I usually vote Liberal. I don't like Ignatieff, but I despise Harper.
I don't hate all the things Harper has done (I am actually in favour of that F-35 purchase) but I do hate most of them. And I hate his style. Its Canadian republicanism.
Also a lot of my ancestors were politicians in the conservative party back in the day. Pretty sure they'd be rolling in their graves if I voted NDP
I love how we have the exact opposite problem the US has. They have only two parties so nothing gets accomplished because there's too much division and not a wide enough array of possible positions to vote on.
We get nothing accomplished because our votes get split up too much.
I love how we have the exact opposite problem the US has. They have only two parties so nothing gets accomplished because there's too much division and not a wide enough array of possible positions to vote on.
We get nothing accomplished because our votes get split up too much.
If we had Canadian/British party discipline here we'd probably have 3-4 parties as well.
Edit: For example, there's no way the New Deal Coalition could've existed with strict party discipline, or at least it would've collapsed a lot earlier than 1968.
My verizon ISP just changed it's name and now Youtube is always slow even though I have the same speed everywhere else I go. Seems like shenanigans.
I hate Verizon. They robocall us and send us mail at least all the time to try to get us to buy their TV service no matter how many times we tell them that we do not and never will want it. And we have no way out because the only other option is Comcast, who are even worse.
simben are you sure that these 'two companies' have anything at all to do with metering? if it's anything like australia they're wholesalers, and when they sell bandwidth to isps they're doing just that: selling a set amount of data transfered per second. it's the isps job to manage that bandwidth as it's used by the customers, and if the demand is high and the supply poor they're going to have to deal with that in their prices, and by somehow encouraging lower usage
what you see in your metered monthly bill from a retail isp is likely very much departed from what goes on between them and bell. you're paying mostly for the isp's margin. as such there's certainly going to be a lot of room for competition. some places will work hard to make money by providing a competitive price and managing their bandwidth carefully. others will use their big names to exploit consumers. but those don't last forever. slowly, begrudgingly, they have to follow the market.
The companies supplying the smaller ISPs are ISPs themselves and this is where the problem lies. In the past, the major ISPs (most of whom did have bandwidth caps in one form or another) were limited in how much they could charge for going over the caps, because there was the chance of smaller ISPs undercutting them. Now that they can force the smaller ISPs that are using their copper wiring to impose caps, that competition is gone, and the "Indie" ISPs are reduced to being resellers for the major telcos, rather than competitors.
So yes, internet rates in Canada are about to go up for a lot of people, because there is no way for anyone to compete with the major ISPs. Also, as others have pointed out, this isn't just about controlling internet pricing, it's also about protecting their interests as Cable Television providers - it would be very naive to not see this as a way to make alternatives such as Netflix (or piracy) more expensive.
To quote Netflix's official response:
"Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber. The ISPs' costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced."
Yes, if they really are having issues with bandwidth hogs something needs to be done, but they already had an answer to that with throttling.
Also, "we've been getting ripped off for years, so it's cool that other people are too" is a really shitty attitude.
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BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
Bandwidth hog is a misnomer. The ISPs like to use that term to pass the blame back to their paying customers, but really what's happening is they're vastly overselling their bandwidth, when they don't have the capability to provide it for even a small subset of their users simultaneously.
simben are you sure that these 'two companies' have anything at all to do with metering? if it's anything like australia they're wholesalers, and when they sell bandwidth to isps they're doing just that: selling a set amount of data transfered per second. it's the isps job to manage that bandwidth as it's used by the customers, and if the demand is high and the supply poor they're going to have to deal with that in their prices, and by somehow encouraging lower usage
what you see in your metered monthly bill from a retail isp is likely very much departed from what goes on between them and bell. you're paying mostly for the isp's margin. as such there's certainly going to be a lot of room for competition. some places will work hard to make money by providing a competitive price and managing their bandwidth carefully. others will use their big names to exploit consumers. but those don't last forever. slowly, begrudgingly, they have to follow the market.
The companies supplying the smaller ISPs are ISPs themselves and this is where the problem lies. In the past, the major ISPs (most of whom did have bandwidth caps in one form or another) were limited in how much they could charge for going over the caps, because there was the chance of smaller ISPs undercutting them. Now that they can force the smaller ISPs that are using their copper wiring to impose caps, that competition is gone, and the "Indie" ISPs are reduced to being resellers for the major telcos, rather than competitors.
So yes, internet rates in Canada are about to go up for a lot of people, because there is no way for anyone to compete with the major ISPs. Also, as others have pointed out, this isn't just about controlling internet pricing, it's also about protecting their interests as Cable Television providers - it would be very naive to not see this as a way to make alternatives such as Netflix (or piracy) more expensive.
