I'm interested in your comments and opinions on Canada's Internet situation

[SHA-hi]

I realize the majority of regulars on this website are likely to be American, but I do know there are similar issues regarding NN also. More over, with the Egypt situation it looks like Internet regulation is becoming a more global issue.

For everyone not up to speed on the Canadian Internet topic:

• The CRTC is a ruling body simmilar to the USA's FCC.
• They are changing regulations to allow Usage-based-billing
• It's almost cheaper to buy and ship a hard-drive with pre-loaded data, then throw it out each month.
• The US issue of NN content providing is also included, but not the star issue right now.

I'm wondering what thoughts others here have on the issue, especially regarding subverting these rules and creating something like a massive darknet.

[renderman]

Re: I'm interested in your comments and opinions on Canada's Internet situation

Things are going to hit the fan very soon.

Out by me, the weather has been freaky cold for much of the month, so I'm guessing alot of people stayed at home with netflix, running up bandwidth totals, and charges who will get a surprise bill.

Pissing off your user base is never a good thing, however when you only have a couple competitors in a town, there's not much choice. I think that once this affects someone in a position of power, there will be sudden change.

[ButterSnatcher]

Re: I'm interested in your comments and opinions on Canada's Internet situation

I'm in Ontario while you have last mile ISP's Bell and rogers pretty much own and cover all the networks. I'm grandfathered into a contract of unlimited bandwidth but a friend of mine isn't and his bill is crazy high and it seems since netflix came into Canada the ISP's don't want to upgrade there equipment so they just charge more in hopes that less will use it. Bell give you an allowance without the "insurance" of 75GB and if you go over its $2.5/GB up to max of 60 dollars then on top of that if you go over 300GB its $1.5/GB i believe. It's surprising no one has stepped in and stopped it but it was just started in January so who knows.

[renderman]

Re: I'm interested in your comments and opinions on Canada's Internet situation

Just for reference, my ISP (Shaw) has made no outward effort to alert me to any changes. The website always had limits, but they never imposed them in ~13 years. I'm not changing my habits in an effort to see what the situation is and how they act.

One very real complaint about the situation is that many ISP's (Shaw is one) have no method for checking your bandwidth usage, so the only way to know is when your bill is delivered in a box instead of an envelope. If they were up front, sent you warning emails when approaching a limit, etc, I could see that taking the sting out of casual users getting smacked. No bandwidth gauge or other warning method screams of the cashgrab undertones that is pissing off everyone up here.

[theprez98]

Re: I'm interested in your comments and opinions on Canada's Internet situation

Having just given a recent talk on Net Neutrality (shameless self promotion), I find the idea of usage caps (which has been around for a while) to be rather interesting. Some ISPs in the US have experimented with them, and I believe Comcast is (un?)officially at 250GB/mo. But this is considerably higher than most of the numbers cited in Canada.

Also, as I noted in my talk, if you talked to ten people, you're likely to get 10 different definitions of net neutrality. Some of those definitions might include usage caps, but it is entirely possible that other definitions would not. Take for example, Tim Berners Lee, a prominent net neutrality supporter:

If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.

He goes on to say:

Net Neutrality is NOT saying that one shouldn't pay more money for high quality of service. We always have, and we always will.

It seems obvious that by his definition, usage caps don't appear to be an issue. But others might disagree.

Regardless, I am glad that the issue continues to ripen. I have talked to a few folks and I am looking forward to submitting a CFP for a net neutrality panel for DEFCON and/or BSidesLV. I think it will be very interesting.