Post Tagged with: "ubb"

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

Cable Companies on UBB: No Link Between Cost and Price

The cable company submission to the CRTC on usage based billing confirms what has been readily apparent to consumers for some time: there is no link between the prices charged by ISPs for usage pricing and the actual costs to ISPs. According to the cable companies: In order to be […]

March 29, 2011 — 14 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

BCE CEO Cope Says UBB Accounts for Almost All Internet Revenue Gains

When Bell’s Mirko Bibic appeared before the Standing Committee on Industry to answer questions on usage based billing last month, he focused on the “fairness” associated with the billing approach. Using the word “fairness” seven times, Bibic mixed congestion, heavy users, and fairness with responses such as:

As for small businesses, which are generally on the same network as residential users, what you have is really a case where the congestion during peak periods is largely a residential phenomenon. It’s in that area that we’ve addressed the usage-based billing issue, and all we’re asking the CRTC for is to follow a fundamental principle of fairness. If we asked 97% or 98% of Canadians if they would be prepared to pay more so that the 2% of heaviest users pay less, I’m pretty sure of what the answer would be.

While Bell emphasized fairness once UBB became a political hot potato, the company had a far different emphasis when discussing UBB last year with financial analysts. In an August 2010 quarterly call, BCE CEO George Cope stated:

March 21, 2011 — 80 comments — News