Posts with tag "Bell"

If you are using Canada as an example please try to base your reasoning on facts

Category: Technology
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Posted 673 days ago

Don’t get me wrong, I like it when I see Canada make it into the tech news but what I don’t like is when a writer takes a situation in this country and uses to validate some line of thinking in a post – without checking some simple facts.

The latest incident of this is a post at ReadWriteWeb by Dan Rowinski where he was talking about the sale of Hulu and the implication of that sale on the future of the web. In the post he points to Canada as an indicator of what his fellow American can expect.

To be fair he is partly right but really for all the wrong reasoning.

Dan is right that if Americans want to see what their Internet future is like just look north; but it has nothing to do with Hulu but something that has already happened in the US. I am talking of course about the purchase of NBC by Comcast and the dangers of a carrier owning a major content producer.

Cogeco Cable confusing it’s customers? Tell me something new.

Category: Technology
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3 comments
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Posted 1429 days ago

screwed Up here in Canada we don’t have the luxury, regardless of how the companies involved like to spin it, of real competition when it comes to broadband Internet access. We have Bell Canada deciding to throttle the speed of third party ISPs who buy wholesale broadband access from the telecommunication giant because they don’t want competitors offering faster service than what they offer their own residential and business customers.

This is the same company that has also announced the closing of their online video store, leaving customers holding the bag with videos that they will no longer be able to play (thank you DRM), so they can concentrate on their Online TV service. At the same time we have Rogers appearing to revisit to controversy again over injecting Rogers’ content into users browsing activity.

Now we find out that Cogeco in their effort to further screw their customers through their instituting metered billing back in April can’t even get the software being used to track usage to work right.

After a several month adjustment period where customer usage was tracked but not billed, Cogeco was supposed to start billing in June. Judging from posts to our Cogeco forum, the process isn’t going particularly smoothly for most customers, in part because the bandwidth usage monitor Cogeco is using doesn’t work.

Many users are getting e-mail alert notifications with consumption numbers that don’t match the consumption indicated in Cogeco’s online usage-tracking portal. Others aren’t seeing accurate amounts on either. Some aren’t having any bandwidth usage registered whatsoever. It looks like Cogeco hasn’t started billing yet which is good — given they wouldn’t know what they were billing for.

Source: DSL Reports :: Cogeco Metered Billing Goes Live, Confuses Customers

When I first switched to using Bell’s DSL service almost two years ago now I was paying $24.95 (and another $39.95 for regular phone service) for 5MB down. I am now paying just over $50.00 for the same service. My only other alternative where we live – Cogeco Cable.

Either way like many of the people in Canada I’m screwed either which way. Competition? It doesn’t exist outside of maybe the large metropolitan areas like Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver.

The real Web 2.0 shows its face

Category: Technology
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9 comments
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Posted 1817 days ago

Everyone is under the impression that this whole Web 2.0 thing that has a narrow section of the Internet world all a flutter is about freedom of data and living on the web full time with absolute transparency. The advocates of this electronic hippy movement float around the world content in their ideological bliss that everyone wants to share everything everywhere and all the time. Whether they be swimming in the river of news or paddling around tidal pools of noise while hooking themselves into the great world wide web talk show there is a shadow starting to drape itself over our illusions of electronic equality.

Without even paying attention to a world outside of their cozy terms of social media and incessant 140 character quips of their daily lives they don’t realize that there is a movement afoot that will slap them back to their electronic ashrams to wonder what went wrong. This movement is the real and breathing North American Web 2.0 and it is going to be run by those gatekeepers to the Internet – your local cable company and their brethren the equally greedy telcos.

While the rest of the world might glory in unmetered and constantly increasing speeds of their broadband lifeline here in the U.S.; and if it happens there trust me it will happen north of the border as well, we are seeing cable companies beginning to experiment with metered access. As well others since they got caught with their fingers in the traffic shaping cookie jar are now calling it protocol agnostic bandwidth management. Up here in Canada Bell just calls that deep packet monitoring and shaping but in either case it all boils down to the same thing – making the most amount of money for the least amount of service.

This is all happening at a time when the web is under the illusion that everyone has fast cheap access to the Internet 24 hours, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. It is through this imagined ubiquitous connection to the new world of electronic freedom that they believe things like free web software and common meeting grounds will change the world. Well it must be an illusion because we are being told by the real power of the internet that unless we are willing to pay up in increasingly larger amounts for even lesser access we can forget this dream world.

