Category Archives: CRTC

It’s 2015: Cancon is the aberration, not VPNs or the Internet

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WiTopia is a provider of personal VPN services

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In a Globe and Mail piece last Friday, Kate Taylor starts off by asking the wrong question: Digital content may be cheap, but who will pay to create it? Things go downhill from there.

Ms Taylor’s old-fashioned apology for Cancon, with its predictable sideswipes at “freeriding” Netflix and marauding pirates, is based on ideology rather than evidence. It completely misconstrues the role of security tools like VPNs, at a time when Canadians should be far more concerned about their privacy and security online than about shelf space on the network for domestic TV shows. Most of all, it treats the Internet like a cultural and economic aberration that’s ruining our TV system, when the aberration is Canada’s bizarre and unworkable framework for broadcasting.

Virtual private networks and why you need one

What the article says about VPNs:

“The latest scheme is to use a virtual private network, or VPN, to trick Netflix into believing you are located in the United States and can thus subscribe to the video-streaming service’s American catalogue….

Internet advocates love to preach choice, diversity and freedom – after all, a VPN can also be used by citizens in China to access content censored by their government.”

A VPN is specialized client software that encrypts online messages, and is said metaphorically to “tunnel” through the public Internet. It’s a “virtual” network because there’s no real tunnel or separate physical network. Your data packets are still co-mingling with other people’s packets, but only you and folks with the authentication tools – like a password – can read those packets. The VPN is said to be private for exactly that reason, like an office behind a locked door. Continue reading →

Now playing at the CRTC: your precarious future on the Internet (2)

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In this post, I follow up on my comments about the first day of the CRTC’s hearing to review its framework for wholesale services in the telecom industry. Since the most significant sector to be affected is Canada’s residential broadband service, I’m summarizing evidence here that was compiled recently by the Open Technology Institute (OTI) that compares broadband in 24 cities in Europe, East Asia and the US, along with Toronto. This evidence is consistent with findings from other international studies. It shows Toronto lags far behind the broadband leaders in available speeds; in the penetration of fiberoptic platforms; in symmetric connectivity (uplink bandwidth matches downlink bandwidth); and, most seriously from a social policy perspective, in the high prices Torontonians are forced to pay. I take this evidence as a strong argument in favor of maintaining and extending the regulatory regime that ensures open access to networks for smaller, competitive ISPs – including not just legacy platforms like DSL, but also emerging fiber platforms. Unless the CRTC includes these next-generation platforms, Canada will fall even further behind in its long slide into slow and expensive broadband connectivity.

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“We are now ready to take our place as the most technologically advanced nation on the planet.” –Stephen Harper, Digital Canada 150, April 2014

Last month the Open Technology Institute released the third in a series of annual studies of broadband speeds and prices in 24 cities in the US, East Asia and Europe, plus Toronto (originally 22 cities). I wrote about OTI’s first report back in November 2012 (CRTC’s 2nd pro-consumer decree: 4 reasons not to celebrate); and I had comments a year later about the second report (Broadband data for Toronto: more bad news and getting worse). Continue reading →

Now playing at the CRTC: your precarious future on the Internet

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If the Competition Bureau is too short of “facts” on Canadian broadband to advise regulation, as it told the CRTC, here’s a start (source: Open Technology Institute).

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THIS week’s CRTC hearing, launched in October 2013, will cover the changing market in Canada for wholesale wireline telecommunications services, including Internet access. The Commission is hearing arguments as to whether any of its existing policies on wireline services should be eliminated or updated. The biggest bone of contention will involve the treatment of fiberoptic delivery platforms. New entrant ISPs want the Commission to guarantee wholesale access to these next-generation platforms. Deciding in their favor would be an important barometer of the health of Canadian broadband, but that goal is far from a sure thing. Meanwhile, recent data on broadband in 24 cities around the globe, compiled by the Open Technology Institute (OTI), shows once again how terrible the prices and speeds are here in Toronto.

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In my previous post on Barack Obama’s stunning pronouncement on open Internet policy, I misrepresented what the CRTC is up to these days. I claimed the CRTC “is fiddling over the fate of broadcast television with few signs it’s prepared to address the much more important problems of broadband availability, high prices, slow speeds and unaccountable service.”

Not exactly. First, the CRTC recently finished a proceeding on the wholesale market for mobile wireless services. Second, this week features the hearings phase of a proceeding launched in the fall of 2013 that tackles many of the same policy problems on the wireline side. While the scope is all wholesale telecomm services, what really counts here is the Internet access market.

