Disruption

In some cases, the wholesale price could fall by more than 10% per year.

Start offering some service innovations instead of one-size fits all pricing models.

My colleague Roland Renner has put together a commentary on the issues surrounding the recently announce decision of the Supreme Court to rule on role of ISP’s in Broadcasting.

Supreme Court to rule on ISP’s role in broadcasting

The Supreme Court announced http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Court+rule+ISPs+role+broadcasting/4500632/story.html that it will rule if Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) distributing video services should be subject to the same laws as traditional broadcasters.  The decision is connected to other issues of importance in the world of telecom, Internet and entertainment content and how they will develop in Canada.

A necessary but not sufficient action.

In response to the CRTC’s call for comments relating to the UBB proceedings, Bell has revised their proposed approach that they name Aggregate Volume Pricing.  Instead of forcing independent ISP’s to mimic Bell’s retail pricing model, they have now proposed to implement usage-based pricing at the wholesale level.  Several news reports have reported this revised approach as Bell backing down.

“With our filing today, we are officially withdrawing our UBB proposal,” said Mirko Bibic, Bell’s head of regulatory affairs. “Let’s move on, in my view, and use the CRTC hearing as an opportunity to approve those principles and get the implementation details right.”

Netflix has joined the discussion about bandwidth caps and UBB in Canada.

For his part, Mr. Hastings said he believes data caps have little impact on traffic management because the real problem points for ISPs are peak usage times, and monthly data caps do little to alter the times at which customers use the Internet.

“This idea of capped Internet really makes no sense from a network management or policy sense,” he said. “Really, the costs on the Internet are driven by wherever the peaks are … So it’s really inefficient to use caps to manage network bandwidth. All you care about is peak bandwidth.”

As we see a growth in video usage on the internet, making sure we’re monetizing that for our shareholders through the bandwidth usage charges

The evolving usage based billing issue has led to calls to drop foreign investment restrictions in the telecom sector as a means to stimulate more intense competition in that market.

The problem is that telecom and Cable operators also own broadcasting operations and opening them up to foreign control raises a number of touchy cultural policy issues.  In a recent post, Michael Geist takes  a look at how other countries approach foreign ownership of broadcast asset.

Some things, such as the right to free speech, are not for sale at any price.