Things Fall Apart

At the end of November last year, I blogged about the coming shitstorm over Internet bandwidth, prompted by the arrival of a streaming-only Netflix service here in Canada as well as the perpetually-growing popularity of YouTube and other streaming sites. Well, it appears that storm has now arrived!

The last several days have seen a flurry of reaction to Bell Canada's impending implementation of Usage Based Billing, which was approved by the CRTC last year. Starting in March (i.e. a month from now), Bell internet customers - which include Vicki and I - will be charged using an escalating fee structure based on the amount of bandwidth they use each month.

While it's a bit hard for me to criticize that approach in general - after all, most services like taxis, buses, electricity, gas, water, etc, operate under the same principle - it sounds like the pricing being used is going to be rather ridiculous. And by "ridiculous", I mean highly profitable to Bell and deleterious to their clientele. The critics are certainly painting a picture of increases for everyone, regardless of how reasonable your bandwidth consumption might be. I guess I won't really have a sense of the scale of the problem until we get our first bill under the new system, but if it's as bad as the most cynical depiction makes it out to be, that may be the end of Netflix for is. After all, $7.99 / month for Netflix is one thing; $20 or $30 / month is completely out of the question.

This development is certainly a sad commentary on just how backwards Canada can sometimes be both in terms of technology and catering to powerful industry, but I suppose none of us should be all that surprised.

[Update Feb 3/11: It looks like the CRTC's decision may be reversed, which would come as welcome news to most of us!]