Canadian goverment vows to reverse CRTC decision on usage-based internet billing

It’s happened before when Canadian government overturned the CRTC’s decision and allowed Globalive to enter the Canadian cellphone market, and it looks like Ottawa is about to again weigh in and reverse an even more controversial ruling by the regulatory agency. As confirmed by Industry Minister Tony Clement on Twitter, the government plans to reverse the recent CRTC decision that effectively imposed usage-based internet billing if the agency doesn’t back down and “go back to the drawing board.” Citing a senior government official, The Toronto Star further reports that the reversal could come as early as next week. As any Canadians reading this may well be aware, the issue of usage-based internet billing has been simmering for some time, but it reached a tipping point with the CRTC’s decision last week that affected smaller internet service providers who rely on the major telecom companies’ networks. Under the new ruling, those companies would be have been faced with increased costs that would drastically limit the amount of bandwidth they’re able to offer to customers — one such ISP, Teksavvy, had in fact already sent out notices to customers informing them that their current 200GB bandwidth cap would be dropping to just 25GB on March 1st, with any additional data use to be charged by the gigabyte. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Canadian goverment vows to reverse CRTC decision on usage-based internet billing originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Feb 2011 13:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Posted by on February 3, 2011. Filed under News, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry