””
Assuming that’s true, then logically people would bolt to independent ISP’s as many of them either have higher caps or they have no caps at all. Bell would need to stop that from happening, thus they throttle and they want to force ISP’s to build their own “last mile” connections to their customers. Talk about sneaky.
Is this the smoking gun that proves Bell is trying to kill of competition?
UPDATE #2: The full CRTC Filing has appeared on p2pnet.
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This entry was posted on April 4, 2008 at 7:53 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Canada, CRTC, Net Neutrality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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CAIP To CRTC: Deal With The Net Neutrality Issue, NOW!
I woke up this morning to the news on Michael Geist’s blog that the Canadian Association Of Internet Providers will file a Part VII application with the CRTC asking it to direct Bell Canada to cease and desist from throttling its wholesale Internet service. Their argument is:
“Bell’s traffic shaping measures have impaired the speed and performance of the wholesale ADSL access services that it provides to independent ISPs and other competitors, to the point where the quality of the service has been degraded beyond recognition.”
and
“it seeks to restrain anti-competitive behaviour on the part of Bell. Thus, the relief requested. . . is intended to ‘ensure the technological and competitive neutrality’ of the interconnection and and wholesale services provided by Bell to independent ISPs and to promote competition from new technologies that are enabled by the Internet and ADSL access technology.”
This hasn’t been posted onto the CRTC Website as of yet. But when it is, I’ll add a link to it.
Quite simply, this is a very positive development. The sad part is that it took an industry group to get this ball rolling rather than the politicians elected to deal with this sort of thing. (Industry Minister Jim Prentice, are you listening?)
UPDATE: There’s a plot twist to this story. The Globe And Mail is now reporting that CAIP has documents in its possession that indicate that Bell Canada on its Sympatico service is going to charge for access to the Internet on a per byte basis with no maximum cap to those charges:
“Included in the application is a document, dated Mar. 13, which CAIP says is an internal memo that was circulated among Bell employees. The document lays out a plan for Bell to phase out a maximum $30 charge that customers could incur for going over their 30 gigabytes of allotted bandwidth. Under the new plan, there would be no maximum over-use fee, meaning there would be “no monthly billing limit.””
Assuming that’s true, then logically people would bolt to independent ISP’s as many of them either have higher caps or they have no caps at all. Bell would need to stop that from happening, thus they throttle and they want to force ISP’s to build their own “last mile” connections to their customers. Talk about sneaky.
Is this the smoking gun that proves Bell is trying to kill of competition?
UPDATE #2: The full CRTC Filing has appeared on p2pnet.
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This entry was posted on April 4, 2008 at 7:53 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Canada, CRTC, Net Neutrality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.