Thanks to the usual tumultuous changes in technology, markets and business models, the Commission has set itself an obscure but potentially far-reaching task (Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2013-551, pdf uploaded here):

“The Commission initiates a proceeding to review the regulatory status of wholesale services and their associated policies, including the wholesale services framework, wholesale service pricing, and the appropriateness of mandating new wholesale services, including fibre-to-the-premises facilities. The purpose of wholesale services is to facilitate competition in retail markets to provide Canadians with increased choice.”

Why the CRTC regulates wholesale Internet access

It may not be clear as to why wholesale services should exist to make retail markets competitive. (Ironically, one of the least convincing arguments made by the incumbents during the wholesale wireless proceeding was that the wholesale arrangements they make with the smaller carriers like Wind have no effect on the health of the retail market for wireless.) Continue reading →

Barack Obama for Prime Minister

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As net neutrality boils over, Obama calls for much tighter regulation of Internet access

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If you care about the Internet and don’t care to see it co-opted and controlled by gatekeepers like Bell and Rogers, President Obama is your man. Yesterday he made a speech from the White House that has electrified the nation (theirs, not ours). He has called not merely for proactive regulation from the FCC to protect the open Internet. He has explicitly called on the agency to invoke Title II, that part of the Communications Act of 1934 intended to regulate common carriers like phone companies. Obama wants the regulator to treat the Internet like what it has become: a utility-like lifeline, not just an add-on to cable-TV service. Continue reading →

Rogers loses a sub: a study in price gouging & lousy service

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The point of this street-level story is to show how Canada’s broadband oligopoly works in practice, especially the incumbents’ freedom to collect economic rents as ISPs – i.e. charge prices they would never get away with in a competitive market.

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Rogers drives a furious customer into the waiting arms of TekSavvy

I’ve known Jacky and Jimmy* for many years (*not their real names). They’re a happy, successful couple raising a terrific teenage daughter. But after months of terrible service as Rogers subscribers, they were anything but happy. In due course I got a phone call from Jimmy, who was beside himself, wanting to be rescued from their ISP hell. And btw, would I still recommend TekSavvy? Continue reading →

Netflix? it’s not the content, stupid, it’s the connectivity (2)

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Fresh evidence from Akamai about Canada’s lousy broadband speeds

Time now for some empirical evidence, featuring Akamai’s recently published State of the Internet report for Q2 of 2014. 

Akamai’s Intelligent Platform is a cloud computing technology that operates in some 90 countries around the world. Because of the scale and sophistication of its operations, it collects and analyzes huge amounts of real-time (not advertised) data about broadband speeds and related variables (based on roughly two trillion requests for Web content every day). Akamai includes in its analysis every country from which it receives requests for content from more than 25,000 unique IP addresses. Currently that’s 139 countries. Continue reading →

Netflix redux: it’s not the content, stupid, it’s the connectivity (1)

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“We are now ready to take our place as the most technologically advanced nation on the planet.” –– Stephen Harper, Digital Canada 150, April 2014, p.4

In my previous post I argued that the showdown last month between Netflix and the CRTC has a silver lining: it has pointed the way to a new role for the Commission. That role would acknowledge that the job of trying to regulate “broadcasting” content in the Internet age has become a mug’s game. On the other hand, Canadians have never had world-class broadband connectivity, no matter how much the Harper gang try to spin the story. Speeds here are too slow, service is lousy and prices are way too high. Hence the new role: make connectivity – not content – the Commission’s top priority.

Ottawa has given us low expectations to go with our low bandwidth

What should Canada be aiming for in the broadband future? Continue reading →

The Netflix boogeyman and a 21st-century role for the CRTC

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“Though some intervenors think this proceeding is all about Netflix, it’s not.” –Corie Wright of Netflix

“If the Commission fails to act swiftly after this proceeding, a service such as Netflix will become … one of the largest broadcasters in this country in the near future.” –Pierre Dion, CEO, Quebecor

“Canadian consumers can rest assured that our government will continue to stand up for them. We will not allow any moves to impose new regulations and taxes on Internet video that would create a Netflix and YouTube tax.” –Shelly Glover, Minister of Canadian Heritage

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The thesis: Netflix has handed the CRTC a new lease on life

CRTC ordered Netflix to share its highly sensitive Canadian customer data. Netflix demurred (“stonewalled” by some accounts). The Commission has responded by making Netflix disappear from the history books, expunging its official testimony. Does that mean, as we read recently, that “It’s over, CRTC, Netflix and globalization have won”? Continue reading →