Post Tagged with: "bell"

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

Bell’s Sunny Broadband Claims

Bell offers its perspective on UBB in a debate with TekSavvy in the pages of the National Post (a similar debate occurs in the Globe – Waverman vs. Beers). The Bell response includes the claim that Canada is a broadband leader: At the same time, Canada has increasingly become a […]

February 8, 2011 — 16 comments — News

Unpacking The Policy Issues Behind Bandwidth Caps & Usage Based Billing

Over the past few weeks, public interest and concern with Internet bandwidth caps has hit a fever pitch as new ISP policies (Shaw and Primus announcing caps) and the CRTC decision on usage based billing has taken the issue to the mainstream – CBC’s the National covered it, George Stroumboulopoulos discussed it, CBC’s Spark talked to several players on the issue, the Globe has highlighted business concerns with bandwidth caps, and there have been numerous op-eds and media articles on the issue.

The Stop the Meter Internet petition now has over 200,000 signatories and is growing fast, which may help explain why UBB has emerged as a political hot potato. The NDP was the first to raise it as a political issue, followed yesterday by a response from Industry Minister Tony Clement (who promised to study the decision carefully “to ensure that competition, innovation, and consumers were all fairly considered”) and the Liberals, who called on the government to reverse the CRTC decision.

Yet despite the obvious anger over the issue, there remains a considerable amount of misinformation about what has happened and uncertainty about just what to do about it. This post attempts to unpack the issue, by discussing two related but not identical concerns – the recent CRTC UBB decision and the broader use of bandwidth caps by virtually all large Canadian ISPs.

February 1, 2011 — 98 comments — News

Creator Groups Trade Short Term Gain for Long Term Pain in Bell – CTV Merger Review

This week the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission will hold hearings on Canada’s biggest media and communications merger – BCE Inc. and CTVglobemedia Inc. The merger will combine the country’s biggest telecom provider, private broadcaster, Internet provider, and second largest wireless provider into a single powerhouse.

My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that the implications are enormous, yet in stark contrast to a similar recent merger in the United States between cable giant Comcast and broadcaster NBCU, the competition concerns will take a back seat to the â€œbenefits packageâ€ that BCE must pay to the Canadian cultural community.

January 31, 2011 — 6 comments — Columns

Creator Groups Trade Short Term Gain for Long Term Pain on BCE-CTV Merger

Appeared in the Toronto Star on January 30, 2011 as Monster Merger Threatens New Uses of Web This week the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission will hold hearings on Canada’s biggest media and communications merger â€“ BCE Inc. and CTVglobemedia Inc. The merger will combine the country’s biggest telecom provider, […]

January 31, 2011 — Comments are Disabled — Columns Archive