To quote Netflix's official response:
"Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber. The ISPs' costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced."
Yes, if they really are having issues with bandwidth hogs something needs to be done, but they already had an answer to that with throttling.
Also, "we've been getting ripped off for years, so it's cool that other people are too" is a really shitty attitude.
Man, I know I'm not intimate with the situation at all. But this bolded statement is true in Australia as well, where both #pipe and bsjezz are talking from. The smaller ISPs which are reselling still manage to keep the larger ones in check here.
I am 95% sure that OPTUS and Telstra own all the Infrastructure in the country.
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UnbrokenEvaHIGH ON THE WIREBUT I WON'T TRIP ITRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
Stim - can OPTUS and Telstra dictate what the smaller ISPs can charge? The issue isn't just that the smaller ISPs are reliant on the major ones - that sucks, but it's been the case for years. The issue now is that the bigger ISPs have been given permission to drastically increase what they're charging the smaller ones, effectively controlling the pricing of their competition.
Besides, I don't know enough about the situation in Aus/NZ to say for certain whether what we have coming in is worse, but that doesn't matter. Shitty is shitty, and the fact that other people are also being ripped off doesn't make the amount we're being ripped off any less.
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BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
Yeah, in Canada Bell and Rogers were granted large amounts of taxpayer money in order to build the infrastructure needed for all of the last-mile copper, with the expectation that smaller ISPs would be able to wholesale purchase and re-sell access to these lines, in order to ensure competition.
Bell then lobbied the CRTC (which is primarily composed of highly connected ex-telco executives) to be let out of its end of the agreement, stating they couldn't have forseen that people would possibly use the bandwidth that they actually paid for, and that if they did their network would become congested and slow.
So now the CRTC has agreed to UBB, which lets Bell vastly inflate its wholesale prices, which means TekSavvy (my ISP) has to lower its cap from 200GB a month down to 25GB a month. Hooray!
I unfortunately do not know how much the smaller ISPs are paying for their bandwidth. But thank you for clarifying that this lets the larger ISPs charge more than they previously were to the smaller ones, that actually helps me see what is going on.
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Blake TDo you have enemies then?Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered Userregular
Stim - can OPTUS and Telstra dictate what the smaller ISPs can charge? The issue isn't just that the smaller ISPs are reliant on the major ones - that sucks, but it's been the case for years. The issue now is that the bigger ISPs have been given permission to drastically increase what they're charging the smaller ones, effectively controlling the pricing of their competition.
Besides, I don't know enough about the situation in Aus/NZ to say for certain whether what we have coming in is worse, but that doesn't matter. Shitty is shitty, and the fact that other people are also being ripped off doesn't make the amount we're being ripped off any less.
Thats not the case at all. They have permission to advertise differentally. That is all.
Stim - can OPTUS and Telstra dictate what the smaller ISPs can charge? The issue isn't just that the smaller ISPs are reliant on the major ones - that sucks, but it's been the case for years. The issue now is that the bigger ISPs have been given permission to drastically increase what they're charging the smaller ones, effectively controlling the pricing of their competition.
Besides, I don't know enough about the situation in Aus/NZ to say for certain whether what we have coming in is worse, but that doesn't matter. Shitty is shitty, and the fact that other people are also being ripped off doesn't make the amount we're being ripped off any less.
Thats not the case at all. They have permission to advertise differentally. That is all.
The Commission approves, with changes, applications by Bell Aliant and Bell Canada to introduce an economic Internet traffic management practice for their wholesale Residence Gateway Access Services (GAS). The Commission also approves an additional speed option for each of Residence GAS and Business GAS. The dissenting opinion of Commissioner Molnar is attached.
Introduction
1. On 13 March 2009, the Commission received applications by Bell Aliant Regional Communications, Limited Partnership (Bell Aliant) and Bell Canada (collectively, the Bell companies) to introduce two new speed options for their wholesale Gateway Access Services (GAS):[1] one for Business GAS and one for Residence GAS. The Bell companies' applications also proposed to introduce usage-based billing (UBB) rates for wholesale Residence GAS.
2. According to the Bell companies' proposal, for each Residence GAS speed option, a GAS Internet service provider (ISP) would pay the following for each of its end-users:
a monthly flat-rate charge that would cover both Internet access and an Internet usage allowance, up to a predetermined threshold (usage threshold);
a per-gigabyte (GB) rate for monthly usage generated by the end-user above the usage threshold (overage), which would be capped;
a per-GB charge for usage in excess of 300 GB monthly for a GAS ISP's end-user (excessive usage charge) if, and when, the Bell companies introduce a corresponding charge for their retail residential Internet service (retail Internet service) customers on UBB plans at that time.
