Tony Clement was interviewed on CBC on Saturday and expressed the government’s objections to the UBB ruling…
The CRTC’s recent ruling that a transport carrier can impose the same UBB on ISPs that buy connectivity from it that the carrier has for its own retail customers forces “one size fits all” pricing on the independents, Clement said.
It’s not usage-based billiing but the imposition of it on ISPs that the government won’t tolerate.
At the end of the day, perhaps some calm discussion and debate can return to the table related to usage based billing, bandwidth caps and bandwidth throttling. Most of the key participants agree that there is an incremental cost incurred to transmit larger amounts of data. Somehow those increased costs must be paid for or else service quality will degrade to unacceptable levels.
The government appears to have taken a constructive stance that yes, usage-based billing can occur, but it should not be a one-size fits all pricing structure. Who knows, someone might come up with something innovative along the lines of a “time-of-use” rate that charges a high rate for transmission capacity when network use is high and a very low rate when traffic levels are low.
As long as a one-size-fits all pricing scheme was being contemplated, that type of service innovation would be precluded.
