Re: Canada gets first, bitter dose of metered Internet

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 6:15 PM, Karl Swenson <[email protected]> wrote:
> Side note, according to critics, what you have is what we will get if net
> neutrality passes.  Any thoughts?

Ah, but what we have is government committees setting ridiculously
high rates on behalf of monopolies.  If the actual costs are what
ArsTechnica and Netflix say -- $0.01 to $0.03 cents per GB -- then
even charging a >200% premium to bring it to $0.10/GB would result in
200GB for $20.  Add on a network access fee of $15 to $20 and it would
still be cheaper than what a lot of people have now.  I would be happy
with that.

Ideally, with properly regulated competition prices would be like that
or lower.  With these quasi-monopolies that have the regulators in
their back pockets we don't have true competition.  Bell gave higher
bandwidth caps for their DSL customers 10 years ago than they're
offering today, but their cost per GB has actually gone down and
infrastructure has been paid for and is now in maintenance mode.

With both internet and cell phones in Canada the power is in few
enough hands that instead of competing for price, one of them will
change their prices to charge more (like suddenly charging for
received text messages as well as sent) and instead of the rest
advertising "we don't do that" they instead copy the higher prices &
service degradation.  As speed of connection has gone up in Canada the
bandwidth caps of the major players have gone down.  The week Netflix
announced they were starting in Canada, Rogers Cable lowered their
bandwidth cap across all plans.

Jeremy

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