Category Archives: data caps

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 →

Klass complaint to CRTC on Bell’s Mobile TV winds up – for now

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Subject: Part 1 application by Benjamin Klass requesting the fair treatment of Internet services by Bell Mobility (Klass application) and Part 1 Applications by CAC-COSCO-PIAC regarding Rogers’ Anyplace TV service and Vidéotron’s Illico.tv Service (CRTC files 8622-B92 201316646, 8622-P8-201400142 and 8622-P8-201400134). 

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Yesterday was the deadline for final reply comments on the Part 1 Application filed last November by Ben Klass. I wrote several posts on Ben’s initiative, starting with this one on November 24, 2013. My second and final submission is pasted in below (with a few copy edits; paragraph numbers remain).

The case brought by Ben is a good opportunity for the Commission to see how its ex-post regime for handling ISP and WSP misdeeds is working. Thus, while I hope the Commission gives Ben his due, I also hope it takes a long hard look at the bigger picture, i.e. the status of the mobile TV services operated by both Rogers (RAP-TV) and Vidéotron (illico mobile), in addition to Bell’s Mobile TV. Continue reading →

Digital Canada 150: why the Tory plan is risky, not just foolish

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April 17 and a couple of updates

1 – Data caps. Not quite a breaking news update (on my caps comments at the end ofpost-dc150-caps-2 this post), since this story appeared in Ars Technica on March 13. “Time Warner Cable has been offering customers $5 monthly discounts in exchange for giving up unlimited data for the last couple of years, but almost no one has taken the company up on its offer.” In fact, only a few thousand of TWC’s 11.5 million customers have done so.

Here’s the deal: any TWC sub who wants to save the $5 a month can do so by cutting their cap from unlimited to… 30 GB! Jon Brodkin does the math and figures that three months of “excessive” Internet use and that sub loses a year’s worth of savings. The USA’s second most-despised ISP (after Comcast) has a story for that. CEO Rob Marcus claims his customers must value unlimited – duhdoy. Continue reading →

CRTC demands answers from Bell on its Mobile TV shellgame

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mirko-bibic-1Bell’s CRTC whisperer, Mirko Bibic, got bent out of shape when he saw the CRTC’s annoying interrogatories Friday morning

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Today saw another encouraging step in the CRTC’s management of the Ben Klass Part 1 application on Bell’s Mobile TV service. You can get the backstory in my prior posts (first one was in November) and from Ben’s blog, among other places.

That step was the interrogatories sent to Bell officials, asking for detailed information on Bell’s network architecture, subscriber invoicing, content exclusivity and competition, among other things. I’ve pasted in all 10 of the Commission’s questions below. A couple of comments in the meantime…

bell-mobileTVimageFirst off, the language of the questions demonstrates that the Commission is taking Ben’s application to heart, and that it sees a prima facie case against Bell for violating telecom rules. On one crucial point, whether Mobile TV is simply a broadcasting service as Bell claims, the Commission staff want to hear an explanation of the “inconsistency” in Bell’s statements on this matter – as well as of “how a data service that uses the Internet is not a telecommunications service” (yes, Bell argues that its quacking duck ain’t no water fowl no how). Continue reading →

Intervening in support of Ben Klass complaint on Bell Mobile TV

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Last Wednesday was the deadline for followup comments on Ben’s Part 1 application, more accurately described as a complaint. In the text below you’ll find the main body of my intervention, minus the top and tail. I wrote about Ben’s original filing back in November: Ben Klass asks CRTC to stop Bell’s deliquency on Mobile TV. As of today, Ben’s current filing hasn’t yet shown up on the Commission’s site: I’ve uploaded it here. Of the other interventions filed this past week, two were especially critical of what Bell is being allowed to get away with. Teresa Murphy starts her comments by suggesting that Bell’s whole argument is founded on a phony distinction (para 2: her pdf is uploaded here):

It makes no sense whatsoever to treat competing services differently when the underlying technology and distribution method is the same. This is allowing vertically integrated companies to behave by one set of rules, and allowing them to treat their competitors differently, and frankly unfairly.

Continue reading →

The Internet in 2025: 12 reasons to fear our online future (Pew 5)

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patel-theverge-internet-is-fuckedBe very afraid: see Nilay Patel’s hard-hitting post in The Verge last week

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The trends are mostly about fragmentation

Or at least the triumph of depth of experience over outreach and a sense of commonality.

This is the 5th and last of my responses from the 2013-14 edition of the Pew/Elon experts survey on the future of the Internet. I only answered 5 of this year’s 8 questions; my four prior responses are these:

The final Pew question was the only one described as open-ended, i.e. it did not begin with the usual Yes/No binary choice. By the time I was done writing my relatively short response, I was seriously depressed. As Free Press president Craig Aaron said to The Verge’s Nilay Patel: “What we need right now is decisive action. We can still unfuck the Internet.” Sure, but where’s decisive action going to come from? The FCC? The CRTC? Questions for another time. Continue reading →

What you don’t know about your ISP service will hurt you (2/2)

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teksavvy_infographic-3Infographic released by TekSavvy in February, from omnibus survey by IDC Canada

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(Please see previous post for the setup to this one)

In early February, TekSavvy released the results of five survey questions fielded by IDC Canada on its behalf, which probed for attitudes to Internet service among Canadians. In keeping with its White Knight role, the maverick ISP is not only going Ottawa one better on the research. TekSavvy also took the opportunity to launch a new tool to help customers navigate the decisions involved in choosing a particular access plan. They call it Find Your Plan and apparently people like it.

Tina-2I spoke recently about this initiative to Tina Furlan, TekSavvy’s Director of Marketing and Communications, and the brains behind last year’s dramatic rebranding. The two main questions on my mind concerned a) why her team decided to plunge into the research game, and b) were they surprised by the results. Tina points out that TSI’s subscriber base across Canada (for all services) is now close to 270,000. Naturally, with that kind of growth, its traditional customer base of younger, techie males has broadened into a more mainstream and technically unsophisticated group, the very end-users who are especially puzzled and frustrated by all the bafflegab ISPs usually throw at them. Continue reading →

What you don’t know about your ISP service will hurt you (1/2)

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Infographic released by TekSavvy in February, from omnibus survey by IDC Canada

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How much do you pay each month for Internet access? What speed tier are you on? What’s the size of your data cap? Is it measured in bits or bytes? Can you complain to the CRTC about your ISP? Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?

We get the ISP we deserve

To the wonks with a vested professional interest in these questions, it’s hard to believe most people don’t know the answers – in fact, don’t know what the questions mean in the first place. Part of the puzzle comes down to a simple matter of caveat emptor: why would anyone pay year in and year out for a pig in a poke? Especially when that particular pig keeps growing in importance. We all pursue a wide range of critical activities online, like education, government services and job searching. We’re also spending more and more money on communications services (as the CRTC noted last fall, Canadian families spent an average of $185 each month on communications services in 2012 , up from $181 the previous year). Continue reading →