Canada's telecom regulator has launched a new proceeding to reconsider its decision to allow usage based billing (UBB) throughout the land. That decision is now suspended in the wake of public furor over the call, which would have allowed Bell Canada to bill smaller competitive ISPs by data use rather than hitting them with a fixed monthly fee.
"The great concern expressed by Canadians over this issue is telling of how much the Internet has become an integral part of their lives," declared Konrad von Finckenstein, Chair of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission.
Ya think? As indie ISPs started announcing steep rate hikes in the wake of the policy change, Canada's conservative government was hit with a tsunami of consumer outrage (see typically low key One Ninja Alert below), and quickly told the CRTC to go back to the drawing board. The Prime Minister "will reverse this decision unless the CRTC does it itself," a top government official told newspapers.
Sorry about that
And so it was done, and just in time apparently, since Bell Canada says it can't even keep track of its customers' data usage.
"Please note that we have identified an issue that may cause Internet usage shown on the site to be overstated in some cases," consumers were told last week when they logged into the telco's subscriber service pages, according to the Toronto Star site Moneyville. The Star says it has been getting lots of e-mails from subscribers who say Bell inflates their data consumption.
"In order to ensure we provide reliable information to all our clients, the usage tracker will be unavailable while we resolve the issue," the Bell missive continued. "We apologize for the inconvenience."
Meanwhile, there's an interesting discussion over at Ottawa e-commerce professor Michael Geist's blog about whether the policy was appropriate in the first place. Bell Canada has admission before the government that its congestion problems don't happen on the last mile level; they happen before the traffic gets to a Central Office, from which data gets distributed to individual homes.
"This raises the question of why not offer the independent ISPs access to the network at the Central Office or at other earlier points in the network so that their users' traffic never causes congestion for Bell?" Geist wonders (hint
"The great concern expressed by Canadians over this issue is telling of how much the Internet has become an integral part of their lives," declared Konrad von Finckenstein, Chair of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission.
Ya think? As indie ISPs started announcing steep rate hikes in the wake of the policy change, Canada's conservative government was hit with a tsunami of consumer outrage (see typically low key One Ninja Alert below), and quickly told the CRTC to go back to the drawing board. The Prime Minister "will reverse this decision unless the CRTC does it itself," a top government official told newspapers.
Sorry about that
And so it was done, and just in time apparently, since Bell Canada says it can't even keep track of its customers' data usage.
"Please note that we have identified an issue that may cause Internet usage shown on the site to be overstated in some cases," consumers were told last week when they logged into the telco's subscriber service pages, according to the Toronto Star site Moneyville. The Star says it has been getting lots of e-mails from subscribers who say Bell inflates their data consumption.
"In order to ensure we provide reliable information to all our clients, the usage tracker will be unavailable while we resolve the issue," the Bell missive continued. "We apologize for the inconvenience."
Meanwhile, there's an interesting discussion over at Ottawa e-commerce professor Michael Geist's blog about whether the policy was appropriate in the first place. Bell Canada has admission before the government that its congestion problems don't happen on the last mile level; they happen before the traffic gets to a Central Office, from which data gets distributed to individual homes.
"This raises the question of why not offer the independent ISPs access to the network at the Central Office or at other earlier points in the network so that their users' traffic never causes congestion for Bell?" Geist wonders (hint