Competition and Consumer Protection in the Canadian ISP Market

[truenorth]

A decision is to be made today by the CRTC re the type of billing system to be created in the ISP industry in Canada, The Canadian Government did  an intervention after a substantial public backlash against an earlier CRTC ruling that would have effectively killed any competition by smaller companies with their larger dominant rivals. Here is a link to the news article that gives details and background on this issue. truenorth
http://www.canada.com/technology/CRTC+rule+unlimited+Internet+plans+from+smaller+telecom+providers/5708439/story.html

[soybean]

I imagine you're hoping the CRTC makes a decision that will not stifle or destroy competition.  I'd like to see more competition in the ISP arena here in my area in Ohio.  We now can choose among numerous suppliers for natural gas and electricity, even though Columbia Gas and American Electric Power (AEP) provide the actual delivery since they own the distribution lines.  I'd like to see that same thing done in telephone and Internet service, in the manner Canada has been doing it.

[truenorth]

Yes absolutely i am hoping that the status quo is maintained. It was only after years of concerted effort by small telecommunications  would be providers that the monopoly companies  (essentially they had divided the whole country up into regions and NO competitors existed in their regions--not even each other) were the monopolies forced to allow competitors to use the infrastructure  (on a rental basis).
Of course the big boys never were happy with that and this is the way they are trying to eliminate that competition. That is to force a billing system based on degree of use (which they use) on the small providers. A personal example would be that i am a subscriber to Distributel. They lease the infrastructure from Bell Canada (a misnomer because they only exist in Ontario and Quebec provinces). Distributel does NOT have packages with prices varying on a basis of use. They only offer one price for what would be essentially Bell's highest price package (but at a substantially lower consumer cost). The original infrastructure was highly subsidized by taxpayer's dollars at the time of it's creation and sustained by a pricing structure very favorable to the monopoly companies (by CRTC pricing criteria). Also to give this some size prospective currently the small providers are 5% of the total market place in Canada. But even that is too much for the insatiable appetites of the wannabe monopolies. truenorth

[truenorth]

For those people interested in this topic here is the current link to the CRTC ruling and the comments made by other groups or the Federal Government to the ruling rendered yesterday.
http://www.canada.com/technology/Government+study+Internet+billing+ruling/5718561/story.html
truenorth