That is specifically a request to change how they bill, not for internet access, but for use of the "last mile" connection to the customer, infrastructure which Bell and the other major telcos own, but which was heavily subsidized by canadian taxpayers. It's not a change in how they advertise, it's a change in how they charge allowing them to force UBB on other ISPs.
The use of UBB is not new. The CRTC approved its use by cable providers over ten years ago. The original reasoning – that cable Internet is shared by hundreds of people and that measures may be needed to address network congestion – may have been reasonable in light of the particular time and technology. However, the current UBB regulatory fight involves a much different set of circumstances.
First, the regulated GAS is not an Internet service but rather a connection between end users and the independent ISP. The actual provision of Internet services comes from the independent ISP, not from Bell. Independent ISPs need the GAS in order to reach the end users themselves, since only telco and cable companies have the “last mile” connection to the customer. Many countries require some form of open access to this last mile in order to enhance competition among Internet providers.
Second, while the independent ISPs are independent operators, the recent regulatory history makes it clear that Bell would like to turn them into little more than resellers of Bell’s residential Internet services. By imposing UBB at the wholesale level, Bell ensures that independent ISPs cannot significantly distinguish their services from Bell’s – both will face identical caps, limitations, and deep packet inspection. This will greatly undermine the competitive environment among independent ISPs, who already face enormous challenges competing with companies that can offer deep discounts on Internet services by bundling a wide range of additional services (local phone, long distance, TV, and wireless).
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BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
Wait, are you and Blake talking about the same ISPs here?
So we have the Internet, perhaps the most powerful tool for democratisation in human history, and it's controlled entirely by brute corporations who cannot be gainsaid.
At some point something is going to have to be done about this.
So we have the Internet, perhaps the most powerful tool for democratisation in human history, and it's controlled entirely by brute corporations who cannot be gainsaid.
At some point something is going to have to be done about this.
You are talking this up a bit too much.
You are paying a private enterprise to provide you a service. The same as last week.
UnbrokenEvaHIGH ON THE WIREBUT I WON'T TRIP ITRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
welp, Rolo's already received notice from his ISP that his bandwidth cap is dropping to 1/8th of what he's currently getting, for the same price he's currently paying.
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BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
Fortunately there are some very big corporations on the other side of this that are also getting screwed by the ISPs, and they also have substantial amounts of money to lobby lawmakers with.
With the Tech industry promoting cloud-based services and streaming so heavily, a lot of money is invested in making sure people don't suddenly start conserving their bandwidth.
Fortunately there are some very big corporations on the other side of this that are also getting screwed by the ISPs, and they also have substantial amounts of money to lobby lawmakers with.
With the Tech industry promoting cloud-based services and streaming so heavily, a lot of money is invested in making sure people don't suddenly start conserving their bandwidth.
...and thus began the first of the Corporate Wars.
I pay less than 40 USD per month for 100mbit down 100mbit up
Curse you!
The Swes in work are always going on about how cheap and amazing their internet is.
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UnbrokenEvaHIGH ON THE WIREBUT I WON'T TRIP ITRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
Also, I don't expect a private enterprise to do anything other than try to make as much money as they can get away with. That's their job.
The problem is, we helped them build the infrastructure they're using to squeeze extra money out of us, and the government body that oversees their use of that infrastructure has decided to go along with letting them do so. It's the CRTC decision that I disagree with.
Also, I don't expect a private enterprise to do anything other than try to make as much money as they can get away with. That's their job.
The problem is, we helped them build the infrastructure they're using to squeeze extra money out of us, and the government body that oversees their use of that infrastructure has decided to go along with letting them do so. It's the CRTC decision that I disagree with.
The problem is basically that there's no reason for there to be competition, since there can't be more than three or four actors in the marketplace and they gain more by collaboration then competition. So a small group of people have absolute power over an increasingly vital service which it is frequently in their interests to limit - a service which theoretically functions to disseminate power among as wide a group of people as possible.
Posts
I always said that Layton was Patrick Stewart + mustache.
http://www.cablemap.info/
It's a display of all the undersea data cables in the world, present and planned.
I usually vote Liberal. I don't like Ignatieff, but I despise Harper.
I don't hate all the things Harper has done (I am actually in favour of that F-35 purchase) but I do hate most of them. And I hate his style. Its Canadian republicanism.
Against the conservatives.
