|
Okay, this Current interview is pissing me off. Not because of Waverman, who is just doing his (apparent) job of repeating standard pro-Bell talking points, but because Steve Anderson isn't directly correcting or responding to him. Though, honestly, I would have interrupted the fucker. He's clearly trying to shotgun the interview by putting in so many bullshit lines that Anderson can't respond to them all, and Tremonti is letting him get away with it. It's a standard Republican tactic, and the best/only way to sort it is to not give them the opportunity. But Steve just let too many things slide, and didn't counter by pointing out that the Finnish example is more representative of the country as a whole. But, anyway, yeah, Bibic is probably hosed. I think Bibic was trying to say that the congestion was between the DSLAM and the central office in order to get around the IPTV thing (which is pretty damning) but it's going to get interpreted as "congestion for Internet access"...with has nothing to do with the resellers. Edit: Wait, no, he's saying it's between the central office and the hub, if I'm getting the ADSL-CO thing right. Honestly, that would seem to be a solution that everybody (except Bell) could go with. Let companies like TekSavvy get access to the Central Offices and the un-congested connections to the DSLAMs. If Bell whines about IPTV, screw em; the customers can be told that you can't have IPTV without Bell Internet and make up their own minds. Nomenklatura fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Feb 11, 2011 |
#
¿
Feb 11, 2011 17:20
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 20:25 |
|
|
Stanley Pain posted:Everytime I see and hear Mirko talk I just want to Plus, it's a divide-and-conquer strategy. If Bell can successfully pit users against each other, it'll be that much more difficult for people to actually say "wait a second, it's BELL that's getting all this money". If this money were going towards some sort of upgrade fund, or if users were getting rebates for the bandwidth they didn't use, or if BCE weren't making MASSIVE profits as of the last quarter, they might have a more credible case. But since none of those things are true, Bell has to change the focus away from themselves at all costs. That's mostly what Bibic's trying to do, along with muddying the waters as to costs and usage. VERY disappointed with Paikin in that interview. He routinely gave Bibic a chance to respond to Burger without providing the same opportunities in turn, he gave too much time to James Cowen, who was absolute dead weight, and he jumped all over Burger's comments about bandwidth costs while letting Bibic's absolute horseshit over the Quebec/Ontario thing slide. It really feels like Paikin was in Bell's camp there, which is rather surprising considering how sharp a guy he is. Edit: If he had given Burger enough chances to speak, Burger might have challenged that whole "people need to be punished for using the Internet" line that Cowen was pushing. Bibic is excusable; it's just his job, and he's doing it to the best of his ability. Cowen had no excuse for his dipshittery. Re-Edit: Closing statement was awesome, though. Nomenklatura fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Feb 12, 2011 |
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2011 01:41
|
|
him non stop. Fairness, fairness, fairnes.... uuugh... more like MONEY MONEY OMG I WANT SWIMMING POOLS OF MONEY....
|
The ITMP thing is unsurprising. Both the CRTC and Government are in favor of throttling. Fortunately the solution to throttling is the same as to UBB: to ensure that retail ISPs get to make their own decisions about how to use the bandwidth they buy. You could kill both birds with one stone. (Especially if the outcome of this is to open the door for ADSL-CO. Geist has done everybody a massive favour by bringing that up. By admitting that there's no serious congestion on the Last Mile, Bell has opened the door pretty wide for relocating independent ISPs' entry point.)
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2011 01:49
|
|
|
Perhaps. My experience with letting someone "hang themselves" is that it usually doesn't work, though. Talking points generally work if they aren't countered, and Bibic's talking points ARE superficially convincing, which is one of the reasons why he uses them. A lot of the reason Bibic isn't effective isn't because of his talking points, but because the man is just...unpleasant. I'm not sure why, I couldn't put it into words, but he doesn't come across well. Burger comes across VERY well, so much so that it's honestly surprising that their positions aren't reversed. You'd think that Bell could/would be able to hire someone that effective to be their spokesman. By the by, anybody else noticed how silent ROGERS has been on all this? Supposedly TekSavvy has had a better relationship with them, but it's still somewhat surprising that they've been much quieter than Telus, Shaw, and Bell. Might be because they know that cable can carry a ridiculous amount of data, and that "network upgrades" for their last mile is pretty much just rolling out a new DOCSIS version every so often. Even so. Edit: And "hang himself" doesn't explain why Cowen got so much screen time, or why Paikin was so aggressive towards Burger. Maybe it was the video link thing.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2011 03:31
|
|
|
Pity that Bibic and Facebook calls up sweet gently caress-all of use on Google. After having listened to it, I have to say that the exchanges about IPTV and about time-based billing were probably the most damning. IPTV because he's saying "Internet" while trying to claim that it's not Internet, and the time-based thing because the Shaw guy descended into absolutely paternalist, ridiculous bullshit about how people would complain, about how "people who download during the afternoon are all unemployed", and about how they don't have the capacity to do per-minute or per-hour metering. The questions about how "they could just download during off times when it wouldn't put strain on your network" got REALLY hostile as the evasions and excuses got worse and worse. Pity as well that nobody pushed harder on the international thing, though that may have been short-circuited by the shots taken at the OECD study. Hard to say that we're falling behind and that nobody else is using UBB when Bell is pulling studies out of their rear end saying how awesome we are. (Not that anybody ELSE has seen any figures that back that up. Would like to see that handout.)
