Bell isn't making enough money. So they have petitioned the CRTC to allow them to charge metered billing on Internet Usage. I personally don't care what they do to their own Sympatico customers. However I do care what they do to independent ISPs.
You have to understand how stupid this is. An independent ISP must pay for their own upstream connection and traffic. They are already paying for the bandwidth used by their customers. Now bell is trying to convince the CRTC, that the leased "last mile" that the independants use, should also be metered and the ISPs charged. So in essence these ISPs would have to pay double. This is at the same time as Bell has ignored a CRTC ruling telling them to also allow for ADSL2 reselling.
What's mind boggling here is that the CRTC has a mandate to promote ISP competition in Canada. They imposed a bunch of regulations on Bell in order to do this. Competition has been a success and the independent ISPs are doing well. Now Bell has successfully gotten the CRTC to allow them to do more and more things that will kill the independant ISPs. This will be the final straw.
Many people have argue that if these independent ISPs want to compete, they should install their own hardware and lines. This is not a viable option as Bell has a stranglehold on the Government Paid For infrastructure. Any attempt to compete on that level would cost millions and lead to anti competitive behavior with no Government intervention (see http://www.10buckstoo.com/).
I encourage you to visit http://www.competitivebroadband.com/ and make a submission to the CRTC and your MP about this.
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