Yes... published on this and net neutrality... and Harper put a real stop to it, but look at what it did to Netflix in Canada. The quality and speed dropped. I believe that your (as well as our) infrastructure needs expansion.

Government can legislate all they want.  But the true mover is the wallet.  Stop paying for metered and it will go away.

Sound advice Dr. Guy except for one thing. Who is going to stop? People want access to the net so they'll pay and the big ass corporate types know that. A no win for us little people.

The Canadian situation is a little more complicated that most people realize. Most of the internet trunk lines are owned by 2 or 3 big telcos plus 2 or 3 cable companies. These guys are forced by the CRTC to sell bandwidth to smaller ISPs in order to promote competition.

Rather than expanding by laying their own network, most of the smaller ISPs have decided to leech off the the larger ISPs' networks. And why not? The CRTC has basically guaranteed that they will always be able to offer a cheaper deal than the big fish.

The big ISPs do not like the fact that they are basically forced to subsidise the smaller ISPs by selling bandwidth at a significant discount. Under the current system they basically have to sell unlimited bandwidth at a fixed rate based on the speed of the connection. So small ISPs don't care about how much bandwidth their customers use, they just care about getting as many customers as possible to maximize profits.

The big ISPs asked to CRTC to provide a fairer system for charging the small ISPs for access to their bandwidth. In the big ISPs opinions, fairer means metered billing because that would stop small ISPs from offering unlimited bandwidth options. The CRTC's response was that they larger ISPs would have to switch to metered billing for retail customers first before they could apply metered billing to their wholesale customers. I don't know about the rest of Canada but here in Quebec, Bell and Videotron have made the switch.

As a result of the switch, all the high bandwidth users gravitated to the smaller ISPs. Now the small ISPs are in a bit of a panic because they are going to be forced to pay for all that bandwidth their high bandwidth consumers use. As a tactic to fight back, the small ISPs ran a successful publicity campaign against metered billing by exaggerating how the new system would affect consumers. With metered billing, high bandwidth users will have to pay their fair share rather than having the majority of users subsidies the bandwidth of high bandwidth users.

Ultimately, the problem is that the CRTC put in place a very badly implemented system to stop the large ISPs from becoming monopolies. We essentially have a monopoly that subsidises small companies to give the illusion of competition.

It will not happen over night, and the pain in the interim will not be pleasant (money), but some startup is going to see a niche - higher prices, but for unlimited internet.  If enough then jump on the wagon, more providers will enter the market and drive the price down.  We forget that back in the 90s, AOL was THE game for internet.  They started out with a metered plan but competition drove them to an unlimited plan (before broadband killed them).

If everyone gives up and resigns themselves to the new structure, you are right, nothing will get done.  But if enough decide they want unlimited and are willing to pay for it initially at least, it will happen.

State fan.   That said, UNC is extraordinarily corrupt- twice the corruption and half the wins of USC.  

LOL Sin, I feel ya.

It's called 'Pollie-speak'.

The art of not choking oneself to death whilst deepthroating your own foot and at the same time licking your Party's collective arse.

Wow......bit of a sick/twisted mind there Jafo?!

...now back on topic.  Zygwen hit the nail on the head with reply #8.  That is a pretty accurate depiction of how our system is currently working and the issues that our infrastructure will need to overcome in the near future.  Having said that, I do have faith that our government will continue to intervene when/where it sees it a necessity and will help lead our tech-structure into a fruitful new generation.  While I have witnessed (especially over the last few years) more and more "strong-arm" tactics creeping into our local telco business actions even the illusion of competition brings with it some real competition in the sense that the few "big guys" still have to pick and choose their subsidies wisely or risk losing out to one of the other "big guys".

If the big telcos made bandwidth costs at a reasonable ratio  (the actual cost of bandwidth is something like $.01 per gig), such as even $.05 per gig, I'd accept it.  Instead they want to charge $1-$2.    Price gouging in its purest form.  This is on top of the $40-$50 they charge at a flat rate.  You should be mad at them for charging so much for a flat rate.  If the cable companies had their way, you'd have what you have now, at the same price, but a 5GB cap.  That is what Time Warner tried to do here.  Now you know why I am so fired up on this issue.

Note: this is a huge issue for Stardock as well.  If draconian broadband caps were enacted, I probably could no longer be a Stardock customer, as their game prices would effectively shoot up to $70 or $80 with the broadband charges.  Also, Steam would likely cut a deal with Time Warner and the big isps to have their games not count against the cap (they do in Australia), which would lead to a real DD monopoly, and force me to use Steam to play PC gaming.

As for refusing to carry Netflix- you do know there's a massive conflict of interest there, and internet is a utility not a luxury these days?

When you don't have a free market, and take steps to squash a free market, government intervention is needed.  If the big telcos would have legitimate competition, these things would go away fast.   Take Time Warner's attempt to put caps in locally 3 years ago.  They picked four markets to "Test"- each market was one where they had a complete monopoly.  They knew if they did it anywhere else everyone would leave.  Captive markets are not free markets, as much as the big corps try to convince the American public otherwise.  I support free markets, but I don't support unregulated failed markets.

Don't believe the crap the cable companies are paying to get out there.

Could be.  Or he could be dead on.  All too often when you ask the fox (Gubmint) for a ride across the river (helping anyone), you wind up in the belly of the fox.

Alstein, I agree with your point on price gouging. I just wonder what's our alternative? Should we ask the (shudder) government to impose or negociate a Fair and Reasonable price structure on the infrastructure owners, then open up the market. Thats what i'd like. The open market I mean. Not the government interference. Then bandwidth would be cheap, pay for use plans would be viable, services like netflix could expand massively, we'd all gooble up bandwidth and the big providers would make more than they do now.