Michael Geist explains Canada's screwed-up Internet to the Canadian Senate
This is great -- open spectrum, net neutrality, surveillance and packet-shaping, the whole shebang, laid out with the legal, economic and ethical arguments:
First, Canada is relatively expensive, ranking fourteenth for monthly subscription costs at $45.65. By comparison, Japan costs $30.46 cents and the U.K. is $30.63. Second, the Canadian Internet is slow, ranking twenty-fourth out of the 30 OECD countries. It is truly a different Internet experience for people in Japan, Korea and France, where the speed allows for applications and opportunities that we do not have. Moreover, Canada lags behind in fibre connections direct to home fibre with 0 per cent penetration, according to the OECD. By comparison, Japan sits at 48 per cent, Korea at 43 per cent, Sweden at 20 per cent and the United States, which has been slow in this area, is at 4 per cent. Third, when you combine speed and pricing, Canada drops to twenty-eighth out of the 30 OECD countries for price per megabyte. In other words, as consumers, we pay more for less -- higher prices, slower speeds. Fourth, in addition, Canada is one of only four OECD countries where consumers have no alternative but to take a service with bit caps. That means the service provider caps the amount of bandwidth that the consumer can use each month. In almost every other OECD country, consumers at least have a choice between providers that use bit caps and those that do not.THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS (Thanks, JF!)What can be done about this issue?
We need a firm commitment to universal broadband access akin to the same type of commitment that we once had to universal telephone service. As I say, it is the price of admission for much that the Internet has to offer. All Canadians should have access to reliable, high-speed networks. In addition, we need a strategy for faster networks because it is clear that we cannot rely on our existing networks as we slip further and further behind. This might mean more competition, market-based incentives and potentially community-based networks as local communities take this issue into their own hands.
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Is it really fair to compare Canada with Japan? I mean, come on.
I think it is totally fair to compare Canada and Japan.
Dividing our small population by our huge landmass is very deceiving. Most Canadians live in fairly densely populated areas. The GTA holds about a quarter of Canada's population, so there is no reason why the internet is that area is so expensive/slow.
I lived in South Korea for one year. and I was no where near downtown Seoul. I was stuck in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, with a population well under 10,000, surrounded by rice fields as far as they eye could see. And i could still get super fast internet with no caps for about $30/month.
If the Koreans can get great internet in their smallest, most remote villages, why are we unable to at least get reasonable internet in our most densely populated areas?
Huh? One quarter of Canada's population exists on Grand Theft Auto? Wowz.
The responses from the senators sounded very promising. I hope something happens fairly soon. It's frustrating to walk around with a cell phone that could be hooked up to Google maps, Gmail and the web in general, but only be able to use it for voice and text.
Money being -poured- into the Broadband Internet companies (Rogers, Bell) each month -should- be directed at mandated service improvements.
Instead it just goes into the big Money Pile.
ISPs -know- that they have us by the balls. We are their bitch. They know it; we know it. There is fuck-all we can do about it until government steps in and says "Hey Jerks, make this better."
We researched the issue at work and came to some interesting conclusions. Essentially, you can have a UK/US/German style ISP market - ISPs buying service wholesale or leasing unbundled wires from incumbent telcos - which means service is cheap but crappy, a Turkish-style one where service is crappy and expensive, or another strange group including Sweden, France, Japan, South Korea, and the Netherlands where it is both cheap and quality. The only common factor in those we could find was a tradition of Big Infrastructure.
Hurr-ay. Maybe now they'll do something about it. Or maybe they will spend all sorts of money on talking about it and the CRTC will quash it cos Rogers and Bell have them by the balls.
I mean if we are looking at losing our Canadian content restrictions on TV, bit caps are staying.
Those companies don't "have us by the balls" unless you think they do. They're using *our* ditches and *our* homes to *sell* us something. They're at *our* mercy, since we can revoke their right to use those ditches and to connect to our homes.
Admittedly, this has more weight when there are actual alternatives, instead of the duopoly we Canadians face today, but we paid for the PSTN with our taxes, so it can be resold. We allow the cable companies to dig trenches and put in those stupid green plastic boxes that they're supposed to maintain, so we can remove our permission.
We do have the power in this. We just think we don't. And as long as we don't realize that they're not giving us permission to access their network (because we don't care what's on their network) *we're* giving *them* access to provide us with it, we lose.
I know that this report is talking about "Averages" (cost/speed), in Calgary my ISP is faster and cheaper than the cited numbers. Is this a Country wide issue? Or an area specific issue?
"Fourth, in addition, Canada is one of only four OECD countries where consumers have no alternative but to take a service with bit caps."
We have a bit more choice than that... unless we're limiting ourselves to only the largest telcos. Many resellers (Teksavvy, perhaps Velcom and others) offer packages with no monthly caps.
(However, I recognize that they are resellers, and the owners of the fat interpipes won't sell to end-users without bandwidth caps. On the other hand, Geist's point remains a bit hyperbolic).
@ASTROCHIMP -- I was just logging in to mention Tek Savvy! They have no-cap DSL. At not-unreasonable rates too.
"We have a bit more choice than that... unless we're limiting ourselves to only the largest telcos. Many resellers (Teksavvy, perhaps Velcom and others) offer packages with no monthly caps."
Teksavvy, while a fine ISP which deserves your business, is still limited to reselling Bell's crippled service, albeit for a lower markup than Bell takes.
And Bell performs its infamous Deep Packet Inspection-based traffic-shaping on the bandwidth it leases to Teksavvy and other downstream providers. (Yes, Bell has admitted it, and dared the CRTC to do anything about.)
