With the enormous groundswell of protest building up amongst the Canadian population, it seems as though Internet metering (or usaged-based billing) is going to wind up as a mere footnote in Canadian telecom history. At least, let’s hope that’s the case.
The concept of billing Internet customers according to how much bandwidth they use isn’t a particularly new concept. Years ago, I signed what was a early version of the current Stop the Meter petition to call on regulators to say ‘no’ to companies setting strict limits on their customers and then charging enormous fees for overages. Back then, it was the big Canadian telecoms, Rogers and Bell, who moved to reduce the amount of bandwidth their customers could use and hitting them with fines for every gigabyte they went over. The rationale then was that the Internet was growing too fast and that a select few customers were “hogging” the pipelines. These so-called heavy users were the kind of geeks who lived in their parents’ basement and downloaded full seasons of television shows, full-length movies, and pirated music. At first, they were painted as sinister delinquents who wanted to ruin the fun for everyone else. But then Rogers and Bell rolled out even more strict limits on downloading and the “regular” users began to feel the pinch as well.
With study upon study revealing that more Canadians are ditching their landlines for cellphones, and abandoning their cable and satellite subscriptions for Internet-based movie and TV streaming, strict limits on how much Canadians could actually download every month became a growing concern. Rogers and Bell argued that their limits were generous and that the average user would never come close to their cap each month, but others disagreed. Anyone who’s signed up for Netflix, downloaded TV episodes of iTunes, or even tried to use services like Rogers TV to stream World Cup matches or stream television from CBC will know that the tiny bandwidth limit imposed by the big telecoms is quickly eaten up.
