The CRTC’s Public Notice for the Review of billing practices for wholesale residential high-speed access services has a sentence in the pre-amble that I am having trouble with.
The Commission’s approach in reviewing this matter will be based on two fundamental principles: (1) as a general rule, ordinary consumers served by small Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should not have to fund the bandwidth used by the heaviest retail Internet service consumers; and (2) smaller ISPs should continue to be in a position to offer competitive and innovative alternatives.
I get part 2: that the alternate ISPs should be able to stick around to compete and hopefully innovate.
What I don’t get is part 1: that ordinary customers served by the alternate ISPs should not have to fund the costs of serving the heavier users.
The CRTC uses the modifier “small” in front of “ISPs”. If I stretch, I might be able to understand the first part, if the CRTC referred to “all” ISPs. But I find it troubling either way that the CRTC’s first fundamental principle in this review appears to be manipulating retail pricing of internet, rather than focussing solely on the second part – getting the wholesale regime right.
If part 2 is done right, then the alternate ISPs are able to “offer competitive and innovative alternatives”.
I don’t think the first of the CRTC “fundamental principles” makes any sense the way it is written. If we have a competitive enough industry for retail price forebearance, then why is the CRTC weighing in on consumer pricing by “small ISPs”.
On this point, we completely agree. I think the wholesale UBB was an attempt by both Bell and the CRTC to do an end-run around retail price forbearance for the smaller ISPs. It always looked as though they wanted the smaller ISPs to simply pass on these charges directly to their own customers. Many consumers were under a similar impression, thinking they would start receiving bills directly from Bell.
GAS is not an internet service. It is entirely inconsistent to base GAS overage charges on Bell’s retail internet service charges, while at the same time claiming that IPTV, which uses much of the same infrastructure, shouldn’t count towards these limits.