Bell Proposing Usage-Based Billing 238
Idiomatick writes "Bell Canada is attempting to impose UBB on its wholesale customers. As Bell was given a last-mile monopoly in much of Canada by the government, they are required to follow rules set up by the CRTC; this includes leasing their lines to competitive ISPs. And they are given a directive by the CRTC to provide competitive speeds to said ISPs. Teksavvy has informed its customers that were this to go through, the current monthly cap would be quartered and the cost for exceeding it would be 'multiple times more than our current per Gigabyte rate of $0.25/GB on overages.' They have also helpfully included a link where you can send your comments/concerns to the CRTC directly."
Do-over (Score:4, Interesting)
How much would it cost to rip up the ground and lay down more fiber? It seems like in most cases, a (natural?) monopoly results. When things get this bad, is there any chance that a new generation of telecommunications companies can spring up (perhaps with government subsidies to get them going)?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:You canadians need a regulator with some teeth (Score:1, Interesting)
Internode? Adam? iiNet?
And Telstra have been slapped down over their crap in the past, and the Rudd government looks like it is going to do that better (and I say that as a paid-up member of the Liberal Party). there are many things wrong with our broadband system, but at least we are better-off than the USA and Canada.
Re:Thats it... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.highlandilnews.com/index.html [highlandilnews.com]
Re:Do-over (Score:5, Interesting)
What happened was that after a few years they were the cheapest, fastest and all around bestest internet provider in the country. This forced the biggest and the baddest to sharply drop their prices and start laying FTTH to simply stay in business at all.
Now, about 5 years after this started happening, Slovenia is the 7th in the world in FTTH adoption right behind Scandinavia and Asia.
Fun fact: It's about half cheaper to get 20/20 FTTH here than it is to get 1024/256 ADSL.
Makes sense in the long run? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ultimately I think Internet access may well be another utility like water or electricity. It sort of makes sense to pay for what you use, so to speak.
But the charge should be so low that you need to really strain your connection a lot to feel it, and at the same time normal monthly fees need to go away.
I don't like the idea, but it makes sense economically. It costs energy to move packets around and keep networks running. The more you use the more you should pay.
But having some crazy base fee and then some punitive extra usage fee on top of that... No thanks.
Re:Greed at its finest.... (Score:5, Interesting)
> If I switch to Rogers, Bell will lose me as a phone customer. I'll have no
> reason to not subscribe to a digital phone service from Rogers.
Make sure your port your number. When you port your number away from Bell, it triggers some magic retention-department panic. They'll call you several times asking how they can get your business back. Make sure you tell them exactly why you're no longer a Bell customer, maybe if enough people shout loud enough they'll eventually listen.
In my case, there was no DSLAM in the nearest CO; they suggested I get Bell WiMax. After I finished laughing at them, I explained that my new phone company had their own ADSL2+ DSLAM in that same CO, and that I was pleased-beyond-belief with the service I was receiving. The bits... they torrent!!
Re:Usage based is fine if you're an honest ISP (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree. UBB actually makes a lot of sense, but the UBB structure they're proposing is wrong. If you're going to bill on usage, bill on usage; don't set up some arbitrary cap at which the rate goes insane.
I don't think it's a matter of gouging heavy users, though. Not exactly, anyway. The problem is that the carriers sized their infrastructure on the assumption that the subscriber base would grow a lot, but the data transferred per subscriber would not grow as much as it has. They didn't see mass-scale P2P file sharing coming along, let alone YouTube coming along and replacing cable TV.
So now they have a big, expensive, inadequate infrastructure (and an inadequate pricing model to go with it). The depreciation schedules they based their plans on require that infrastructure to last a long time before it gets replaced, but it's already being overwhelmed.
I think what they're really trying to do is less to gouge heavy users, and more to discourage heavy use entirely, so that they can continue to limp along on their old infrastructure long enough for it to pay for itself.
In other words, they screwed up their market forecasts, and now they want everybody do without improved service until they make their money back based on those flawed forecasts.
Of course it was their screwup in the first place, and most of them (I don't know about Bell or Canada) got a lot of subsidies and tax breaks based on promises of fabulous networks. They then kept as much of that money as they could get away with while building out the cheap network they thought they could get away with. I therefore think they (their shareholders) should really be first in line to eat the costs of writing off the infrastructure they built in error.
Then they can go ahead and do UBB to create a revenue stream to get financing to build a proper network.
Re:Thats it... (Score:2, Interesting)
Now just wait for the local Telco and Cableco to sue your hometown for doing that. While your town is getting sued, they will start building out their own network while the town is having to fight in court and not be able to do any work.
Re:Canada Big, Slovenia Small (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Do-over (Score:3, Interesting)
I know your point is that it doesn't seem to make much sense for a company in terms of profit but although the profits might not be the same as that of a natural monopoly, I think the profits of an oligopoly would still be attractive.
Actually it was completely the opposite. I was arguing that a natural monopoly exists (and a government allows it to exist) because it is in the best interests of the customers. You can only discount to get into the market for so long. Eventually you have to start paying for the infrastructure and need to earn a normal return on investment. Several infrastructures, with sets of administration overhead etc, is just going to be more expensive than one in some scenerios.
