In doing a bit of background research, I happened across a Canadian Heritage parody done by none other than Rick Mercer -- video after the jump. To summarize -- Canada -- Gouging consumers since the advent of the telegraph.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0ZGkqQvAVw

I’m a self-professed tech guy, and I literally have spent the last 10 years of my life building / working on the web.  I also find things like network stacks / transmission interesting, so I’ve done a lot of reading on the topic.  So, armed with all that knowledge, I’ve been following this UBB  scandal with some significant interest.  I should also mention that in my house, we have Netflix and make liberal use of the Boxee box that Tania bought me.  With Tania being home / on mat leave -- we can pull anywhere from 3 GB -- 40 GB in a day.  Fortunately we’re signed up with a smaller ISP (Acanac) who are awesome and provide us unlimited bandwidth over cable for less than Rogers was screwing charging us.

Now, what does all that have to do with UBB -- well, lets say I was still paying Rogers (for their terrible service / low bandwidth caps) -- I’d be paying around $60 / month ($46.99 + modem rental + tax) for 60GB of bandwidth with $2 / GB of overage beyond 60GB.  Well, doing some quick math, average usage for my house is 450GB / month -- making my monthly bill from Rogers $840 / month.

Am I a “bandwidth hog”, I wouldn’t consider myself one, if I’m paying for 10mbit service, I expect to be able to use that 10mbit whenever and however I want.  If I decide I want to use 10mbit for an entire month, I’d better be able to pull down 2.5ish TB in a month without incurring overages.

Now, why am I writing all this -- because I do believe in UBB, go ahead and charge me for my usage, I really don’t have a problem with that.  The problem I have is with “what” they’re charging me.  Instead of charging me $2.00 / GB over a set limit, why not charge me a reasonable markup on what they pay for bandwidth.  If it costs them $0.05 / GB (which is what most people are estimating it actually costs Bell / Rogers), then they’d better not charge me more than $0.10 / GB -- plus a flat monthly fee for the connection (something like $20 / month seems reasonable).

So, if the CRTC decides to make Canadian ISP billing into a more utility based billing, they’d better damn well put limits on the markup ISPs can charge.  Of course all this is just me speculating -- Bell / Rogers owns the CRTC, and in the end will get what they want.

You can read the first 9 ways here: 9 Ways ISPs Screw You Over.

10.  ISPs advertise speeds in a way that only people who have an understanding of how data is stored can translate.  For example, lets say you pay for a “10 meg” connection, thats not actually 10 Megabytes per second you’re capable of, its actually 10 Megabits.  Now, there’s quite the difference between Megabits and Megabits, but not so much a difference in the acronyms.  MBps is for Megabytes and Mbps is for Megabits.  The real issue here is if you pay for a 10 Megabit per second connection, your maximum transfer rate is only going to be 1.25 Megabytes per second (there are 8 bits in a byte).  Thats also theoretical, you can very rarely actually achieve the theoretical bandwidth provided by your ISP, unless you’re trying to load their homepage or hit a url that they detect doesn’t exist and throw you a page full of ads.

I’ve been a long supporter of transparency from ISPs, but we’re likely never to see that up here in Canada – at least not until the CRTC cracks down and decides we, the consumers, need some competition and not more monopolies.