We should send some guys to the prairies to start up a couple more right-wing parties to split up THEIR votes too.
My MP Marc Holland (Liberal) is known as a major thorn in the side of the conservatives. So I'd be voting for him directly as well.
We get nothing accomplished because our votes get split up too much.
If we had Canadian/British party discipline here we'd probably have 3-4 parties as well.
Edit: For example, there's no way the New Deal Coalition could've existed with strict party discipline, or at least it would've collapsed a lot earlier than 1968.
unless you send me one billion estonian kroons in unmarked coins
And then the other cell phone companies went, well fuck that's a good idea, so they did it too
hurray for canadian competition
PSN: Robo_Wizard1
Me too, I pay $63 a month and I get the good Telstra 3G
The companies supplying the smaller ISPs are ISPs themselves and this is where the problem lies. In the past, the major ISPs (most of whom did have bandwidth caps in one form or another) were limited in how much they could charge for going over the caps, because there was the chance of smaller ISPs undercutting them. Now that they can force the smaller ISPs that are using their copper wiring to impose caps, that competition is gone, and the "Indie" ISPs are reduced to being resellers for the major telcos, rather than competitors.
So yes, internet rates in Canada are about to go up for a lot of people, because there is no way for anyone to compete with the major ISPs. Also, as others have pointed out, this isn't just about controlling internet pricing, it's also about protecting their interests as Cable Television providers - it would be very naive to not see this as a way to make alternatives such as Netflix (or piracy) more expensive.
To quote Netflix's official response:
Yes, if they really are having issues with bandwidth hogs something needs to be done, but they already had an answer to that with throttling.
Also, "we've been getting ripped off for years, so it's cool that other people are too" is a really shitty attitude.
Man, I know I'm not intimate with the situation at all. But this bolded statement is true in Australia as well, where both #pipe and bsjezz are talking from. The smaller ISPs which are reselling still manage to keep the larger ones in check here.
I am 95% sure that OPTUS and Telstra own all the Infrastructure in the country.
Besides, I don't know enough about the situation in Aus/NZ to say for certain whether what we have coming in is worse, but that doesn't matter. Shitty is shitty, and the fact that other people are also being ripped off doesn't make the amount we're being ripped off any less.
Bell then lobbied the CRTC (which is primarily composed of highly connected ex-telco executives) to be let out of its end of the agreement, stating they couldn't have forseen that people would possibly use the bandwidth that they actually paid for, and that if they did their network would become congested and slow.
So now the CRTC has agreed to UBB, which lets Bell vastly inflate its wholesale prices, which means TekSavvy (my ISP) has to lower its cap from 200GB a month down to 25GB a month. Hooray!
They could have charged more last week as well.
But they didn't!
Satans..... hints.....
Have you actually researched this?
Here's the actual decision.
That is specifically a request to change how they bill, not for internet access, but for use of the "last mile" connection to the customer, infrastructure which Bell and the other major telcos own, but which was heavily subsidized by canadian taxpayers. It's not a change in how they advertise, it's a change in how they charge allowing them to force UBB on other ISPs.
this is a pretty good summary/explanation of the issue.
Also, even if we were being ripped off (which we're not), it'd be okay because other people are being ripped off in other parts of the world.
At some point something is going to have to be done about this.
If it doesn't go up give me an apology.
If it does go up, well I'd apologize but you won't be able to afford the Internet so I can't apologize to you.
Satans..... hints.....
You are talking this up a bit too much.
You are paying a private enterprise to provide you a service. The same as last week.
Except you weren't typing dumb shit.
Well to be honest, you probably were.
Satans..... hints.....
With the Tech industry promoting cloud-based services and streaming so heavily, a lot of money is invested in making sure people don't suddenly start conserving their bandwidth.
...and thus began the first of the Corporate Wars.
Curse you!
The Swes in work are always going on about how cheap and amazing their internet is.
The problem is, we helped them build the infrastructure they're using to squeeze extra money out of us, and the government body that oversees their use of that infrastructure has decided to go along with letting them do so. It's the CRTC decision that I disagree with.
Also I suppose I am just saying that because of Steam. Go steam.
I pay like 70 bucks a month for only 20 megabits down 1 and a half up.
Can this be a computer thread too? I am thinking of building my brother a new PC for around 300-400 bucks.
The problem is basically that there's no reason for there to be competition, since there can't be more than three or four actors in the marketplace and they gain more by collaboration then competition. So a small group of people have absolute power over an increasingly vital service which it is frequently in their interests to limit - a service which theoretically functions to disseminate power among as wide a group of people as possible.
WOO FREE MARKET