The [CRTC has supported Usage Based Billing (UBB) for Canadian internet service providers](http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2011/2011-24.htm). On the surface, paying for what you use sounds entirely rational. But the way UBB is set up is to impose a disincentive for usage, rather than an actual pay-for-use model.
My ISP, Shaw Cable, has a “High Speed” internet service. It is now capped at 60GB per month. Every GB above that is billed at $2 each. It apparently costs the ISP about 1 penny to move 1GB of data. Real UBB would have my monthly bill increased by approximately 1 penny, rather than $2. Maybe the ISP can make a case for a 10x charge. Fine. So a rational UBB at 10x cost would add 10¢ per GB, rather than $2.
But, 60GB? That’s a lot of data, right?
Not really. On [Shaw’s own page on data usage](http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/newdatausage?utm_source=shawca&utm_medium=textlink&utm_content=hslanding&utm_campaign=datausage), they don’t recommend that I access streaming media with my “high speed” connection:
Suppose I listen to Radio #ds106 (a student-run internet radio station used by a single course) for a month. A quick calculation shows that will use 42GB of data just for that. Leaving less than 20GB for using the web, or streaming media. Take Netflix – the streaming service uses approximately 3MB/sec of bandwidth to stream a high quality movie. That’s 1.35GB per hour of video. So a 2 hour movie takes 2.7GB.
The real move here is for the ISPs trying to kill Netflix to protect their video-on-demand streaming video services. The ISPs would now like to charge you an additional $4 bandwidth disincentive tax to let you watch a high quality movie on Netflix. Or, you could just give the ISP the $4 in the first place and watch the video through their streaming service.
What does this mean for education? Most courses now have online components – videos to watch online, videos to publish by students, applications to download. Now, students will have to monitor their monthly bandwidth usage to decide if they can fully participate, or if they’ll risk publishing a contribution and take a potential hit on their monthly bill.
Many courses take place in online meeting rooms – with streaming audio, video, and media. A student in such a class may be chewing up substantial bandwidth, pushing them toward their monthly cap with every session they participate in. Instructors often provide large files for students to download – each of these files, which can be over 100MB, counts against the student’s monthly data cap.
A student trying to survive on a budget connection is imposed a 15GB/month cap (with an additional bandwidth throttle) by their ISP. That means they are now functioning as second (or third) class citizens online. The ISP is imposing the bandwidth cap at an artificially low limit, and then charging obscenely high overage fees as disincentives for use.
If I want to watch Al Jazeera English, whose coverage of the protests in Egypt have been exceptional and far more useful than those of North American news channels, I can tune in to their live video stream online. The Al Jazeera English channel isn’t part of my basic cable package, so unless I want to pay for another tier package, the online stream is the only option. Watching their outstanding coverage for an hour uses about 720 MB of data. Approximately 0.72GB/hour. That will eat up the allotted data very quickly. I’d better cough up for the Digital Premium channel package if I want to avoid surprise bills from my ISP.
Or, if I want to buy a copy of Call of Duty 4 via the new Mac App Store, I’d better make sure I have room left in my monthly data cap to accommodate the 7GB download. Same thing, if I want to buy some albums or HD movies via iTunes. Or follow course materials via iTunesU.
Usage Based Billing has **nothing** to do with charging for actual usage. It’s about using extraordinarily inflated penalties to shape social behaviour in an attempt to protect services offered by the large Canadian ISPs. It’s about punishing people for fully using the internet.
In 2011, this is not OK.
Excellent post! I will use many of your arguments in my letter to my MP
I think you nailed it – they want to get rid of Netflix and peer to peer in the easiest way they know how – think like the telco.
Spark had a really interesting interview on this – http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/spark_20110130_44538.mp3
the scary thing is the level of conflict of interest. Company A owns media networks that produce TV programming sold to customers through “value add” premium tier packages. Company A also owns internet service provider, charging customers for access to the internet. Company A decides internet access negatively impacts TV Media Network subsidiary, so lobbies government to allow punitive pricing on internet provided by ISP Subsidiary.
If a company is going to act as an ISP, they should not be allowed to also own Media Networks. There is a strong conflict of interest between the two, and Company A is leveraging an effective monopoly in the ISP realm to protect its profit in the TV Media Network realm. At the expense of ALL of its customers.
Horrifying cronyism and third worldish.
Just who are these “SME”s? I’m as expert as anyone is, about the internet and Bell’s use of these in their reports is just “doctoring the books”. Amazing! Buddy buddy system or in pleasant speak – corporatism. Their drinking buddies.
I just arrived back in Canada after 5 years in Korea. I teach graduate courses online now. I forever have to apologize for being unable to communicate / have reliable streaming etc…
The internet is the “highway” of 1950 and if we don’t make it fast and free – we won’t be driving to anywhere nice. We’ll be the town that’s been bypassed. Pity.
I got to write me an article about how business oriented Canada is now. Everything is about business – really mind bending. We are the 51st state and soon our educational system will reflect that as the Kaplan’s start chunking it up and commoditizing.
I appreciate the thought and time to write this up. But it should include an instant reply to our MPs. What the hell are these guys and gals doing?
David Deubelbeiss
Good post, D’arcy. I’m glad to see the government beginning to put some pressure on the CRTC to review this decision. One of the tougher sells that I have to faculty is how to correctly optimize files for the web, balancing the quality vs file size issue. Just this morning I came across a faculty who had loaded a 52 meg Powerpoint file on her website. If UBB does go through, this issue of optimization will become critical for faculty to understand.
Thanks for this very informative post, D’Arcy.