From 1995 until 2001, I had the pleasure of building and owning one of Hamilton, Ontario’s largest independent ISPs - NETinc. Yes, back in the old days, before high speed. It was high speed, in fact, that was the major factor in us shutting the doors in 2001 - I’m a margin hound, and when it drops below 10%, I’m no longer interested in playing the game. Independent ISPs have mostly vanished in Canada in the 21st century - Cable companies and LECs (the phone companies) control –insert whoppingly large statistic here– of the residential internet market. Residential Internet access is effectively a commodity business now - price is king, and the difference between a 2mbps connection and a 7mbps connection matters only for the most technically savvy.
Today, in my morning Blog reading, I noticed an article over on the UK Site The Register, showing how Bell canada is throttling the internet connections of their reseller customers. What does this mean? Well the only way to be an independent ISP in Ontario is to buy wholesale service from Bell. You pay a ridiculous fee per end user, plus you also pay for the big circuit on which all of the customers are handed off to you. Bell is supposed to transparantly pass the data between the customer and the ISP. Well, this article says that they’re not doing that anymore - they’re imposing their own network policies on those of their customers.
As an independent ISP, I’ve felt the force of Bell squeezing me from all sides. Looks like they’re up to it again. I guess the only frontier left is wireless.
Wireless is as dead as dial up for service delivery. Unless they can start beaming signals through the air at light speed (see fiber) then it’ll be limited to WAP and a way to deliver short range solutions from a hard line access point. Working in the Wireless industry the tech is quickly being outpaced by land line infrastructure due to the relative ease of deployment and lack of service interuptions that wireless broadband connections employ.
However working for a company that prides itself in it’s wireless devices I never said this publicly lest I be shot.