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Telecom

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

Rogers Admits Traffic Management Throttles World of Warcraft

Rogers has admitted that its traffic management practices may interfere with World of Warcraft. It says modifications to its software will not be ready until June.

March 25, 2011 — 9 comments — News

Rogers Provides New Evidence on Effectiveness of Notice-and-Notice System

Bill C-32 looks to be headed for the dustbin if Canada heads into an election this week, but the C-32 committee is still ongoing until someone pulls the plug on the current Parlimentary session. Rogers, Telus, and Bell appeared yesterday and the discussion unsurprisingly focused on the notice-and-notice approach currently used by ISPs and codified within the bill. The notice and notice system involves a notification from a copyright holder – often involving movies, software or music – claiming that a subscriber has made available or downloaded content without authorization on file sharing systems. The ISP forwards the notification to the subscriber but takes no other action – it does not pass along the subscriber’s personal information, remove the content from its system, or cancel the subscriber’s service.

While some rights holders (who the committee learned played a role in establishing notice-and-notice in the first place) have claimed the system is ineffective, Rogers came prepared with evidence about how the system functions and on its effectiveness. It reports that it processed 207,000 notices in 2010, sending those notices to about five percent of its customer base. In other words, 95% of its subscribers are not identified by rights holders as copyright infringers – far from the piracy haven that it often claimed. Of the households that receive notices, only 1/3 receive a second notice. Of those that receive a second notice, only 1/3 of those receive a third notice.

March 23, 2011 — 27 comments — News