Beyond Classic DOS Games

I’ve been living in a region that has sub-standard internet access and cell phone service for many years, and I hardly ever think about it. From time to time, I wonder if we’ve allowed ourselves to fall behind because of ignorance, apathy, or resignation. In the beginning, I’m sure it was ignorance. Now that the media has informed the population, I believe the cause is resignation. We now live in the technology Third World. The region I’m referring to is North America.

People in Canada and the United States have been aware for years that we pay some of the highest prices for some of the slowest internet access in the world. When First World regions like Europe and Japan move to 20 megabit, 50 megabit, and eventually 100 megabit internet access, Canadian and American providers boosted speeds to the 5 to 7 megabit range. While other nations paid roughly $30 per month for speeds up to 20 times faster than ours, we helplessly watched our rates increase to almost $50 per month.

We understand how it got to be this way. In most parts of North America, there are only two choices for high speed internet: the phone company and the cable company. They have a monopoly and can charge as much, and provide as little service, as they want. Slowing our internet access to 1/20th of the speed of access in First World technology nations has saved the telecom companies billions of dollars in equipment purchases, but still they claim that we’re using too much bandwidth. ISPs like Comcast, Bell Canada and Rogers have throttled internet traffic that they claim uses too much bandwidth, such as BitTorrent.

Presumably Comcast planned to invoke the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to protect themselves because they could claim that BitTorrent is used to illegally share copyrighted material. The reality is quite different. Legitimate websites have used BitTorrent to distribute their legal content for years, allowing them to distribute movies and webisodes that they couldn’t afford to distribute on their own hosting packages. What’s interesting is that even large corporations have started taking advantage of BitTorrent. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, or CBC, was Canada’s first national television network and is a crown corporation, meaning that it is owned and operated by the Government of Canada. They recently distributed episodes of Canada’s Next Great Prime Minster using BitTorrent. When Bell Canada customers had difficulty getting copies of the show, Bell’s BitTorrent throttling gained national media attention and led to a public inquiry. Google claims that Bell’s throttling is illegal in a complaint they made to the CRTC.

Google Inc. says Bell Canada Inc. is breaking Canadian telecommunications law by slowing certain internet traffic, and is urging the CRTC to take action against the company.

“Bell claims its throttling of peer-to-peer applications is a reasonable form of network management. Google respectfully disagrees. Network management does not include Canadian carriers’ blocking or degrading lawful applications that consumers wish to use,” the company wrote in a 15-page submission to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which was made public over the weekend.

“From consumer, competition and innovation perspectives, throttling applications that consumers choose is inconsistent with a content and application-neutral internet, and a violation of Canadian telecommunications law, which forbids unfair discrimination and undue or unreasonable preferences and requires that regulation be technologically and competitively neutral.” Link

Net neutrality is a reasonably new issue in Canada, but it will likely soon become law in the United States. But throttling internet access to reduce their bandwidth requirements is only scratching the surface. Both Bell Canada and Rogers now limit the amount of bandwidth customers can use on all of their internet products. Slower tiers are limited to 2 GB of combined upstream and downstream bandwidth per month, while the most expensive tiers are limited to 95 and 100 GB per month. The cost of exceeding that limit can be up to $5 per GB. American ISPs like Time Warner Cable are apparently planning to place bandwidth limits on their services, too.

The technology gap between North America and the rest of the world also extends to cell phone service. Everyone knows that North Americans pay much higher rates for cell phone service than Europeans, so it’s hardly necessary to go into that. We’ve all seen the numbers. The average Rogers cell phone contract is $75.15 per month, while the average annual cost of cellphone service to a medium user in Denmark is $91.63. Yes, many North Americans already pay more per month than Europeans pay per year for cell phone service. But that just isn’t enough for Canadian cell phone providers.

While Americans are eagerly awaiting the arrival of the new 3G iPhone, there is outrage that the lower price of the new phones is more than offset by the increased monthly service rate from $20 per month to $30. Oh, to have that problem. Here in Canada, Rogers is also about to introduce the 3G iPhone. Plans range from $60 to $150 per month, plus the $6.95 system access fee, and there is no unlimited plan. While AT&T charges just $60 per month for their unlimited plan, Rogers’ cheapest plan will cost more than AT&T’s most expensive plan. Rogers is terrified that if they had an unlimited plan, customers might use gigabytes of bandwidth per month and force them to spend millions of dollars on new equipment. But, since the iPhone will come with a 3 year commitment, the minimum commitment for iPhone service is $2160 per customer. If Rogers signs up 500,000 customers, which is within the realm of possibility, they’ll make between $1 billion and $2.7 billion during those three years. That’s not enough to buy new equipment to meet the bandwidth needs of those customers?

But Rogers isn’t alone in their bandwidth misery. This morning Canadian news media started reporting that Bell and Telus will begin to charge 15 cents per incoming text message, even when the message is spam. Customer outrage was swift, with customers posting in forums that they can’t control who sends them a message. Cell phone spam is increasing, and having to pay for it could make the cost of owning a cell phone prohibitively expensive. Many customers will have no choice but to remove text messaging from their service packages, sending them even deeper into the technology Third World. Is Canada really about to lose text messaging? Is it true that we can’t afford it?