As this rolling wave of greed moves across the landscape there are many folks calling out for change suggesting that the web is now no longer a luxury but rather a utility that we can not live without. Others suggest that this model is nothing more than the death knell for cable companies going down that road and will fail. There are those that suggest that users will become pissed off because they have to constantly figure out what they have used and what is left.

The reality is as my fellow Canadian Mark Evans suggests that none of these moves should come as a surprise and that like Michael Arrington; along with Mike Masnick, believe that this move will do nothing less than kill off any future innovation. I have written before how I feel that the current idealistic version of Web 2.0 culture is something that will never happen as long as the cable companies and telcos hold the power over the very access to that new world.

That view is re-enforced on an almost daily basis as I see moves like the ones from Time Warner, Comcast and our own Bell to further erode the ability of all people to be able to access what has become the new utility. The real Web 2.0 has shown its face and it’s not about all the goodie two shoe nonsense being spouted around. No .. the real version is all about power and money.

I told you so’s have to suck

Category: Technology
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3 comments
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Posted 1844 days ago

Imposing speed limits In this past weekend’s Elite Tech News podcast the subject of data caps came up while we were discussing the move to more web based applications as a part of our daily lives especially with the idea of a web OS. During our back and forth on the subject I pointed out that there was talk of U.S. internet providers looking at instituting data caps on their users which had the rest of the panel members basically say that this would suck if such a thing were to happen.

While the U.S. has pretty well enjoyed a free ride as far as data caps and bandwidth speed are concerned the rest of the world hasn’t been so lucky. Regardless of the fact that ISPs regularly trot out the unlimited access advertising bullshit the fact remains that many ISP around the world do in fact have some pretty stringent data caps as well as ridiculous speed limitations. I know of friends in both New Zealand and Australia who constantly have to monitor their downloads – which by the way in all cases include things like email.

Bell - king of Canadian companies screwing its users Even here in Canada this is something that we have always had if you were a Bell customer even though they tried to couch it in cutesy terms like Network Fairness. Now however Rogers Communications has jumped on the bandwagon with caps for home and office based DSL accounts.

It now appears that the rumors I heard being floated around in the past little while could very well turn out to be being instituted by the major internet providers like Time Warner and Comcast to start with. Not that this is anything new when it comes to the mobile market which JR Raphael of The Inquisitr blog (Duncan Riley’s new project) points out today where Verizon is trying out new plans that are charging by the meg.

Even though people like Dave Winer; a Comcast customer, might be happy knowing now at least what limitations they are facing as customers and acknowledging the company for its so- Comcast - internet users least favorite company called new effort at transparency the fact is this move is coming at a pivotal time. In my opinion this move by Internet providers to start instituting data caps and charging outrageous overage fees is nothing more than a move to capitalize on our increasing reliance on the web as a part of our daily lives.

As we begin to use the web more and more for our acquisition of movies, old style television shows and as a part of a concerted effort to webify our business activities our bandwidth usage is climbing radically to keep up. Where once we might have only used the web to handle our email and visit our favorite web sites we are now using it for our entertainment and social interaction. This means we are active on the web for an increasing portion of our day whether it be listing to streaming radio or downloading music right through to handling out financial transactions and all this stuff is taking an increasing amount of bandwidth to do.

As Mike Masnick of Techdirt pointed out in a post on the Comcast news that while it might be nice that the company is finally acknowledging the secret fuzzy caps the fact is that at the very time when we need true web innovations these moves by ISP could literally kill off any initiatives to bring new things to market. This won’t necessarily be because companies won’t try but because the consumer can’t afford it.

The Internet has become such an integrated part of our lives that in some aspects it could be argued that it is no longer a luxury relegated to only those that can afford it but in fact it has become a necessity of life in our modern world. This move by companies like Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner to name a few will do nothing more than line their pockets with billions more and further widen the technological divide. Along with that it will also validate the practice so that ISPs in other countries will continue to shackle their users with prohibitive costs.

It is my feeling that with the ever increasing weaving of the Internet in our daily lives and the push for new services; some of which are still on the horizon, the time is quickly approaching where companies that also provide internet access should not have the hammerlock on access that they do. When you have a companies whose primary business is that of A growing divide television, communication or even movies should not be the ones to dictate the rules of the road. The very nature of their primary business is in direct conflict with anything web based and as such they will do whatever needs to be done to protect their primary business.

When this happens along with a concerted effort to nullify any idea of network neutrality the only losers are you and I. This will be especially prevalent among the section of society who already are finding it difficult to be a part of this new world. A technological divide already exists and moves like this by the real gatekeepers of access will only deepen that growing divide.