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I was really excited when I saw that Canada was getting some new DSL services that would give customers access to faster speeds and start making things like real time HD streaming video a reality. If you are not in Canada and haven’t heard, Bell has a new service that offers speeds up to 25Mbps download (7Mbps upload) for residential service. I quickly remembered how there is a strange convention for Canadian ISPs to give super fast speeds but to limit the amount of data that can be transferred over the connection. The new service from Bell limits the data transfer to 75GB per month.

This may get a little technical, but to put this into perspective a 1Mbps connection being used 100% for 1 day is roughly 10GB (really 10.8GB). So 1Mbps connection for a month is roughly 300GB (technically 324GB). Now if you used a 25Mbps connection for an entire month it would utilize approximately 7,500GB. Yea, that is a whole lot of data to be transferred. The issue is that Bell’s limit of 75GB is almost exactly 1% of the capacity of the connection. So in essence Bell is saying that you can use your 25Mbps connection at full speed for 7.2 hours.

This just doesn’t make any sense. With the sheer volume of TV watched on a monthly basis (~153h/month) and a growing shift of these viewers looking to the internet to watch their favorite shows 7 hours is just not going to cut it!

Some people might say “25Mbps is more than people need”. Well here are the bitrates for video (without compression)

• DVD – 5Mbps
• HDTV – 8 to 15Mbps
• Blue-Ray – 40Mbps

We are on the cusp of the needs of video for consumers. Keep in mind this only takes into account the current state of technology. These numbers are only for 2D video. What happens when we have streaming 3D video (remember Avatar the largest grossing movie of all time?). I’m sure that 3D video will require even more data to be transferred.

The reason this really bothers me is that Canadian ISPs are setting up a culture that stifles innovation. I can remember (albeit a long time ago) when Internet providers loved to see what their bleeding edge customers were doing to push the barriers of their technology. Complicated caching and compression technologies were invented, modems were bonded together (to get you 128Kbps!), communities would even bond together to deploy ad-hoc networks- all of these things helped push the technology further. My worry is that new entrepreneurs or hobbyist trying to create the next generation of consumer video services will not even get started (in Canada) if they see that they can only deliver service to customers for 7 hours.

Strangling Innovation

The argument that ‘most’ people fall under these limits infuriates me. This is like saying ‘We have invented this new car. Its best feature is that it can go 180kph. But most people don’t drive over 90kph so if you buy this car it can only drive 180kph once a month’.

I do think that there should be some realistic limits in place for internet usage. I just don’t agree that 1% is that limit. The ideal business model for telcos would be to either charge for the amount of data you transfer (Gigabytes) OR by pipe size (Mbps). Charging for both is double dipping. If the business was based on Gigabytes (which is more in line with the old per minute long distance model) then it would be in their best interest to provide you with the largest possible pipe at all times so that you can download more data.