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2011 11:13
|
|
|
8ender posted:Honestly I think most of all Rogers is scared to lend any sort of weight to the "duopoly" argument thats been floating around. If they came to the defence of their #1 super friend Bell then it would look bad. Italy's Chicken posted:That "debate" was awesome. Kevin O'Leary doesn't answer Burger's question about how Kevin as a consumer feels about being charged $2/GB for something that costs $0.03/GB, not a shareholder reaping all those costs. loving billion dollar rich prick. (You know, like Andrew Coyne. CHRIST, what an rear end in a top hat.)
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2011 21:50
|
|
|
Migishu posted:More proof that Macleans is the worst magazine of all time And, yeah, the Coyne/Whyte regime is taking a once-boring-but-respectable magazine and basically turning it into the National Review with extra "u"s in the words. It's just sad that there's no immediate competitor to take advantage of this.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2011 19:47
|
|
|
Dallan Invictus posted:TVO's Jesse Brown (he used to do that tech show Search Engine for CBC Radio before moving to TVO) recently got hired to blog for Macleans, and his response tweet-rant is pretty impressive too (although it lacks the sheer glee of hearing a Conservative cabinet minister admit that unchecked corporate power isn't "invisible-hand fairness"). (Or, like Kady, he moves on to greener pastures.) Edit: Yeah, I didn't notice that. That was a BIG admission by Tony; drawing the distinction between apologizing for corps and supporting having real markets within the context of Canadian "pro-business" people is just astonishing. Damned sight better than Bernier was. (Who the gently caress would have guessed that motherfucking Landslide Tony would turn into the best member of the Tory caucus?) Nomenklatura fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Feb 19, 2011 |
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2011 23:12
|
|
|
Martytoof posted:Thank god the CRTC is fighting for me, the average consumer. Sad thing is, I still think that something like the CRTC is necessary, but it needs to exist because of broadcasters' rights to the public airwaves, and that has absolutely nothing to do with this. Plus, the excuse is just custom-loving-designed to enrage consumers. "Too cheap"? gently caress YOU too cheap. Canadian broadcasters get literal rents thanks to loving simulcasting, and are the main reason why our country is a geoblocked shithole when it comes to decent online video. And now they're moaning about netflix? This is going to end with the CRTC shut down, simulcasting ended, and Global/CTV left as nothing more than smoking craters.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2011 06:12
|
|
|
CanCon worked (works?) relatively well with Canadian musicians; and I do think that our culture and artistic community would have been simply annihilated by the colossus to the south had there not been some kind of protection. Pretending otherwise is just delusional. It's like why American animation is practically dead; it's just straight-up cheaper to leech off of someone else's production. That's what would have happened here, and the CRTC was right to limit broadcasters' ability to do so. But that's not the problem. The problem is that the broadcasters were given a loving job to do and didn't do it. The reason why they are allowed to simulcast is because they are supposed to use that money to bankroll decent Canadian productions. They don't. CTV used to and basically stopped, and Canwest/Global NEVER did. Were the CRTC not a textbook example of regulatory capture, they'd have had their licenses taken away ages ago, given to somebody else, and the country would have been better off for it. But that didn't happen, and it isn't because of our (actually quite good) artists; it's because of our bullshit, parochial, cliquish politicians. Edit: No, it isn't just the superbowl ads. We have TERRIBLE broadcasters, airing TERRIBLE programming, and anything that might have been good about them (or at least limited) has been destroyed by the CRTC's modern-day tendency to completely abdicate its responsibility to enforce licenses. I don't think Global has aired anything original that wasn't a horseshit mill show in something like a decade; why the HELL do they still have broadcast or digital channel licenses? Nomenklatura fucked around with this message at 09:14 on Feb 21, 2011 |
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2011 09:10
|
|
|
Oh, by the way...that Just For Laughs stuff is actually a major international cash cow. Makes truckloads of money. The shitball sitcoms I'll grant, but there's nobody better than us at standup or sketch comedy. (That's what's baffling. Canadians are great comedians, as a rule. We should have excellent sitcoms, rivalling anything out of the U.S. It's not like it's a price thing, either, since sitcoms are cheap to produce. Yet they're pretty much crap, excepting Corner Gas, and even that was only really inventive during the first year or so.) Edit: And I have no idea what the hell Bloody Hedgehog is on about with the film output. Canadian film is actually fairly good; often excellent. Atom Egoyan is internationally respected, "deviant" or no, and Cronenberg's Canadian work was arguably his best. There's a line between getting annoyed at CanCon and indulging that peculiarly pathetic tendency Canadians have to denigrate what they make because it doesn't come from the U.S. or U.K. As I said, Canadian artists are excellent; Canadian broadcasting and telecommunication corporations are what is utter loving poo poo in this country. Nomenklatura fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Feb 21, 2011 |
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2011 09:18
|
|
|
Vergeh posted:I wouldn't exactly call it a sitcom, but Trailer Park Boys is surprisingly well-written, very funny, and apparently popular south of the border. As for that animation thing...no, there isn't. Unless something's changed a LOT since the last time I checked, original American television animation (as opposed to, say, dubbed Japanese imports) have dropped like a stone. It's not complete, of course, but the decline from the heyday of even the 1990s shows what can happen when entire industries are built around little more than leeching off of another country's economies of scale. (Not THAT relevant, of course, except for pointing out that the CRTC is necessary to balance out the horror that is simulcasting.) Bloody Hedgehog posted:I was directly hosed over by Corus. I was working with an animation company here in Vancouver several years back, and they opened a studio in Toronto. They had cut a deal with Nelvana to be one of their top production houses, and the whole point of the Toronto studio was to be close to Nelvana. So I moved there, supervised the day-shift ink & paint artists for a few years. Then Corus buys up Nelvana, slashes their animation budget and schedule, and vis-a-vis leaves us with no work. 
