If you love your computer, you’ll clean it once in a while.

Last summer, I mentioned that System Mechanic helped re-tune our computers to improve performance. The folks at Iolo Technologies tell me that Monday is Clean Out Your Computer Day; the second Monday in February happens to fall on Valentine’s Day this year. Hence my opening statement, if you love your computer, you should think about cleaning it up this year.

Some facts and figures:

• In the UK, technology is above domestic relationships as a cause of stress (19 to 20 percent), according to British Association of Anger Management.
• Executives waste six weeks each year looking for lost items and information, according to a study published in the Wall Street Journal, adding up for huge corporate operating losses.
• 30 percent surveyed have witnessed physical attacks on computers, while 62 percent say their colleagues regularly swear at their PCs out of frustration

While we continue to develop the concepts to move forward on the One Million Computers project, please consider community projects like the Little Geeks for your slightly used machines. They will refurbish P4 desktops and get them into the hands of kids who can extend the life of machines before they go to e-waste recycling.

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 forbearance, then why is the CRTC weighing in on consumer pricing by “small ISPs”.

Columbia law professor Tim Wu doesn’t like usage based pricing for internet services. In his article in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, he provides a clever soundbite: “A nation that spends its time worrying about bandwidth caps is not a nation that leads.”

Different people do use the Internet in different amounts. And there are, in fact, perfectly reasonable ways to deal with variable demand. Operators can offer faster connections for those who want more and offer discount plans for light users. An ongoing bandwidth limit is much preferable to a monthly cap.

Implicit is a view that usage based billing should be banned. Professor Wu is credited with coining the term net neutrality and he has recently been named as a senior advisor to the US Federal Trade Commission. His perspectives on usage-based billing seem to be at odds with the US Federal Communications Commission. In its landmark Order on Net Neutrality issued late last year [pdf, 1.0MB] the FCC wrote:

prohibiting tiered or usage-based pricing and requiring all subscribers to pay the same amount for broadband service, regardless of the performance or usage of the service, would force lighter end users of the network to subsidize heavier end users. It would also foreclose practices that may appropriately align incentives to encourage efficient use of networks.

Professor Wu’s solution restricts the types of offers that could be made to target light volume users or perhaps lower income broadband users. He says that budget offerings should only be low bandwidth, rather than restricting volume of use. I suppose dial-up service would be his idea of the ideal low-bandwidth budget offering.

His proposal for a budget priced product offering is one suggestion, but it isn’t the only one. And we should heed the warnings of the FCC before imposing any constraints on the flexibility of operators to develop commercial offers.

It is difficult to understand how consumers can benefit from restrictions in the types of offers available to them.

How can it possibly be in the interest of end-users to have only one price structure in the marketplace? Why would we say to someone seeking a low price internet solution that they should not even be able to consider trying out a high bandwidth application? Not every high bandwidth customer has a need for their applications the same way; shouldn’t we let the internet service providers develop their own market plans and let users make informed purchase decisions?

Restricting light volume or low income internet users to dial-up speeds doesn’t sound very reasonable to me. I don’t think we want the government restricting internet pricing models.

If asked, would you agree that a government agency should be able to stick hot pokers in your eyes, how would you answer?

Personally, I am surprised that 1 in 4 Canadians think this is OK. That is how I read the recent survey released by Angus Reid. The survey was portrayed as a poll on Canadians’ views on the CRTC’s usage based billing decision, but it really didn’t do that at all.

After all, it was a survey of members of the Angus Reid online panel – not average Canadians. This panel may have tested fine for political polling, but there should have been some kind of bias expected when asking internet users if they want their rates to go up.

The survey didn’t get the question right either – in fact, the survey didn’t even get the name of Canada’s regulator right, let alone describe the decision correctly. The way the question was phrased, I have to ask what kind of people agreed with a price increase. They are the ones that I suggest would also allow the government to stick hot pokers in people’s eyes.

Hopefully Angus Reid did this work on a pro bono basis. Besides helping to grab headlines, “free” is more than this study was worth.

Let’s stop talking about only having two choices for internet services.

It is part of the big lie propaganda. Yes, most Canadians have a choice of two wires coming into our homes for internet service. That is double the number that most of the world enjoys. In Canada and the US, we have facilities based competition powering investment in continually improving the services being offered.

Most of the rest of the world has only one choice.

And like most of the world, we also have hundreds of others that offer internet services to the public, companies that make use of those two sets of wires. That means that the internet service providers (ISPs) also have a choice of suppliers, a choice that isn’t available in most countries.

On a technical level, the ISPs can choose between aggregated connections and connecting their own equipment to unbundled loops. ISPs in Ontario and Quebec can reach their end-users all over Ontario and Quebec by connecting at one single point in Toronto. They don’t have to put equipment in every switching centre, engineer their backbone network, lease long distance connections, manage the traffic. They just need a local interconnection in Toronto and pay Bell about $20 per month and let Bell do all the work for them.

The main point is that there are lots of choices for consumers, including choices of different types of service from each of the service providers. 

Which makes me wonder, why did the alternate ISPs tell all of their customers that their caps were being lowered to 25GB, regardless of how the customers were connected (including those on unbundled local loops). Why did the alternate ISPs not pass on the reduction in the basic GAS tariff; after all, if they decided to pass on the potential cost increase for excess bits, why were they keeping all of the cost reductions for themselves?

Update: I have been informed that Yak had prepared to apply usage based pricing only to its GAS customers. Yak appears to have suspended accepting customers that cannot be served from its co-locates in a limited number of areas. Co-locate based Yak customers continue to enjoy flat rate unlimited service.