Monday, February 7, 2011

Download Unlimited: ... where are the limits?

Thus, the Conservative government has imimiscé in decisions of the Council for Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) decision on the pricing of unlimited download. A petition of 168,000 people has led the federal government to overrule the CRTC called for an increased charge to ALL those who download more - that some small service providers can avoid their customers.
"The chairman, Konrad von Finckenstein said Thursday to members of a Commons committee that the introduction of the usage billing for resellers would be delayed by at least 60 days after the scheduled date of March 1 "said the Canadian Press.
What about all this?
In my case, the addition of two separate problems creates a vast confusion in the Canadian context.
On the one hand, we pay more than our internet connection in most markets, if not all markets in this small planet. In Canada, ISPs justify these costs by the smallness of our market and infrastructure costs. Really? In the late 90s, the internet connection to Canada was among the cheapest in the world, it is now the most expensive. Sudden small market? Hmmm ... A lot of trouble swallowing this. So? Users-payers are increasingly aware of this growth in subscription costs, hence the removal of 168 000 shields.
On the other hand, the bottleneck bandwidth by a minority of Internet users is an objective fact. Plus or minus 14% of users account for 83% of the bandwidth. Half a million subscribers as against 8.5 million. Why do you think? To download and upload without paying a round. The internet service providers are well aware, many have already begun to price upwards the most active downloaders-uploader. However, it is highly likely that these additional revenues reaped not discourage active users. They are aware that it is better to pay a monthly surcharge for access to content they do not directly pairont. For their part, ISPs continue to claim they are innocent and that carriers are not responsible for the nature of their trade customers. In this sense, they are not responsible for any hacking and consequently refuse to share their income. Moreover, they claim to want to regulate traffic by charging more greediest downloaders! Then go to convince consumers of a Canadian connection graduated. There are already good gun to pay too much for their database connection!
Those are two separate problems that add up and create confusion. The high price of Internet connection automatically excludes any graduation with the goal (hypothetical) to share the profits with the creators of content. If ISPs are not forced to share their rate increases are fairly debatable thank you. In a context where the price of the basic connection would be much lower than current prices (as is the case in Europe, Asia and in several U.S. markets), consumers would be willing to agree to increases in targeted biggest downloaders of content, provided of course that these revenues are then shared with the providers of such content. We're really not there.

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