Open Letter to small Canadian Internet Service Providers and Canadians too
To whom it may concern, (headings added for the impatient)
For those regular Canadians reading this please comment if you'd buy into my plan or if you have some ideas to add.
Introduction
So here we are. Canada was already behind the times with regard to Internet access and now the CRTC has decided that a massive corporation, which the government saw fit to break into subsidiaries and force to resell bandwidth, is now allowed to charge resellers of its services unreasonable rates. This will decimate competition between Canadian ISPs as merely by making its own services unaffordable this company can now do the same to other providers, while pushing people towards its older more outdated technologies. Forget VOIP, all those IP packets cost too much, you're best off getting a landline.... Netflix? People in the US with actual internet access only love it so much that it tripled in stock market value in 2010. Canadians deserve better, they deserve to pay for cable or satellite that limits when they can watch what they want and forces them to pay for channels they don't even want or watch. We want video on demand over dedicated channels that charge us as much for a single show as we'd pay for half a month of Netflix. Just like when these same companies needed to charge text message recipients as well as senders, because they were only making huge profits from text messaging instead of the absurd profits which they desired, our government has failed to intelligently regulate them.
Why would our government regulate them anyway? I mean it isn't like information technology infrastructure is important to Canadian business is it? It isn't like the eventual replacement of inferior technology could lead Canadian consumers to spend money on things that might actually progress society instead of hold it back. I mean really good telecom is just unachievable right?
The Gist
Look what some Americans are doing (PDF) How are they selling 10Mbps up and 10Mbps down for $30 a month? Where are the excessively low bandwidth limits? I used to have Teksavvy internet and I totally believe in the company but... why is the cost/speed ratio so different here? The reason is that the American prices I've linked to come from a public utility. A public utility funded through municipal bonds that serves the people in its area and not investors who have chosen to put their money into large corporations that are holding back Canadian infrastructure. A public utility that was able to raise enough money to purchase its own infrastructure and not have to rely on reselling overpriced bandwidth from an incumbent who may or may not traffic shape the bandwidth you pay so dearly for at their own discretion. But where are these projects in Canada? There seem to be plenty of projects in the US but for whatever reason (is it a legal thing?) I can't seem to find any examples of this happening in Canada. Now if there aren't any mayors stepping up and saying enough is enough why don't the small ISPs? So I say to all small ISPs in Canada, SELL ME BONDS. I mean it. Make me a business case, make some legally binding commitments. Sell me bonds to build real IP infrastructure in our country.
The Plan
- Ban together: There are enough small ISPs to get this moving quickly and none need to be left behind
- Study US municipal projects
- Start with a medium size town:
- Lower risk
- Less money required to get started
- get some Canadian data
- Do a business case for the market:
- Show me the business case
- How long will it take to get my money back?
- offer me interest at a reasonable rate
- Make progressive promises (I mean promise in a contractually binding legal sort of way):
- We don't need more closed networks
- Promise to allow resellers on the infrastructure
- Have the infrastructure managed as a non-profit which maintains cash reserves of a particular percentage of revenue for expansion, sustainment, and to pay fair market rate salaries (with management capped at a multiple of the lowest paid worker)
- No Throttling
- No limits on what is to be resold to ISPs
- Fix net neutrality (allow for quality of service to be managed by each subscriber but limit the number of prioritized packets allowing for quality VOIP and similar realtime services. All the benefits of net neutrality with the capability for subscribers to run time sensitive services reliably even when maxing out their connections.)
- Don't waste money and available bandwidth on TV signals, ip over the internet based on demand is the present
- Deliver:
- Don't make us happy, make us proud. I don't want to see rates better than the competition, I want to see rates that are fair and reasonable and utterly embarrass the competition.
- Survive - If the infrastructure is managed by a non-profit, compete over actual innovation and value added.
- Provide security services
- configure QOS devices that give control to the subscriber
- Help businesses make reasonable use of the upload speeds they didn't know could exist outside of a data centre
- Configure VOIP systems
- Sell VOIP at competitive prices
- Manage and sell cloud services that couldn't exist without these LAN like speeds and the low latency of being a local company
- I'll Buy your Bonds if you do this and I bet other people would too
The Future
Once Canadian land networks are fixed, do the same for wireless.
Sincerely,
Dave
PS: I'll buy at least 5k of bonds if reputable companies buy into this.