The CRTC earlier this year couldn't be bothered to come to the defense of independent ISPs facing extinction due to Bell Canada's sudden throttling efforts, but the regulatory agency amazingly came alive this week to stop the entry of a new wireless phone competitor in Canada. A CRTC ruling has banned Globalive, a new entrant into the Canadian market, from doing business in Canada. Why? because it's 61% owned by Orascom, a telecom company that does ample business in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and South Asia.

Canadian regulation, lobbied for by incumbent companies, prohibits any telecom networks that aren't majority-Canadian owned. The entry of WIND would be the first major threat to Bell Canada, Telus and Rogers in more than a decade, so the companies lobbied the CRTC extensively to investigate and ban Wind's market entry. Wind Mobile has issued a press release saying that the ruling's odd, given another Canadian agency had already given them the green light, they were already allowed to purchase spectrum, and they were well into the process of employing 500 people and setting up operations:Canadian Law Professor Michael Geist blames the entire affair on outdated pseudo-patriotic regulation, being a bit too kind to the CRTC (stocked with phone industry executives) and Canada's incumbent phone giants (who lobbied for the original restrictions and initiated the investigation in the first place). Mike Masnick at Techdirt gets to the point, noting how such pseudo-patriotic moves are usually just another form of protectionism that ultimately winds up crippling competition and harming consumers, be it in the U.S., Canada, or Tajikistan.

While the United States FCC prepares to begin construction of new network neutrality rules tomorrow, users in Canada saw Canadian regulatory authority the CRTC issue some new network neutrality rules today. While the new rules don't prohibit Canadian ISPs from imposing the network management of their choice, they do force carriers to be wholly transparent with consumers, while giving retail customers thirty days and consumers at least 60 days before imposing any new traffic management.

Last week an FCC-commissioned report confirmed what most everybody but the FCC already knew thanks to countless other studies -- that United States broadband is a middle of the road performer, in part thanks to having no real broadband plan. Canadians are now taking note of the study as well, as it highlighted how Canada is lagging behind other industrialized countries in broadband speed, price and coverage. Of course none of this is particularly surprising when you note how Canada seems to have been mirroring the last decade of U.S. broadband policy -- which basically consists of a well-lobbied regulator doing whatever the wealthiest carriers tells them to do.

A few years ago, you'd be hard pressed to find a Canadian who knew what network neutrality was, despite the fact we've been debating about the idea here in the States since around 2005. The only reason Canadians hadn't been made aware of the issue is they weren't being shown clear examples of potential violations, like when AT&T CEO "Big Ed" Whitacre began mumbling about "free rides," Clearwire blocked VoIP traffic completely on their network, or Comcast began throttling upstream P2P services for all users regardless of congestion.

With Canada doing their best to mirror the United States when it comes to telecom regulatory policy (the carriers with the money make the rules), Canadians haven't been very happy lately with Canadian regulatory agency the CRTC. The CRTC, as we've well covered, is stocked with executives from some of Canada's largest ISPs, and as such, has unsurprisingly been engaged in rulemaking that threatens to put smaller independent ISPs out of business.

At the beginning of the summer we noted how Canadian Cable company Cogeco had officially launched a plan to impose caps as low as 10GB per month, with per gigabyte overages as high as $2.50. The problem? Cogeco wasn't able to get their meters to actually work correctly, with inaccurate or conflicting usage amounts being reflected via online Cogeco usage meters and customer e-mail alerts.

Last week Canadian regulatory agency the CRTC once again ruled against independent Canadian ISPs by granting a Bell Canada request to double dip wholesale customers by charging them for up front bandwidth, then charging a new usage-based billing (UBB) charge on the other end. This has been only the latest in a series a rulings that independent ISPs say are aimed to put them out of business.

Last year, Bell Canada started throttling wholesale customer ISPs without telling them, ensuring that these smaller operators couldn't offer an un-throttled connection to consumers that was better than Bell's throttled Sympatico service. As their back up plan against competitors in case regulators stopped them, Bell Canada started devising a usage-based billing (UBB) system smaller Canadian carriers worried could drive them out of business.

Last month we explored how Comcast and Sandvine's network management technology continues to evolve. Unlike Comcast's last system, which throttled upstream traffic for all users regardless of consumption, this new system identifies customers and throttles back consumption only if they're on a congested node -- and they're a particular reason why.

