[kwlug-disc] UBB comes to Teksavvy

[unsolicited at swiz.ca]

On Mon, 31 Jan 2011 20:06:03 -0500, Chris Frey <cdfrey at foursquare.net>
wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 07:38:28PM -0500, unsolicited at swiz.ca wrote:
>> On Mon, 31 Jan 2011 20:41:44 +0000, rbclemen at gmail.com wrote:
>> > It is an attack on our culture and our educational
>> > development in the name of, not increasing--but maintaining,
corporate
>> > profits.
>> 
>> That has to be a crock. If you take out streaming or torrents...
> 
> Take out streaming and torrents?  Are you forgetting that to many
people,
> streaming == "our culture"? :-)  And to many people, cheap bandwidth
> is fuel for the kind of advancement we have been waiting for, for
> nearly a decade?

[No doubt I'm digging myself deeper here ...]

Sadly, I have a mental image of myself as Scrooge at the moment ... "Are
there no workhouses, are there no ..."

For both you and Kyle - you cut out the "less affluent" part of what I was
quoting, and I'm thinking with a 60GB cap before additional surcharges,
you're not affected.

I don't believe that in such a financial situation, video or games has
much of a place. Or, at least, games taking such bandwidth.

> Netflix just arrived, with a product and service that people have been
> waiting for, both patiently (via cable) and impatiently (via
filesharing)
> for years.  These sorts of advances don't come along unless you have
> cheap bandwidth and some means to pry content out of the dry, crusty
> fingers of megacorporations.

Whom owns the content?

The crux of this and UBB is - things cost too much.

Different issue.

> According to Ralph's numbers, Bell makes nearly $4 *billion* in just
_one_
> quarter.  Maybe I'm simple, but I think the burden of proof that caps
> are truly needed should rest with them.

Let us please all remember:
- those numbers will be for many aspects of Bell's business. As JJ points
out, they do lots of things.
- can you really blame Bell for advocating what it can, in any legitimate
way it can, to advance it's cause of making more and more money.
- I absolutely don't disagree with Brent or anyone else that the CRTC
should be doing a 'better' job. That's where the blame is, to my mind. [And
even Brent himself got more (correctly?) focused - UBB may have been the
trigger for his anger, but he refocused his disgust from 'UBB' to 'CRTC'.
And I certainly join him in that.]
- as has already been arrived at in other threads, in essence, Bell is not
a social agency. You can argue that they, or their services, should be, and
I wouldn't immediately disagree with you - but that isn't addressable
directly with Bell (which they would fight*), it is with the 'government.'
(As has been pointed out, the basic issue is of monopoly. And my sense of
the times is that the CRTC has given up on fighting that [, erroneously
so?] at the cable and copper level, in favour of wireless. Which I do not
see coming any time soon in sufficient speeds.)

# Disclaimer: I do not work for Bell in any way shape or form, and despise
them myself. (For years now I've been promising myself to get off of them.
Some day.)

* "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."