Hey, America. Canada's watchdog just slapped net neutrality rules on wireless internet A decision by Canadian telecoms regulator CRTC may have significant implications after it applied net neutrality rules to wireless connections. In the ruling, the country's largest telco Bell was ordered to stop offering a mobile app that for $5 per month allowed customers to watch 10 hours of video from television channels …
"...watch 10 hours of video from television channels owned or licensed by the company on their cell phones without it counting against a data cap."
Let's rephrase the above more honestly.
"...stream an additional 20GB of 'in-house' mobile data without it counting against a stingy, overpriced 2GB per month data cap."
And to accomplish this, we need to charge about $85 per month and squeeze the datacap down to 2GB.
Yeah, CRTC got this right. Must be an election coming soon. We should have annual elections.
"Bell also argued that the service was a good thing for Canucks and so should not be prevented."
From a data networking standpoint, its seems pretty hard to argue that this service was a good thing. You're basically offering a small data package upgrade for $5 a month, which seems a bit steep to me. Especially if you also have to pay for access to the content itself (Not sure if that was happening, but if it were you would be paying to be able to view the content and then pay more more to be able to view that content on your mobile device)
Yes, you do need to be a subscriber to access their internet video.
Let's say that it uses 300mb per hour, so 10 hrs is about 3 gb. For $5. Steep you say.
http://www.bell.ca/Mobility/Cell_phone_plans/Personal_plans
4 gb is $50/mo. Now do you see? Plus it says there you only get 5 hrs for $5. Welcome to Canada!
"...are there 5 hours of good TV per month in North America?"
Yes! Between the BBC and NHK imports, there's plenty of high quality TV available in North America.
Oh, locally produced? Hmmm... PBS Nova has at least one good episode per month. Often imported from Europe.
Your point is valid.
Upvotted, but to be fair, there are some good shows.
Made in Canada was wickedly funny, the few times I saw it. Unfortunately it seems to have been swallowed up in a black hole ($298.00 will suck season #1's DVD back out @ amazon.ca).
Trailer Park Boys. I was sitting in a pub wondering what the world was coming to on the first episode because it took me a while to clue in it was a reality tv spoof. High brow? No, by no means, no. But fun. An acquired taste.
Don't forget where SCTV came from.
Archer, Arrested Development, Game of Thrones, Deadwood, Rome are from North America. Yeah, yeah, GoT is filmed over by y'all, but still...
That all said, one of the best thing with being on Canadian Netflix as opposed to the US version is their much greater selection of BBC and European series. The bulk of US network production is either slop to begin with or just gradually runs out of steam after too many episodes and seasons.
Maybe I'm missing something ("Yes! A brain hahahaa!") but this doesn't seem to be net neutrality at all.
E.g. certain ISPs allow Steam traffic to pass through without counting towards a bandwidth limit. This doesn't mean they're getting a special route or higher priority (which would be a net neutrality problem), they're just not being paid for.
It's an ill-defined term.
It's suppose to mean that all data is treated equally by the entire network.
Anyone that violates this rule is Anti-Net-Neutrality and thus evil.
So Akamai and other CDNs or Net Edge Cache systems are evil?
"No! We didn't mean THAT!"
The proponents can't even draw a line on the boundary between good and evil. It's easy to define the extreme end points of the spectrum, not so easy to precisely delineate the boundary.
But it doesn't have the same net effect. If - say - Netflix is willing to contribute money to networks and tell them, "don't charge the customer for this data" then that isn't treating Netflix data any differently to anyone else, it's just changing how the data is charged for. The consumer is still footing the bill, as they pay for Netflix, so everything is paid for, and the traffic isn't being treated as higher priority.
It's arguably more ethical to do things this way, as it makes explicit the hidden cost of a service that uses the internet to do its delivery, ie the consumer has to pay for internet bandwidth and the service they're signing up to.
We are normally pushing Britain out of the way to be the first to sign up to whatever little adventure the big boys want to start. Our leaders are currently arguing that dropping bombs on ISIS still doesn't count as hostilities and is part of the "training local police" mission.
We have a leader that makes Blair look like a consensus politician.
We just announced that we track all Canadians downloads, which although illegal is necessary to protect us from terrorists.
We just announced that we track all Canadians downloads, which although illegal is necessary to protect us from terrorists.
C'est bien necessaire. Il s'agit de terrorisme domestique!
Vive Quebec libre! A bas legalite! Aussi l'egalite! meme net neutralite'!
C'est drole, n'est-il pas!
Un Anglais.
OT I know but the AC who posted 4 hours ago about our "mission" in the Middle East is partially mistaken. We have 2 missions in the area. One is to bomb ISIS targets from the air in support of Iraqi troops - everybody know about this one and its going as advertised. The other is to train and advise Kurdish troops. The second one is the cause of the controversy because our people came under fire from ISIS and returned fire - engaging in combat. The mission is to "train and advise" and by defending themselves, some people see that as an escalation of that mission without proper debate in Parliament.
Squadrons of high-flying pigs spotted in Ottawa. CRTC finally does something useful, as opposed to their usual pointless niggling about Canadian Content and French language regulations.
How is it that TV data, going through the same networks and to the same handsets can be economically provided for fairly low rates? Telus for example. While data automatically goes into a gougeatron mode because it is supposedly very costly to build and maintain those networks to support high data rates and volumes?
Really tired of seeing outrageous bills (hundreds of $ for 8MB over limit from Fido/Rogers in 2008 for example).
Government regulators for years helped the incumbents by requiring >50% Canadian ownership of networks, thus leaving the cozy Telus, Bell, Shaw to carve up the market to themselves and us with sky high bills. (to be fair, it seems as if US cable rates can be even worse).
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