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Why Metered Bandwidth Is a Bad Idea
There has been a firestorm of protest recently over the issue of usage based billing for internet access.
It is widely recognized that the future of Canada is digital. This concept has broad government and community support. This future depends on cost-effective, easy access to the internet.
Anything that inhibits internet access and use (either wired or wireless), such as the usage based billing we are now seeing, is counterproductive, and a step back to the stone age. We can’t afford to have have an environment where existing or prospective businesses or consumers have any hesitation to use the tools that are available now, or to innovate and experiment for the future.
Presumably, however, higher bandwidth use does put some extra strain on the system that requires the system operators to increase capacity. It makes sense for higher volume users to pay for it. Surely the real question is whether the proposed charges reasonably compensate the system owners for the true costs of increasing the capacity, rather than give them undue profit (they are in a regulated business so have pretty firm profit margins) or allow them to discriminate against their competition (from users of their own system).
This is separate from the even more important issue that the system owners should not discriminate against content, as distinct from volume, in favour of competing content that they themselves provide.
Yes, but if the figures being thrown around are right, the marginal cost for an extra gigabyte is about 1 cent – but we are being charged $2-3 for it. The caps are way too low to begin with. And the psychological and behavioural impact of having a cap that leads to more costs impedes usaage, and is contrary to what we should be striving for.
And yes, I agree completely with your net neutrality comment.
I thought that Rick French (ex Vice-Chair, CRTC, and (full disclosure, an old friend)) made some valid points in Second-guessing the CRTC comes at a price in the Globe and Mail today. For the counter view in the same paper, see http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/a-metered-internet-is-a-regulatory-failure/article1881250/ by David Beers the editor of The Tyee, in BC.
And I recommend highly Michael Geist’s recent piece, Unpacking The Policy Issues Behind Bandwidth Caps & Usage Based Billing.