Sincerely, MAB

Usage based billing sucks. I never really had to worry too much about it before, but ever since we got Netflix and have been purchasing music, games and movies legitimately via the interwebs, I have a hard time sticking to my 175GB, especially since we're three fairly heavy users (well, 2+1 light user) at the homestead.

Paying $1.25/GB is not my idea of fair, especially when it costs pennies to get that data to my house. It's bad enough that my cell phone bill is ridiculous, but generally speaking, if you're going to put a data pipe to my house, I want to be able to suck down as much data as I possibly can.

The thing that really irks me about this whole thing though, is the fact that our internet service providers (rogers, bell) are content generators as well. They both own television networks and specialty channels, and their interest in charging per-GB (with ridiculously low caps, I'm looking at you Bell) is purely to protect their content channels.

So the solution, if I were on the CRTC/Competition Bureau, would be pretty simple: Cleave the business units, and make the service providers seperate from the content providers. Make the ISPs essential public utilities. Regulate the minimum data that everyone is entitled to in a plan (say, 150GB), and then limit the per-GB cost to something reasonable, like, $0.10/GB (still about 2-5 times the cost, depending on who you believe), to a limit like, $25. Easy peasy.

The margins would still be very attractive, and as a heavy user, I'm happy to pay a little extra for the extra data, but I'm not willing to bend over and be charged the ridiculous rates the telecoms are charging for the privilege of using their networks.

Did anyone else find it really weird that Rogers chopped all their data caps on all teirs shortly before Netflix became available? Yeah. There's the root of your problem right now.

Get the ISPs out of content and make them focus exclusively on providing a utility service to customers.