Pretty good outcome, though some would argue it may not even be necessary at least for home ISPs. Mobile is a different story...
Even before this ruling we were in decent condition on home ISPs due to actions the CRTC had taken which greatly improved the competitive environment - I went from 30/10 to 300/30 in a matter of a few years at a very close price point. I'm now on gigabit at about 1.5x the cost. It's also interesting that among the people arguing in favor of net neutrality here included one of the biggest ISPs around, Rogers. It's also good that this regulation doesn't extend nearly as far as what the FCC proposed in the states - it keeps it fairly minimal.
I'm in Canada I don't see any point in getting rid of my 25Mbps uncapped account. Going to a 300Mbps or 1Gbps is pointless if you have a 300GB cap especially now with videos in UHD on Netflix and YouTube. I pay $183 for basic cable and 25Mbps/1Mbps but no cap since I've had this package since 2002.
Into the belly of the beats I go! ....
For Bell their 300Mbps plan is $121 with a bundle but then after three months "in market prices apply" which I guess is $300/month but after nearly 2 hours of looking I couldn't find it shown anywhere. And Bell just raised all Internet packages by $5 month in Jan 2017.
Bells' "Acceptable Use" is mentioned but I tried to see it I clicked "Terms of Use" at the bottom of the plan, new page, click to expand "Internet and Value Added Services" which has three links to PDF documents, "Bell Aliant Fibre Services" document, that document has a link in "Internet Acceptable Use" it opens a new page with Legal and Regulatory columns each with four links and each of those links go to new pages with several more links, those several links expand to show links to more PDFs. At several points on several pages and in the PDFs I was directed back to the Legal and Terms page.
I'm pretty sure that Bell Canada 300Mbps or 1Gbps plan is capped at 300GB/month over that exceeds their vague and seemingly non-existent Acceptable Use TOS. And those plans cost a lot $300 for 300Mbps which may be the vague "in market price" that's if you don't bundle them with Bell's TV and landline/cellphone.
There's two hours of my life I'll never get back. You win Bell.
I stream all my content including using iptv, hardly download anything, and hit under 500GB a month.
It has a cap, but quite generous.
I no longer hoard media downloads, and only stream what I went when I want... No pre-grabbing every download I could source.
I notice as the years pass, my ISP speeds are going up, but my demand for that extra bandwidth has gone down.
I use to do several 100 GBs on a 1.5mbps DSL connectio with Usenet running 24/7 ~20years ago (got banned by both local ISPs temporarily... Times before they started charging or not caring)
Most ISPs offer uncapped for a fee. Bell offers a deal with their mid level TV package and uncapped gigabit for $100, you might have to get the right sales person for it though. I have that deal for 2 years right now. A few friends of mine are on a similar deal from Rogers, but Rogers only has docsis to my area and not ftth. You're getting ripped off and badly. The straight up flat rate advertised price for uncapped gigabit on bell is $150.
Note the "included monthly usage" is unlimited. Unlimited is at least fairly unlimited - I burn over 5TB/mo sometimes (big nas and Plex server) and they have no problem with it. If you're willing to ditch the TV, check out some of the smaller time ISPs too, often good deals to be had there. Teksavvy is offering $89 for 250mbit unlimited.
I suspect that this is because Rogers can offer its digital TV service over Coax as opposed to over IP, so any such zero-rating restrictions would only serve to restrict Bell/Telus' ability to provide TV triple-play products that compete with Rogers' offering.
It doesn't matter if it's coax/RF or IP. Bell and Telus' IPTV services are currently zero-rated because they're broadcast services and subject to all the same regulations as a traditional cable TV service.
I can't quite wrap my head around Rogers' opposition to this. Usually they're in lockstep with Telus and Bell, and they have a significant foothold in traditional media in Canada.
Everything I've ever known about Rogers tells me to be wary of their opposition, but I still can't quite say what their play is here.
I was talking over this with a friend when the news dropped. My (layman) conclusion is that Rogers already has their happy little non-neutral network for their exclusive use.
All that coax they have lying around? A certain percentage of its spectrum is reserved for Rogers' digital TV service and the rest of the spectrum is dedicated to internet (that they are forced to sell to companies like TekSavvy).
So Rogers has a bunch of things going for them: a huge installed base of cable boxes across Canada with ability to provide demand video; they've had this for years. Bell and Telus don't have the luxury of dedicating a chunk of their copper spectrum to their (IP-based) TV services and thus want the same advantage Rogers gets by default over coaxial. This is why the other guys don't like net neutrality. Of course, they want priority for their content and want to pay less for it. But the CRTC says no.
Rogers, naturally, wants to keep their advantage over their competitors, and by supporting net neutrality they limit the possibility of Bell, Telus, and co from eeking out a little extra advantage. Cable and DOCSIS are starting to show their age and can't quite keep up with growing internet demand. So Rogers lays net neutral fibre to meet that demand while leaving their happy little slice of digital TV spectrum just as it is: wide open free of traffic and interference.
The idea of an uninterruptible stream for video content is a good one in principle but is perpendicular to a neutral network. One provider creates the stream and that's it. No buffering or packet re-transmission. It's exactly like radio.
I've missed quite a bit of nuance and history and glossed over important technical details, but that's my general idea of why Rogers doesn't really care, mostly because they may see their main market as, for the most part, competing with Bell and Telus on standard old-school TV.
To counter all that, Shomi (may it rest in peace) showed us that they cared about the Netflix threat but it didn't work out business-wise. If they're going to push IP video over their neutral tubes, why should they waste all that money managing and running a web streaming service when they can charge their sucker clients the same money for the same Netflix-sourced bits per second? Maybe their business plan includes charging exorbitant fees for co-locating Netflix cache servers in their city hubs.
I wouldn't count Rogers out yet. They're always up to no good.
Aside: my little day-dream is to start a municipal fibre-to-the-home ISP. Maybe Elon will bestow micro-tunneling upon us and we can say goodbye to Rogers for good.
I was quite surprised that Shomi died. Looking into it, I found the CRTC's commentary interesting:
> The discontinuation [of Shomi] was criticized by CRTC Chairman Jean-Pierre Blais, who remarked in an address that he "can't help but be surprised when major players throw in the towel on a platform that is the future of content – just two years after it launched. I have to wonder if they are too used to receiving rents from subscribers every month in a protected ecosystem, rather than rolling up their sleeves in order to build a business without regulatory intervention and protection."
Look at what happens when your democracy still functions and your regulatory bodies haven't been captured by special interest. Hard to imagine the US getting these same protections under a Trump administration.
Truthfully, it's hard imagining them under Obama either. It wasn't as bad as what we're currently seeing, but he never pushed particularly hard for this type of hardline reform, and took more of a centrist approach.
Even before this ruling we were in decent condition on home ISPs due to actions the CRTC had taken which greatly improved the competitive environment - I went from 30/10 to 300/30 in a matter of a few years at a very close price point. I'm now on gigabit at about 1.5x the cost. It's also interesting that among the people arguing in favor of net neutrality here included one of the biggest ISPs around, Rogers. It's also good that this regulation doesn't extend nearly as far as what the FCC proposed in the states - it keeps it fairly minimal.