CRTC Imposes Monthly Usage Caps on Canadians

The CRTC has decided (now confirmed) to allow wholesale ISPs to apply usage based billing onto their resellers. What this means is that the small number of incumbent Internet Service Providers will now be able to effectively impose their chosen business model on all Canadians. It effectively means the death of the unlimited Internet service plan in Canada. Not only is this bad for consumer choice but, as incumbents continue to adopt lower monthly bandwidth allowances, there will be serious detrimental impact for innovation and migration of services already widely available elsewhere in the world. Streaming services, for example, develop around the premise that users will be able to consume a certain amount of bandwidth monthly, as they can in other jurisdictions.

• The initial and more recent CRTC decisions

• A petition in protest of the decision by OpenMedia.ca