Bell Canada has done another about-face on its wholesale internet plan, replacing Aggregated Volume Pricing (AVP) with Pay Per Click (PPC). Under the new plan, users will have unlimited download capabilities but will pay $1 for 10,000 clicks. The plan is said to be an upstream traffic management plan.
Rogers has historically throttled only upstream peer-to-peer traffic. That’s where we got the idea to charge for clicks. PPC allows users to download all the movies and TV shows they want. It will encourage everyone to learn to be more effective in their search terms because it rewards people who use fewer characters. Similarly, Canada’s gaming community will become world leaders because the more shots you need, the more you will have to pay.
Typically, internet connections are asymmetric, with far more download capacity than upload. PPC is designed to help reduce congestion on the upstream path. Bell does not plan to charge users for clicks on their Fibe TV remote control, as long as the channel is being changed to a CTV station.
We asked why Bell was abandoning AVP less than a week after it was introduced. In an emailed statement, Bell’s spokesperson said that it was time to focus on the real bottleneck.
Enough was enough. Some people were clicking away and using up the entire upstream capacity. Especially the gaming community with all that shooting. We need Canadians to aim better. The new pricing will not affect many people and we have a deal with Open Media to buy their mailing list, offering a special affinity programme to their 400,000 signatories. So everybody wins.
Bell expects PPC to get people to renew their support for the Open Media initiative, unless they realize this is some kind of April Fools Day joke.