Let me do some math for you. Text is the simplest form of data that you can send. Each character represents one byte of information, so a 10 character text message is 10 bytes worth of data (plus header information to identify the sender and the recipient). Text messages are necessarily short, but let’s say that each text message is 100 bytes in length. Canadians send 45 million text messages per day, so that’s about 4.2 GB per day. If my calculation is correct (and it might not be), the entire nation of Canada sends about 4.2 GB of text messages per day. That’s less data than you can fit on a single layer DVD, and is roughly equal to the amount of bandwidth that I’m allowed to use each day with my internet service, for which I pay about $1.60 per day. It’s text, people! As I hinted a moment ago, text messages are so small that the sender and recipient information in the header is larger than the message itself. Our entire country’s text messages could be handled by a single router if they were transmitted over wires instead of broadcast from cell phone towers.

Ah, that’s true! Cell phone technology is quite different from the wired internet, so it’s not fair to compare the cost of delivering 4.2 GB of data over the airwaves to the cost of delivering 1s and 0s over fibre optic cables and copper wires. But wait a second, isn’t the sender paying for the message? So Bell and Telus want to charge both the sender and the recipient! But here’s where the potential for abuse comes in. The sender might have a package that includes unlimited outgoing text messages, and they could maliciously send hundreds or thousands of text messages to someone to stick them with the bill. Someone could bombard you with text messages to be a bully, or as revenge for breaking up with them, and you would be the one paying for those messages. 1000 unwanted messages from your ex-boyfriend, or your new boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, will set you back $150.

Okay, so even though there are only three major cell phone providers in Canada, meaning that there’s a 1 in 3 chance that your provider is charging both the sender and the recipient for the message, there will still be times when your cell phone provider sends you a text message that they didn’t charge the sender for, so they need that 15 cents from the recipient, right? Does it cost them 15 cents to send 100 bytes of data from a cell phone tower? Of course not! The truth is, transmitting your voice over a cell phone requires several kilobytes per second of data transmission, and 19 million Canadians have cell phones. If the average subscriber talks on their cell phone for half an hour per day (and they might not), Canadians send 9.5 million hours (34.2 billion seconds) worth of voice data per day, and there’s enough bandwidth for all of that. So, a text message uses about 100 times less bandwidth than a single second of voice transmission. Math time! If Canadians spend 34.2 billion seconds per day on their cell phones, transmitting data at a rate of 10k per second, that’s about 318.5 TB of voice transmission per day, or 77 653 times more bandwidth than the text messages are using. That means that text messages represent 0.001% of all the bandwidth transmitted by cell phone towers per day. The fact that the cell phone companies think that they can fool us into believing that it costs them 15 cents to deliver a 100 byte text message is so far beyond belief that it simply isn’t worth believing.

Judge Judy has a saying that goes, “If it doesn’t make sense, it isn’t true.” When Bell and Telus tell their customers that they “need” to charge 15 cents per incoming text message, that doesn’t make sense. How stupid do they think we are? Do they even think of us as humans? No one with a human level of intelligence would think that they incur an expense of even 1 cent per text message. This is a matter of truthiness, since I don’t have the ability to calculate the exact numbers for you, but I can say with absolute confidence that, in terms of total electricity, and the price of the equipment necessary to transmit all of Canada’s text messages divided by 45 million messages per day for the entire life of that equipment, the cost to cellphone service providers is less than a thousandth of a cent per message. That’s a markup 1 500 000%. No wonder they post multi-billion dollar profits every quarter. Can you imagine how many other products there are in the whole world that sell for 15 000 times more than it costs to produce them? If you have a lot of friends, or get a lot of spam, you’ll soon be paying more every month for your text messages than for your voice services. If your voice plan is $30 per month, you only need to receive 200 text messages (7 per day) before your text message bill will match it. Bell and Telus are going to charge more for the 0.001% of their bandwidth that’s consumed by text as they do for the 99.999% of their bandwidth that’s consumed by voice. And how do they justify that? Because they can get away with it. There are only three major cell phone providers in Canada, and now two of them are doing it. If you don’t like it, you can cancel your plan and pay up to $400 in early cancellation fees. Customers will simply remove text messaging from their plans and go back to old-fashioned voice transmission. Text messages in Canada? Don’t be absurd. We’re a technology Third World country!

So, to recap, Canadian and American ISPs provide internet service that is up to 20 times slower than most of the developed world (and slower than many developing countries as well), throttle traffic to reduce bandwith usage, and place monthly limits on their customers, while charging almost twice as much as ISPs in First World technology countries. At least two of the continent’s largest cell phone providers will soon charge you 15 cents every time someone sends you an unsolicited text message, and spam is threatening to destroy text messaging in Canada. We’re paying the highest prices in the world for the world’s worst service. We’re aware that it’s happening, we’re aware that our countries are lagging behind the rest of the world, and there’s nothing we can do about it because there aren’t any alternatives. It’s no longer ignorance or apathy, it’s resignation. North Americans have resigned themselves that ISPs and cell phone providers have a monopoly and can spend as little money on equipment, provide as little service, and charge as much money as they want and there’s absolutely nothing that anyone can do about it. We’ve slipped into the technology Third World and resigned ourselves that we no longer live in high tech countries. There’s not enough bandwidth and there never will be. We had the misfortune of being born in the wrong hemisphere. I’m simply astonished that the country that invented the internet would allow itself to have some of the slowest internet service in the world. I never thought that Canada and the U.S. would become Third World countries, but when it comes to technology, I watched it happen, and it happened fast.