@ Astrochimp: I have to sort of agree with The Unusual Suspect. I'm just in the process of switching from Novus (excellent, but only available downtown) to (haven't actually decided yet, but I think) Shaw. I don't want to, but there's nobody but the 'big 3' offering service to my new place: Telus, Shaw and Rogers.
Novus offered what I understood to be unlimited and uncapped (at a significant premium) but I got a call anyways - they informed me that there wasn't actually a cap but that I'd exceeded it anyways. I had a lengthy discussion with them about this but frankly had no better choice, and I didn't even get a decent explanation as to whose policy it was to implement said "cap".
I am in the process of moving to a suburb of Vancouver which has spent the past several years installing its own fiber network, which it recently spun off (or something - it's its own company but I know little more than that). I spent several weeks before I moved trying to get hooked up with this fancy new network but got the complete runaround several times over - apparently they haven't got anyone (ISP's) offering service. They say that Novus will be doing so in 'about a year' and that a competitor will be up and running in about half that, but from what I've seen the people involved are for the most part not even close to competent - either that or there's some sort of financial incentive/disincentive I am not picking up on. Some of the responses I've gotten are kind of bizarre, actually.
I just have to ask- If you are living in Canada, why are you buying an iPhone or Blackberry in the first place if the internet is so poor?
I live in one of the Cityplace buildings and Telus has direct fiber to it.
It's super rare to find, but for about $40 a month ($34.95 for the first six months) Telus gives me 100Mbit (that's not a typo.. a hundred) downstream and 5Mbit upstream. Also, no monthly cap and they won't throttle you for anything.
What can I say, I love fiber!
Now how awesome would it be if all buildings were fiber-friendly and had this pricing??
As a Canadian I would rather my tax money put to increasing our access to technology instead of putting billions into obsolete car manufacturers that in the end won't benefit the entire nation and will only support a small group of people for a short period of time.
With all this bailing out that's been going on, where's some foresight?
Does anyone know where these figures come from? I'd love to find out exactly where Australia fits with these sorts of ranking. Sometimes we seem to score very favourably in these reviews other times we seem to be right at the other end of the spectrum. As far as I can tell our internet is expensive and slow!
I read through the complete transcript, and now if only the results of this committee has real teeth, perhaps things might move. Prof. Geist did a fantastic job presenting the landscape, and the players, and perhaps a direction for the play to move in. Will Canada get a Minister for Digital Economy, or a CTO? And how does the counter-intuitive message get delivered, that protectionism for the vested interests ultimately hurts everyone, because NO innovation happens while they are protecting the legacy at home, meanwhile most, if not all, of the rest of the world WILL innovate, and leave us in the paleodigital dawn. I also liked that last part about running giant data centres in the far north, and using the waste heat to power the communities that spring up around them! Cool idea!
Bruce
One of the real problems with folks like Geist is that they're only able to play one note -- a sour one. That has political consequences. The CRTC needs to do more. Pricing is poor. But, as someone said up above, it has very little political independence, partly because the good things it does are rarely praised.
So why doesn't someone speak up? Say that the CRTC is doing the right thing by requiring companies like Bell and Rogers in the east, and TELUS and Shaw in the west, to unbundle their networks. And then say that the problem is that the CRTC needs to do a better job of regulating them more aggressively -- it's going in the right direction, just not far enough.
As far as I know, the network unbundling required of Bell and Rogers, and TELUS and Shaw, that allows Teksavvy and Velcom and ACANAC to exist -- all they really do is resell the incumbents' networks -- does not exist in the United States. Without some support in Canada, that will eventually cease to exist here, too.
Dont worry about your speed so much as today with new legislation we lost our privacy on the net.
I would just like to say, Japan is not everything its cracked up to be. Wireless is terrible, and extremely expensive. Internet at home is for relatively wealthy Japanese. Also as far as I can see, not many people really use computers in Japan. It's cellphone heaven or hell depending on what your take is of the much hyped super cool cellphones with tons of features that actually don't do much but give another way to access TV or Panchinko. I think there is lots of romanticizing of the Japanese telecom networks, but truthfully the only thing that changes is the movement of the network..as we move well into 3GS now, in a year we will be moving to 4G...but the outcome is the same...shit phones with crappy clamshell designs and slider phones that lack user function .
And its a good thing this isn't about Japanese banking...cause its "ARCHAIC".
"I would just like to say, Japan is not everything its cracked up to be. Wireless is terrible, and extremely expensive. Internet at home is for relatively wealthy Japanese. Also as far as I can see, not many people really use computers in Japan."
As a person who lives in Japan, (A Canadian) I would have to disagree with you there......FAST Internet in Japan, Typically 26-100 MB/sec with NO BIT CAPS is about 3000 yen a month......that is about 30 bucks Cnd (before GST). Typical restaurant workers make 800-1000 yen an hour, so I don't know how you come to the conclusion that only the relatively wealthy Japanese can afford it. Japan is not packed as tightly as most think. It is a LONG thin country.....it takes more than a day on a bullet train to get half way accross the country.....so, I would say comparisons to Canada are valid with regards to Internet providers.
Canada has EXPENSIVE, SLOW internet, and has convinced people that you should pay an arm and a leg for downloading more than 2 Gig a day (if they will even let you before they shut you off).
I can download 5 gig in 45 mins and I have 'slow' Internet......I would imagine streaming too much at that speed in Canada would make me bankrupt in a week.
Willy in Japan