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Bell Wants to Dump Third-Party ISP's Entirely
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Apr 04, 2008 03:46 PM
from the taking-their-cable-and-going-home dept.
from the taking-their-cable-and-going-home dept.
phorm writes "Not only is Bell interfering with third-party traffic, but — according to CBC — they want third-party ISP and phone carriers off their network entirely. Bell is lobbying to have lease-conditions on their networks removed, stating that enough competition exists that they should not longer be required to lease infrastructure to third-parties. Perhaps throttling is just the beginning?"
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As an American, I would like to know (Score:2)
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Re:As an American, I would like to know (Score:5, Insightful)
We have the Competition Act [justice.gc.ca], which replaced the Combines Investigation Act back in 1986 ...
Also the CRTC.
Bell was able to build out their network thanks to their monopoly position for many decades. The network infrastructure, since it was paid for by the excess levies and guaranteed returns allowed under that monopoly, should be nationalized.
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Re:As an American, I would like to know (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd love to see a couple dozen telephone lines coming to my house so I can lease from the company I like, rather than having only one. And I'd also like a couple dozen sewer lines, water lines, and road networks I can choose from, too. As well as competing fire departments, police departments, and sanitation.
I mean, why should I pay for garbage removal when I have no sense of smell. My property, my rules. If I don't want to pay for fire protection, I shouldn't have to. If my house burns down, who else could that possibly hurt?
All these government regulations of private industry do nothing but hurt us. Competition will always ensure we have the best possible services available, and there is nothing government can do that corporations can't do better.
The scary thing is, there are people who actually believe that crap, and want to force those beliefs on us rather than just opting out of the system and making one of their own.
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Re:As an American, I would like to know (Score:4, Insightful)
They try various methods like regulation, bids and other things but none of them really work that well. Take bids for example, they usually deliver the minimum of the service requirements, the way the operation is driven is kept as a competitive secret and it's usually hard to get real competition against the incumbent that's already got the staff, the routines and the equipment in place. Regulation is trying to keep the squeeze on the company to simulate the market pressure, but it's really difficult to know how hard to squeeze because the regulated company will undoubtably say you're trying to squeeze blood from a rock. Set service requirements and you'll certainly get a too high claim of how much it'll cost to deliver and so on.
In the end, I understand perfectly well why people look to many of those poorly handled monopolies and say "Man, if only we could get private companies competing for that". I've only dealt closely with one such monopoly and there were simply so many excesses, the great location, the great offices, the fancy equipment in EVERY meeting room, the free beverages and snacks, the great cafeteria and a million other small things... it's all those things that show they got money to spend, and don't really care what the bill adds up to. They just need something that legitimately can be expensed as business cost, and it's fine. They're still on public salary levels and they can't raise those much, but it's no doubt the money was loose and the work pressure low...
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How would I opt out of a lassez-faire free market system where all the real estate was owned?
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Re:As an American, I would like to know (Score:5, Funny)
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Its take it or move to BFE Midwest and live like a fricken hermit.
I'm curious about something: What does 'BFE Midwest' stand for, or mean?
I moved out to the Minneapolis-St Paul area a couple years ago, and although I've always met great folks wherever I've, these Minnesotans are the nicest bunch of them all. Helpful, you can talk to young and old alike out in public without getting paranoid or 'WTF' reactions that are so common elsewhere in the States. And the State, itself, has this sort of conservative, yet very progressive 'tilt' to it. And of course a bunch of the
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I'd be surprised if the Bells in the USA didn't start making this same argument here soon. After all, they have to compete with cable and satellite. Why would anyone need more choices than that?
Didn't they (read: large corporate internet/content providers like Qwest and Charter) already do this, in reverse? I mean, wasn't that one of their major arguments AGAINST opening the Cable networks to competition? "Why should we allow you to get someone else's pipe on your cable modem? You already could just get DSL or Satellite!"
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what it is that is beginning (Score:2)
Whatever we get, it is double-plus ungood. It is increasingly clear to me that the www, at least, has been dead for about a decade.
Good for them (Score:2, Insightful)
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Do the right thing: dump Bell Canada altogether (Score:2)
Truly: they don't understand the Internet, only monopolistic revenues. They're never spanked, so hit them in the wallet, where they'll feel it as that's where their hearts and souls are.
good thing (Score:2)
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Not only is dumping illegal (Score:2)
OK, so an early flaw was that you could ram the barricade with your car allowing you to dump a silo full of pig manure, but they learned their lesson and fixed that.
