Post Tagged with: "bell"

Canadian Broadcasters and BDUs: Can They Compete With “Free”?

Earlier this month, Bell and Quebecor, two giants in the Canadian broadcasting and telecom landscape, became embroiled in a dispute over Sun News Network, the recently launched all-news network. At first glance, the dispute appeared to be little more than a typical commercial fight over how much Bell should pay to Quebecor to carry the Sun News Network on its satellite television package. When the parties were unable to reach agreement, Bell removed Sun News Network, leaving a placeholder message indicating “the channel has been taken down at the request of the owners of Sun News Network.”

While the dispute is now before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission – Quebecor claims Bell is violating the legal requirement against “undue preferences”- more interesting is Bell’s claim about the value of Sun News Network signal.

According to Mirko Bibic, senior vice-president of regulatory affairs at Bell Canada, the market value of Sun News Network is zero because Quebecor makes the signal available free over-the-air in Toronto and is currently streaming it free on the Internet. Given the free access, Bell maintains that the signal no longer has a market value.

My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes Bibic’s comment may be posturing for negotiation purposes, but it highlights the larger problem for Canadian broadcasters and broadcast distributors such as cable and satellite providers.

May 24, 2011 — 33 comments — Columns

OECD Broadband Rankings: Canada Ranks 28th out of 33 Countries Based on Bell, Rogers & Shaw Data

The OECD published its latest comparative broadband Internet data last week, confirming yet again that Canadian consumers pay more for less when it comes to Internet access. While some will undoubtedly claim that the OECD methodology is faulty, it should be noted that the data is provided to OECD member governments before publication. For this survey, the OECD focused on three of Canada’s largest ISPs – Bell, Shaw, and Rogers – covering 18 of their offerings at a range of speeds and pricing points.

The focus should be on the numbers, which tell a discouraging tale. Among the findings on price of Internet services (all as of September 2010):

Speed	Rank
Overall	28th out of 33
Below 2.5 Mbps	17th out of 24
Between 2.5 an 15 Mbps	28th out of 33
Between 15 and 30 Mbps	29th out of 33
Over 45 Mbps	23rd out of 28

April 19, 2011 — 54 comments — News

UBB is Dead. Long Live UBB

Yesterday was the deadline for parties to the CRTC’s hearing into usage based billing to submit their comments. Bell stole the show by dropping its wholesale UBB proposal and substituting it with a new acronym – Aggregated Volume Pricing (AVP) – that should allow independent ISPs to retain some flexibility when it comes to their Internet service plans. The headlines rightly note that this is a significant backtrack for Bell. Just over two months ago, Bell wrote to the Commission to urge it to grant final approval to wholesale UBB, arguing “the implementation of the Companies’ wholesale UBB has already been delayed for far too long.” Of course, that was before UBB became a political firestorm and Industry Minister Tony Clement made it clear he would not approve the Bell proposal as it then was.

Bell obviously saw the writing on the wall and has come back with a plan that allows independent ISPs to purchase 1 TB of data for $200 with an overage charge of 29.5 cents per GB. The aggregation of independent ISP subscriber traffic means that those ISPs can choose to offer whatever plans they like – unlimited, capped, or variations thereof – simply by purchasing aggregated data from Bell under the tariff. The aggregated pricing model was proposed by several people (even I figured it out in my first long UBB post on February 1st) and is certainly better than the wholesale UBB approach it replaces.

Notwithstanding the proposed improvement on wholesale terms, this represents only a small part of the broader UBB issue.

March 29, 2011 — 32 comments — News

Bell To Drop Wholesale UBB For AVP?

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 […]

March 28, 2011 — 15 comments — News

Saving the Best for Last: Bell’s Network Congestion Admission

As is often the case with House of Commons committee hearings, yesterday’s Industry Committee hearing on usage based billing saved the best for last. Addressing a specific question from the chair about the separation of IPTV and Internet services on Bell’s network, Bell’s Mirko Bibic responded:

There is a copper loop that goes from our Central Office to the home and all data travels on that pipe so it’s Internet traffic, it’s television traffic, it’s actually voice traffic, long distance traffic, but that’s not where there are general congestion issues. The real issue is when you get to the Central Office and you go behind that to the general Internet, FIBE TV is completely different.

Bell’s comments are noteworthy since they confirm that there is no congestion in the “last mile” – the connection between the user and the so-called Central Office. At the moment, Bell aggregates the data from both its own retail customers and independent ISPs at this stage (which it says causes the congestion necessitating traffic shaping and UBB), though the independent ISP subscriber traffic later goes to the independent ISP before heading to the Internet. The “congestion problem” is therefore not at the last mile nor at the Internet – it is in the intermediate stage between the two.

February 11, 2011 — 62 comments — News