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Telecom

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

Solving Canada’s Uncompetitive Internet Will Take More Than CRTC Reversal

Appeared in the Toronto Star on February 6, 2011 as The Real Reason We Pay So Much For Internet Last week, public concern with Internet bandwidth caps hit a fever pitch as hundreds of thousands of Canadians signed petitions against Internet provider practices of â€œmeteringâ€ Internet use. The government responded […]

February 7, 2011 — Comments are Disabled — Columns Archive

Three Cents Per Gigabyte

Hugh Thompson has an interesting column on the actual bandwidth costs for ISPs. He cites one provider that three cents per gigabyte is the likely cost. Even assuming a ten cents per gigabyte “inflated cost”, that still represents as much as a 50X markup given that some providers charge $5 […]

February 3, 2011 — 18 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