O Canada! > Canadian > Canadian Broadband > All This UBB , Usage based BS was such a waste

reply to LastDon

Re: All This UBB , Usage based BS was such a waste

reply to LastDon
It's not a waste ... it is part of a long history of trying to milk this new "internet thing" for all the money they could get out of it.

First Portal Service, UBB and now CBB are attempts by the incumbents to monetize as much as they can.

They've suffered horribly from lack of public interest in the longer term as they tried to milk "portals". The proof that the Portal approach wasn't going to work should have come from Compuserve and AOL, but no our incumbents tried to create their own and failed, so they outsourced to Yahoo! (Rogers) and MSN (Bell) and both failed. People just weren't interested and didn't want portals. Search engines eliminated the need to be spoon fed web pages! So, the money from the portal providers advertising didn't happen.

So, now how do we milk the public? Since they want lots of data from their own sources, perhaps the thing to do is rip them off by charging them for bandwidth on top of the increased monthly rates. Enter UBB. They tried it several years before the third parties started to noticeably impact their turm. It failed because for once competition worked (sort of). Then they seem to collude and everybody started to put caps and fees on together. Hey presto, in spite of complaints, for the incumbents, it worked. But in the meantime, the 3rd parties came along and were able to offer very high limits or even unlimited. This was upsetting the applecart. The incumbents tried to force UBB on 3rd parties to slow down the competition. It didn't work very well, with plenty of public protest and the eventual agreement of the minister and the CRTC. But notice they didn't back away from UBB for their own customers.

Now along comes Capacity Based Billing ... which really is what we have with the incumbents with tiered pricing for faster speeds so really the incumbents are double dipping ... pay for speed which gives you more data and pay for more data moved!. But now they apply it to 3rd parties to keep the milk flowing at a ridiculous rate that has gone to the CRTC in an effort by the 3rd parties to make the charges reasonable.

So, with that, the incumbents foresee that their cash cow has been seen for what it is and decide they need to compete in another way, again by milking their own customers but as a bone they throw "unlimited bandwidth".

So, Portals, UBB and CBB are nothing more than continued attempts to milk subscribers, whether they are direct retail customers or 3rd party customers and you can be sure that they will attempt to find another way to milk customers.

I do remember reading something recently about an ISP that is attempting to revive the portal approach so everything goes through them, and the customer pays.

reply to Gone
Neither are air fares, but selling air fares below your cost in order to drive out the competition is.

So in the case of Bell selling business DSL for less then wholesale, it could be considered predatory pricing.

Bottom line, it has ZERO do with regulation, but how you compete in the marketplace.
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No, I didn't. Honest... I ran out of gas. I... I had a flat tire. I didn't have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn't come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake.......

reply to Gone

Behavior has to be demonstrated, and the most obvious way it is demonstrated is through predatory pricing.

reply to MaynardKrebs

reply to Gone
If the Comp Bureau hasn't cracked down on the incumbents price fixing on each others plans then good luck getting them to crack down on predatory pricing.

reply to mlerner

reply to sbrook

reply to LastDon
From what I'm reading from you LastDon your english is just fine. Just learn how to write and you're all set to go. Cheers.

reply to MaynardKrebs

Proved my point, Comp Bureau or anyone else for that matter will not crack down on it. A court case is just a slap on the wrist.

And as much as Bell would like to get rid of TekSavvy, the irony is they've also said they need wholesale customers, so I'm not sure they would ever sue TekSavvy but then you never know.

reply to hm
It's not really a failure if three of the big ISPs are now offering unlimited options in advance of new wholesale rates. Seems like they're afraid of the 'failed' indies.

reply to TSI Marc
I know it's a pipe dream, but I would rather see full functional separation. Have the municipalities put in and maintain their own fiber networks. These networks could then be used by any ISP on equal terms, giving customers true choice and, more practically, only a single connection to their homes. The ISPs paying for access to utilize these network should offset the cost of maintaining it (hopefully at least).
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"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore, 1993

Yup, not going to happen now. Bell could never achieve functional separation as all of their engineering, marketing, operations and support is all grouped in one. At one point there was a support group along with the business office in Ottawa and Bell Nexxia which handled the wholesale side. Their technical side is now heavily involved in their own operations.

Plus the municipalities and hydro companies which are supposed to by law support a theoretical third wire just put up a lot of red tape and give preference to the incumbents.

reply to Nagilum
All the municipal fibre networks that I'm aware of sold themselves out of the business.