When Arthur first reported on the CRTC (Canadian Radio and Television Commission) decision to force big TeleCom companies to bill independent ISPs on a Usage Based Billing model in November of last year, we speculated how it would affect prices for users of independent ISPs.
Now TechSavvy, an emerging and rather successful independent ISP, has announced their new pricing model that seems to be fodder for media nay-sayers of the CRTC. The focal point of discussion seems to be that they are increasing rates $3-4 per month but when compared to Bell or Rogers, unlimited internet is still much cheaper with independents, and TechSavvy is not the only one.
In Quebec, Electronic Box has also announced its new post-CRTC UBB decision prices and they are even lower than before for cable. “Rather than focusing on cost, the real story is competition,” says Tech Lawyer Michael Geist on his blog. “This announcement is precisely what the CRTC had in mind when it released its decision.TekSavvy is offering far better plans than the incumbents.”
The other big update is that Bell has stopped throttling the internet. The original logic was that P2P (peer-to-peer) applications, like BitTorrent, were using up all of the precious bandwidth and the stress on the infrastructure cost Bell lots of money which it had to shift onto the consumers (pirates). Now Bell claims that P2P traffic is down, which it is, but only because streaming is now a more popular way of getting music and movies. Companies like NetFlix have legitimized video streaming by offering this service in the free market instead of on the black market, and it is unethical for Bell to throttle their competition. “Hopefully Rogers will follow suit,” says Jesse Brown of TVO’s Search Engine.