So good luck Bell with dumping your "third-party ISPs" (whatever that is). There is simply no way you will be able to.
DSL reselling/unbundling doesn't work (Score:2)
If we want an open access infrastructure, I am forced to conclude that we need to build it.
Re:DSL reselling/unbundling doesn't work (Score:5, Interesting)
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the infrastructure business model (Score:2)
VoIP,etc,etc, (Score:3, Interesting)
We, citizens, need to light a fire up the government's ass to step in on this one.
Say Yes, But With A Caveat... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Telcos have forgotten that their networks, both in Canada and the US, were built, one way or the other, with the good graces and money of the taxpayers. Those right-of-ways were essentially a gift, with the understanding that they would be used to make communications near-universal.
If the Telcos want to end that universality, then I think their automatic right to those right-of-ways should be removed. We can either go to an open bid, or we can do annual leases, the rates dependent on how nicely the Telcos behave. If they don't like it, they can go buy their own right-of-ways. Might be a bit problematic in major cities, but oh well, I don't think these bastards deserve an ounce of consideration any more.
If competition is so great.. (Score:3, Informative)
I'm looking for a new ISP because just this week I got a notice from Rogers that they've decided to change the definition of 'unlimited' to 95Gigs + $1.50/Gig after that. While I understand that Rogers is utterly incompetent, once my services and billing were properly set up, they required very little maintenance once they were up and running (it took me almost two years for their 'system' to properly bill me automatically and send me a paper invoice). Because of this I haven't had a reason to switch. ***Attention Shareholders*** Now I do.
I've been looking at CIA.com (www.cia.com) recently as they come highly recommended, but I'm waiting until I can get some more concrete numbers before signing up.
And yes, I will be cancelling my Rogers account now (After nine years), and have no plans to switch over to Bell.
Bell Canada is right .... (Score:3, Interesting)
and the sooner they pay back the differential between the monopolistic prices they received to subsidize their phone infrastructure for 100 years, and competitive prices, the better.
Those funds can be used to subsidize third party "last mile" networks, if Bell Canada is so suddenly keen on bringing competition to the market! And while we are at it, the cable carriers can do the same thing (albiet for a shorter time period). Lets see how they like it when there is more than a duopoly involved in the "last mile"
Problem Isn't Bell or the CRTC (Score:3, Insightful)
While you might think that the CRTC is an old antequated fossil that needs to be put out of its misery, the Minsitry of Industry is on life support. What's left of it is being run by gutless bureaucrats more interested in their career path in private business post-federal brothel than protecting Canadians from scheming corporate predators, marketing fraud, advertising scams, artificially high gas prices, the list goes on and on...
Bell Canada is the least of our worries.
Re:They are a utility (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:They are a utility (Score:4, Insightful)
Essentially the tax payers are the ones who created and funded the company. It has served its purpose.
As with any government agency, once the services it provided are done by private industry, it is time to cut out the public funding. The government should sell back all the hardware to all the companies involved and use the funds generated to cut taxes.
Doubtless this seems unfair to Bell, but the government was unfair to everyone when it created an intentional monopoly. When they whine, and they will whine, they should be told to join the competition that they felt was healthy enough.
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Re:They are a utility (Score:5, Informative)
What's happened is that the telcos have forgotten that the taxpayer subsidized and continues to subsidize their networks.
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Re:They are a utility (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nah, Canadians are bilingual when it comes to measurement systems.
Re:They are a utility (Score:4, Interesting)
What they said: The market was opened up for competition, but now there's enough competition so we shouldn't have to still hold their hands.
What they mean: People are competing with us, despite the fact that we own the network and fuck around so badly with our wholesale clients that their problems never get solved in a reasonable amoutn of time, and instead of fixing our ludicrously broken processes or continuing to lose out to people who use our network better than we do, we want our monopoly back.
Bell does have a point; a lot of companies (like one ISP I worked for for almost a week after my training ended) just keep reselling Bell's and Telus's services (despite getting dicked around all the time); they have essentially the same prices, plans, and service as Bell, but it takes longer to get anything done because you're one more step removed from the technicians.
