Today is the filing deadline for parties for the first round of submissions to the CRTC’s hearing on wholesale Internet access services, better known as the usage based billing (UBB) hearing. Sources advise that Bell may be ready to drop its plans for wholesale UBB altogether as part of its submission. If true, Bell would withdraw its wholesale UBB tariff proposals and instead propose an “aggregated volume pricing” model that would give independent ISPs flexibility in their pricing models but leave retail UBB untouched. Stay tuned…
Bell To Drop Wholesale UBB For AVP?
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Same thing under different name. Most people populating the indie ISPs are not *light* users. They’re there exactly for the large caps. What’s the difference between “30 GB per user” and “300 GB per 10 users” when each user is going for 300 GB all for himself?
And even if this fails, there’s always the “Traffic Management” already approved by CRTC. Want to download 300GB this month? Sure let’s see how that goes at 11,2 kBps. Woot, you managed to get a total of 30 GB at the end of the month? Good for you. That’s exactly what we expected. NIAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!
Nap.
Not in the least surprising after Cope tripped over his own feet admitting UBB was all about revenue!
.. but leave retail UBB untouched.
Mmmm, profits … yummy profits.
Economic ITMP?
Considering all this started as a supposed economic based ITMP (Internet Traffic Management Process) to reduce congestion on Bell’s middle mile network, anyone who analyzes UBB would say that implementing UBB would do very little to reduce congestion since congestion is the short term overload on the network. Now, Bell wants VBB instead of UBB thinking it would be more tolerable to get past the minister and the public. But this proposal is even less likely to be effective as an ITMP since it will allow 3rd party ISPs to average out the pain a bit more across their user base potentially still forcing 3rd party ISPs into some kind of retail level UBB.
The very fact that Bell now wants to try to force VBB down our throats proves that this is absolutely NOTHING to do whatsoever with relieving congestion through ITMPs, but only about increasing Revenues as declared by Mr Cope last week!
Since the CRTC has stated that Bell is already profitable in this sphere there is absolutely no need for adding an extra layer of billing onto customers. And yet again another “after the fact” billing scheme to make the life of TPISPs a nightmare.
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@stuart:
ITMP does not solve congestion. It just makes some type of traffic flow at the expense of other type of traffic. Pretty much like trying to solve 401 highway congestion by allowing only red cars to freely merge and cars of other colors only 1 for every 10 red cars. And I have a suspicion that the red cars have “IPTV” license plates. If your car is silver with “ADSL” plate stay in line to merge. A long line.
Nap.
I’m not @stuart … I’m stuart … no tweet nonsense codes here.
Anyway … ITMP are not supposed to be application sensitive which is why the CRTC suggested Bell try to find an economic ITMP in place of a technical ITMP (throttling).
What everybody forgets is that TCP/IP has its own inbuilt mechanism to handle congestion. and it treats everybody equally. What the hell was wrong with that in the first place?
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stuart: “What everybody forgets is that TCP/IP has its own inbuilt mechanism to handle congestion. and it treats everybody equally. What the hell was wrong with that in the first place?”
Well the answer is in your question. What’s wrong is that it treats everybody equally. Now, we don’t really want pixelation and frozen frames on our shiny new IPTV service just because some schmuck started downloading a torrent, do we? Not to mention that if the shiny new Fib service would be throttled as much as old ADSL, people might not notice any difference between them and might not bother “upgrading” to the “enhanced plans”?
Nap.
And that … Napalm … is exactly what is wrong with using the internet for realtime streaming data. It was never designed for that … there’s always some joeschmuck at some point along your feed from wherever who will saturate a router somewhere … not just a torrent download on your node or remote etc.
It’s a fact of life on the internet … it’s not designed as a bulletproof network, although we like to think it is … and we couldn’t afford it if it were a bulletproof network.
It comes down to what we are ready willing and able to pay for! We want a Lamborghini and we have a Hyundai budget.
stuart: “And that … Napalm … is exactly what is wrong with using the internet for realtime streaming data.”
Well it works – if you *undersell* it. If you connect 5 computers with 100 Mbps network cards to a Gigabit trunk they can stream all day long without issues.
Problem is that currently Bell works the other way round. There’s their internal network of limited capacity which has Internet and the IPTV servers connected at one end and the Fib/IPTV/ADSL customers at the other end. It doesn’t work well (Mr. Bibic stated so) unless you upgrade it. Or, as a cheaper solution, you place some throttling machines to screw the ADSL customers so they can’t mess with IPTV.
Nap.
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Here’s Bell’s stuff explained:
http://www.communityguy.ca/reviews/iptv-television-service-from-bell-how-it-works/
Note the yellow line – their “internal network”. It’s fed from Internet and IPTV at one end end serves the aggregated customers at the other. According to Mr. Bibic and the documents that Bell submitted to CRTC, that’s where congestion occurs. It can’t hold the aggregated Internet and IPTV traffic.
In other words, its not the Internet tap that Bell is overselling. It’s their internal network that was oversold, and once they added IPTV to it all hell broke loose and now they’re trying to find a way out of it through throttling and caps.
Nap.
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Fair-ER ™ on the surface
Basically this is a better way to charge UBB… but it takes the consumer out of the equation by forcing the indies to act as a wall between the Consumers and them and the CRTC.
So when the bi-annual rate hikes come whom is the consumer going to turn to?
Open up the market to competition.
Bell is acting predictably given their position in the market as they seek rents above their marginal costs and maximize monopoly profits. Is this acceptable in this day and age? Absolutely not. A real easy and very effective solution is to open up the “last mile” to competition. Let Bell promote their product “features” that consumers clearly do not want (UBB, VBB, throttling etc) in the free market and let the chips fall. I’m convinced they would act differently if their survival depended on it.
Bell Doc to CRTC on AVP
http://www.scribd.com/doc/51762899/PROPOSED-TN-BA345B-BC7290B-Letter-ABR
Explains what their pricing is going to be to the indy isp’s. Don’t forget to mark it up so they can make money too. 200$ per TB block plus 29.5c per GB if they go over. So if the average household of mid to high are downloading what? 100gb a month? that’s 20$ wholesale for the ISP so mark that up by 2.5 times so 50$ a month plus our beloved HST. So in the end $56.50. Much more than say Techsavvy’s 300GB cap for only 100GB. If we go with the 300GB cap we’re looking at well over 120$ at those prices and mark ups. What a time also, no Mr Clement to stop the antiquated CRTC from screwing the consumer.
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@Voralis: “If we go with the 300GB cap we’re looking at well over 120$ at those prices and mark ups.”
Interesting how Comcast can offer that at less than half the price, including the service.
Maybe our dear Canada Revenue is applying some duty taxes to those Gigabytes traveling north across the border? Not yet? Would be an interesting idea.
And BTW I just realized that with this UBB we’re definitely paying HST on Internet data.
Nice. Well done CRTC.
Nap.