The IT Nerd

Much as independent ISPs feared (and I wrote about previously), Bell Canada has decided to charge them for bandwidth up front, and apply usage-based charges on the back end (although they will not say what those charges will be). There is some good news though:

“The only good news is that it will not affect current clients. So as long as you don’t change ISP’s you can keep your current unlimited connection. Bell proposes to start shadow billing in October and usage based billing in Jan of 2009.

This has given me a new sense urgency to setup our own equipment at the CO. I will be approaching a few other ISP in the next little while to see if we can come to some type of agreement. We prefer not to do this alone.“

This is being discussed in this thread on DSLreports.com in the Acanac forum. Clearly Bell fears that they will lose the ability to throttle and needs a “Plan B” seeing as they clearly can’t compete straight up with smaller ISPs with better customer service and pricing and less scumbags. Hopefully, Acanac can convince others to join their plan to set up their own equipment in Bell COs (Central Office) to mitigate this.

In the meantime, if you were planning to dump Bell Sympatico or Rogers High Speed Internet for something that has better customer service and cheaper pricing and less scumbags, now would be the time to do it.

UPDATE: The CBC has picked up this story. It does add a new twist to this story:

“Bell also has an appeal before the Federal Court of Canada to scrap CRTC-mandated access of wholesale customers such as TekSavvy, Eagle.ca and Acanac to its network. Bell says the high-speed internet market is highly competitive and regulated rules of access are therefore no longer necessary.”

This situation just got a bit more complicated.

This entry was posted on July 31, 2008 at 8:59 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell, Canada, 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.