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Rogers and Bell visit the CRTC

   15 July 2009, mid-morning

The CRTC hearings that took place over the last week or so are fascinating to read about. Rogers did an embarrassingly bad job of presenting its point of view. On Monday, Rogers said, “It is the behaviour of the application, not the application itself that we are concerned with. If an application which could cure cancer acted in a certain way, it would be also be subject to traffic management.” Yes, Rogers testified they would throttle the cure for cancer. Bell didn’t fare much better yesterday, though there weren’t nearly as many bad sound bites. It did come out that they’ve cut monthly bandwidth caps by as much as 90% — some of their services now have a 2gb cap. And they throttle their traffic for 10 hours of the day. So you can pay for a 5mb connection and get a 80*kb* connection 1/3 of the time. (An 80kb connection is slightly faster than a modem.) What a deal! I really don’t understand how Bell can avoid hemorrhaging customers. They also spent much of their time on the stand avoiding questions or lying. Sadly, I think the CRTC is firmly in their pockets. The transcripts end with this comment from the chairmen to Bell: “I do not think we are very far apart. Thank you very much, we spent more time with you, but you did start the whole thing.”

If you aren’t already with TekSavvy you should switch. Vote with your feet. Bell and Rogers don’t deserve your money. (Even though their customers are apparently very happy.) If you switch to TekSavvy you can also avoid Bell’s internet throttling completely by using ML/PPP. You’ll also get to talk to real people when you call them for support. Seriously.

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