An ISP a friend worked for, however, took the other route. After selling Bell's service in Montreal, they hired my friend to do their ADSL rollout. They bought their own bandwidth, installed their own DSLAMs, and started moving customers over, and you know what? Paying for bandwidth directly was cheaper for them than leasing an essentially unlimited line from Bell.
As a result, they started moving all of their customers over from Bell's per-customer charges to their third-party's per-megabit rates, and they're saving tons of money - enough to use to buy the new ADSL2+ equipment and move even more people over.
The lesson is: Don't wait for Bell to stop being dicks; do things right yourself and it pays off.
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Re:They are a utility (Score:5, Interesting)
When high-speed internet came to the forefront, Bell utterly failed to deliver a competitive product and was basically going to fall back a the "gentleman's agreement" with the cable- and phone companies that would have allowed a maximum amount of profit for the providers with a minimum amount of service on lines that we, the consumer, subsidized.
The CRTC, deciding that the existing Bell/Stentor cartel had done little except gouge customers and that forcing leased lines had done wonders for the long-distance market, hit Bell with the same thing. The result is that Canada has one of the best broadband adoption rates in the world, despite a fairly unfriendly geography.
Yes, they own the last mile, yes, and pay for it, but it's not like they didn't get a free ride from the CRTC and the Canadian public for years. Revoking this will result in a broadband market that looks like the Canadian wireless market: something like the "gentleman's agreement" mentioned above that keeps prices uncompetitively high.
On that note, I personally think the CRTC hasn't gone far enough: they need to force the incumbent providers to open their wireless networks ("System Access fee" my ass) as well. The wireless market in this country is abysmal (as in "worse than the US, by a large margin") and the reason is that the incumbents maintain a cartel and buy or destroy competition.
Heck, Canadian content rules have actually kept foriegn competition out of the market, which means that all Bell et al have had to compete with are small fish and bottom-feeders, which is what Bell wants to squash. I don't like T-Mobile or Verizon much, but I'd like to see them slap some respect into Bell, Telus and Rogers
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I've personally had a "discussion" with a Rogers Enterprise Wireless rep (and his sales engineer) on this point when negotiating our contract. He and several of his colleagues were under the impression that it was CRTC-manda
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However, I don't think that the government should force them to lease infrastructure to competitors.
When the government gives businesses billions of dollars, taxpayer dollars, in subsidies the government better attach strings to the money. Such as open access. And actually building the infrastructure the money was given to them to do.
FalconRe:They are a utility (Score:4, Insightful)
There's plenty of competition in high speed internet, but there is *NOT* plenty of competition in terms of technologies in use. Bell Nexxia owns 100% of the copper to the house. Likewise for cable TV lines... in Ottawa, where I live, for example, 100% of the cable TV lines (and that includes cable Internet) are owned by either Rogers (on the Ontario side), or Videotron (on the Quebec side). There is exactly one provider of wireless Internet services.
That means that if Bell's argument is accepted by the CRTC, the Ottawa market will go from having about 50 options for high speed Internet to having exactly 3, each with a monopoly on their respective technology.
To make matters worse, not one of those three providers offers a service that is suitable for technologies like VPN, or running your own server. All three of them filter access on those ports, and won't allow their users any incoming connections. It's also in their service agreements that they can terminate your service if they catch you running a server.
In other words... not only will the variety of consumer-level services be cut down to 3 monopolies, the quality of services available to consumers will fall into the shitter. It's already fairly well known that if you need to run a VPN, you don't go with Bell, Rogers, or Storm in this city... you go with one of the 3rd parties that's leasing time through one of those three, to get unfettered access. If you want decent access to the Internet, you have to buy a corporate connection from these people... Bell's cheapest runs about $80/month, Rogers is the same, and Storm is $195/month. Just for the privilege of actually having a connection to the 'net which you can use for more than surfing and e-mail.
What's more, tax dollars paid for the establishment of Bell Nexxia. We paid for that copper which they own. So no. They should absolutely be required to continue leasing service. Actually, the Government should acquire Bell Nexxia and turn it back into a crown corporation, and make BCE, the phone/Internet company, lease time from Nexxia as well.
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(I know the preceding paragraph is near
Re:Hmmmmm..... (Score:4, Insightful)
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