OTTAWA – The CRTC has approved BCE’s plan to introduce usage-based billing, but only under certain conditions.
Thursday’s decision means that Bell Aliant and Bell Canada can introduce new speed options, usage-based billing rates and levy excessive usage charges (together, UBB) for their wholesale residential gateway access services (GAS).
While the Commission granted interim approval of the plan last October, this decision allows Bell to “implement its economic ITMP (Internet traffic management practices) only once it charges UBB rates to all its retail Internet service customers”.
According to telecom analyst Mark Goldberg, this is not what Bell wanted, and in fact, may be viewed as “a victory for independent ISPs”.
“Which customers don’t have UBB? The customers who have been around the longest”, Goldberg wrote on his blog. “The most stable, least likely to churn customers are precisely the ones that are standing in the way of wholesale UBB.”
Goldberg also predicted that UBB will not come in to effect this year.
“…There will be no usage based billing for wholesalers in the near future”, he continued. “If you are a Bell retail Internet subscriber with a legacy unlimited data plan, why would you voluntarily get rid of it? Maybe some people could be bought out, but all it will take is a single hold out. If I was working for an independent ISP, I would find a Bell customer with such a plan and pay them to make sure they never voluntarily give up their unlimited service.”
In a dissenting opinion, Commission Molnar wrote that the condition that the Bell companies must migrate all of their retail customers to UBB before they can implement changes to their GAS tariffs “is unnecessary” and contrary to policy direction.
“I would note that I am not convinced that the Bell companies’ proposal to apply UBB charges based upon end-customer usage is the most effective Internet traffic management practice (ITMP) approach”, her dissention reads. “Nor am I persuaded at this time that an aggregated usage model, if properly structured, would nullify the potential effectiveness of UBB as a means of managing network usage.”