As users in our Bell Canada forums explore, Bell Canada has decided to lower the caps (and in some cases speeds and select prices) on their DSL services for new users. Bell Canada's "Performance" tier has gone from 7Mbps to 6Mbps and seen its cap reduced from 60GB per month to 25GB per month. Bell Canada's 2Mbps "Essential Plus" tier has seen its cap reduced from 20GB to just 2GB per month. In a particularly curious move, our users note that Bell has also added "Usage Insurance" that provides users additional cap space in forty GB increments (up to 120GB) for an additional $5 per month. Users who don't sign up for this "insurance" will wind up paying between $2 and $2.50 per gigabyte in overage charges.

Earlier this year, Bell Canada decided to start throttling the traffic of wholesale competitors before delivering it to them, and without telling them. While Bell claimed the move was to handle congestion, follow up inquiries showed little to no congestion -- leading to the assumption that Bell simply didn't want any competitors offering DSL service that was superior to their own, throttled DSL service.

Prompted by Time Warner Cable's botched attempt to force low caps and metered billing on its customers, Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) today unveiled the "Broadband Internet Fairness Act" (HR 2902), legislation aimed at protecting consumers from unreasonable broadband overage charges.

Last year, Bell Canada started throttling wholesale customers without telling them. Not only did that prevent independent Canadian ISPs from selling DSL service that was better than Bell Canada's throttled DSL service -- it gave Bell Canada's video store a leg up -- by throttling competing P2P video delivery options (already very limited in Canada). Even that didn't seem to help, as Bell has now announced that they're closing down the unopopular video store as of June 15 -- though they're still offering a limited selection of video on demand offerings. "Funny how Bell must have the infrastructure/bandwidth to handle digital video, but can't keep up 100kB/s @ 7/24 for the DSL they either retail or wholesale," complains one of our users.

Despite similar geographical challenges, Canada has fared a little bit better than the US in terms of broadband penetration. But the Canadian government has recently started mirroring the US regulatory approach to broadband.

Last year, Bell Canada started throttling wholesale customers without telling them, ensuring that smaller ISPs couldn't offer an un-throttled connection to consumers that was better than Bell's throttled Sympatico service. As their back up plan against competitors in case regulators stopped them, Bell Canada started devising a usage-based billing (UBB) system smaller Canadian carriers worry could drive them out of business.

There's no love lost between consumers and the CRTC, the Canadian regulatory agency that thus far has done little to stop Bell Canada's anti-competitive attacks on independent ISPs in the country. Consumers are a little extra annoyed with the agency this week for posting their personal information online.

Last year, Bell Canada started throttling wholesale customers without telling them, ensuring that smaller ISPs couldn't offer an un-throttled connection to consumers that was better than Bell's throttled Sympatico service. As their back up plan against competitors in case regulators stopped them, Bell Canada started devising a usage-based billing (UBB) system smaller Canadian carriers worry could drive them out of business.

Users in our Canadian broadband forums note that Bell Canada's parent company, BCE is appealing a CRTC decision that would require the carrier to give competitors access to their next generation networks. Like other monopolist carriers with the luxury here and in the UK, Bell Canada is essentially telling the CRTC that unless they're given what they want from the government, they won't upgrade to next-generation technology.

Courts here in the States recently ruled against Verizon, saying that the telco couldn't use number portability requests from competing carriers to try and win those departing customers back. In Canada, Bell Canada is asking Canadian regulators a number of rather large favors, including provisions that prevent a subscriber from leaving if there's unsettled balances (even if they're the result of Bell Canada's own errors) as well as new rules preventing other carriers from canceling your service for you via number portability requests:To most people, even this country's FCC, that's anti-competitive (see our forum discussion), but given the CRTC's bell-friendly positions of late, Canadian regulators may just see this as perfectly fair. Maybe if carriers provided better service at a lower price in the first place, they wouldn't have to worry about changing the rules to retain customers?

This certainly isn't a surprise to regular readers of Broadband Reports, given we've been talking about this for the better part of a decade now -- but Canadian ISPs aren't very gentle when it comes to handling P2P traffic. For years we've tracked how Canadian cable providers are at the forefront of using caps and traffic throttling to avoid having to invest in infrastructure upgrades.