There is a concept called minimum efficient scale, where the cost of producing another item falls with number produced and then levels out. Sometimes the whole market can be served by one company running at the minimum efficient scale, but any competitor that enters would not only not initially run at an efficient scale, but would take enough customers away from the first company that neither company would be in the efficient region. Thus prices would be higher with competition than by letting the monopoly continue in these cases. Governments then can try to prevent the monopolist from taking advantage of customers by either regulating (or control as a public entity) the monopoly, or create artificial competition by breaking down parts of the market and forcing the monopolist to allow the competitors (eg. leasing the infrastructure to other companies that provide the service).
Personally I don't like forced competition. It just seems like beating around the bush. You force a company to provide their equipment at competitive prices to competition so that the competition can undercut and force the monopolist to lower their prices. Why not just tell the monopolist what price they can charge the end customer? It's effectively the same thing and removes the costs associated with switching providers a lot of advertising overhead etc.
Also I don't like the situation were my service provider isn't the one that owns the infrastructure. I recently got DSL installed. The provider couldn't tell me when the phone guys would be by to activate my phone system because it was another company that owned the underlying phone line. When it breaks will I have the same problem, oh it's not us it is the phone company? I just don't like the idea of more than one company being responsible for one product that I purchase.
Lots of sound and fury... (Score:3, Interesting)
...from the Slashdot readership. Now can we do something about it?
Let's do something in the style of the Beagleboard. Design and build a bare board for ultra wide band radio, aimed squarely at establishing a mesh network. That is, design from the beginning for every node to simultaneously "connect" to multiple other nodes. Design for as much range as we can squeeze out of it, while still maintaining the ability to ramp up to as much usable bandwidth as possible as nodes get closer together.
I thought about suggesting a Beagledaughterboard. The Beagleboard has lots of pins available on its expansion header, and even more pins available on its LCD header that can be repurposed in software. Making it a Beagledaughterboard would mean there would be very few inquiries from random people wanting to know why the board they bought from Digikey doesn't work when they plug it into their Windows XP machine.
On the other hand, designing it as a USB2.0 highspeed client device would mean that it would work practically anywhere, given software support. The chips and parts required to speak USB2.0 are dirt cheap and trivially available. I'll volunteer to write the software drivers, if somebody will design the hardware.
So... where are the hardware people? I know damn well that lots of you read /. Anybody want to kick the phone company in the nuts? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?
Re:Usage based is fine if you're an honest ISP (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it? I can't find the precise post, but in a similar thread a few days back a slashdotter dug through a cable company (Time Warner?)'s financial filings. For their broadband business, they brought in $4 billion dollars last year, and their costs for it were around $230 million*. Let's assume, just to be nice to them, that those costs don't include employees and such, and let's be super-dooper-extra-nice and say that brings their total broadband costs to $2 billion.
They're still making $2 billion dollars a year profit on their broadband business. Even if their lines really are so taxed to the brim that they're about to buckle, this is not exactly the picture of a company that needs massive rate increases and overage fees to continue to provide service. And if you're bringing in $4 billion and expending $235 million, it doesn't even sound like a company that feels they NEED infrastructure improvements. Or at best, one who's certainly in no hurry to implement them.
More annoyingly, those same financial statements indicated that although they brought in significantly more money in 2008 than 2007, they spent only half as much money to provide those services. Again, this is not a picture of a company whose infrastructure is in dire straits.
Maybe they really are getting dangerously close to capacity; I sure as hell don't know. I do know they're not acting like it. They're acting like nothing but greedy corporate pigs, taking tax dollars, not improving infrastructure, then demanding you pay a higher fee because of seemingly phantom infrastructure issues.
How about a compromise: Let's pass a law establishing their rates right now, before any of these usage schemes or tiered pricing structures, as a baseline. Every few years we'll re-consider adjustments for inflationary purposes if they can justify it. Then they're free to do whatever scheme they want, with one caveat: Every single dime above those rates that they make must be used DIRECTLY, IMMEDIATELY and UNEQUIVOCALLY for broadband infrastructure improvements. Every dime. If they stick it in the bank, they have to use the interest for the same thing. If they fail to do that, they're fined that sum of money plus a nice little penalty on top, and their rates get locked back at the baseline we established, since obviously it was nothing but BS money-grubbing under the guise of needing to improve infrastructure.
I doubt they'd go for that, which in itself makes me believe something ain't quite right with their claims.
* These are off the top of my head and I'm being pessimistic. The best my memory serves me says it was just over $4 billion income last year on about $100 million expenditures, and they spent twice as much the previous year, which was the $200+ million number I ended up using to be on the safe side.
Re:Do-over (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>I live in an apartment.
An apartment is considered a "home". So yes you owe ~$110,000 towards the national debt. ($12 trillion divided by 110 million homes). And climbing to $150,000 before the next presidential election arrives. To give you some idea how much that is, I had $30,000 in college loans and even though I paid them off as quickly as possible, it still took 3 years. So figure 15 years total to payoff my share of the U.S. debt.
Of course our government won't actually pay it - they'll just pass it off to our children and grandchildren. And devalue our money by ~8% a year. You have $100,000 in the bank? In ten years it will only be worth the equivalent of $43,000.
Re:Do-over (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that the top 1% own [ucsc.edu] about 40% of the financial wealth in the country, having them pay 90% of the income tax bill seems pretty reasonable to me.
When they get down to maybe owning 20% of the country's financial wealth, then maybe it's time to back off a bit on the taxes. But it doesn't seem to be slowing them down much.
And as a member of the top 20% of income, (who own over half the country's financial wealth) I pay a noticably higher percentage of my income than someone who is poor. And I think that's fair too. I can afford it much better than they can. And the Gates and Forbes and other top 1% of the country can afford it even better than I can.