CFN – A small victory for Canadians over the big Internet providers in Canada. The CRTC did not allow them to charge for carriage. IE, UBB Usage Based Billing is dead….for now. We still pay far too much for our internet.
I just got my Cogeco bill. Here in Cornwall we’re basically held hostage as Cogeco has a monopoly on Cable internet. The only other option with any sort of speed is Bell and they are not much better an option.
You can go with either Tek Savvy or Primus which have unlimited plans, but the speeds available are not very practical especially if you work from home.
My bill for internet is $41.95 before taxes ( for the first year). This month as I went over my bandwidth allowance I was zapped with a charge of $50. Cogeco caps their extra charges at that point.
This is the second month I’ve had to do this. So I went to the Cogeco website and sure enough they have a plan for $59 that would serve my purposes. More than the $41 I’m paying, but certainly less than $91 with overage.
So I phoned them to only be told that it isn’t available in my area. Of course they have no incentive to have it in my area when they can zap me and others for this outrageous amount of money.
Again, as a consumer I have no choice. Either use a drastically reduced product or pay my hostage fees to a big company that our elected governments have given territorial monopolies to.
Is that productive? Democratic? Nope. So why is our government allowing this? These companies actually whined to the CRTC, but we subsidize them with these outrageous rates and not having competition.
So today I’m giving out a great big LEMON to Cogeco. I’m giving out a even bigger lemon to the CRTC for allowing this to happen. We need options. We need accountability and we need to stop allowing big corporations to rape consumers in this manner.
Hopefully this CRTC ruling isn’t one step forward two steps back. Hopefully now we can petition our MP’s to pressure the CRTC to either break these monopolies or force these companies to cut this predatory practices.