Nomenklatura fucked around with this message at 07:57 on Feb 22, 2011 |
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2011 07:54
|
|
|
rscott posted:I don't know why you Canadians are complaining about your dearth of home grown TV shows, you have How It's Made! Anyway, anybody seen the Bell/Cable Co submissions on the call to expand the hearing? It's hilarious, mostly because they all boil down to "the CRTC already ruled the way we wanted them to when nobody was paying attention, and we don't see what could have possibly changed." Well, that, and "this is against the 2006 policy directive", which is actually a fair cop since Bernier's 2006 policy directive is really the font of all this horseshit in the first place. (Along with the Japan-style regulatory capture.) I did like how they carefully, carefully avoided addressing anything the Vaxination guy said, though.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2011 21:39
|
|
|
Chris Knight posted:TekSavvy said that a bunch of the Toronto POIs finally are getting their upgrades. I haven't checked DSLReports since the weekend, but ever since last Thursday my prime time isn't nearly as bad as it had been since they bumped me from Scarlett to Dupont. :fingerscrossed:
|
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2011 07:53
|
|
|
Stanley Pain posted:OMG Teksavvy Cable is finally available in Thornhill! Calling them just to be sure and switching from Rogers today
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2011 17:43
|
|
|
8ender posted:Ugh. This is both great and scary. If there ever was a target for Rogers to get all anti-competitive on, its Teksavvy. I think Rogers is just patiently waiting right now to soak up all the wholesale customers from Bell and then they'll drop the hammer on ultra-strict UBB. Fakeedit: gently caress it isn't Clement. Okay, we're boned.
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2011 17:51
|
|
|
See, I'd be really leery of switching to TS right now. I'm not confident that they're even going to EXIST in a year, not until we know more about Paradis. Do you guys know something I don't? Edit: holy poo poo, Shaw's keeping the unlimited plans around? Even if they jack the price, that's going to have a big impact on the debate nation-wide.
|
|
#
¿
May 26, 2011 02:39
|
|
|
Lone Rogue posted:I work for Teksavvy. Yes, they will exist in a year. The only way they might not exist in a year is if the government, despite changing Industry ministers, goes head on into allowing foreign investors to come in and AT&T buys up Teksavvy for a big enough price to make a family company sell to create AT&T Canada. Even then you're going to get awesome service.* (Plus, there's the whole UBB thing that this thread was started on.)
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2011 20:50
|
|
|
Lone Rogue posted:Unless the Conservatives have this completely hidden agenda hidden from even those who accuse them of a hidden agenda, I can't see them protecting Bell over the last mile. Haven't heard anything otherwise. Our biggest hurdle with Paradis is the fact he might want to conduct everything in French. Have you actually HEARD anything from Industry about what they're planning to do? Has anybody? If you haven't, I really don't want to stake my internet access on people's confidence in Conservative goodwill.
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2011 22:08
|
|
|
kuddles posted:Probably the biggest hurdle with TekSavvy is right now you can only buy a cable modem, you can't rent from them, so I can understand feeling a little shaky with a rather high expense upfront for a company you never heard of.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 27, 2011 06:58
|
|
|
The Gunslinger posted:Teksavvy is going through some growing pains but they are generally very customer service oriented. Your experience is an outlier, it happens but it's not the norm. You should definitely escalate the issue to a supervisor so that they can properly take care of things here. I had a similar experience when I moved, things up to that had been fine but there was a mistake in the transition and I wasn't happy with the result. In the end I ended up switching ISPs due to a line profile dispute with Bell but Teksavvy refunded me a bunch of money and went the extra mile.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 12, 2011 08:10
|
|
|
Yep. When we hear Americans go on about the "Cloud" we tend to start wanting to smash things.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 17, 2011 07:53
|
|
|
The commissioners seemed to be a bit tired of Bell's poo poo during the hearings, though they might start getting swung back when the lobbyists get their claws into them. Bibic's basically just playing for the cameras; he knows damned well that his company can bend the ears of the commissioners whenever they please. Still, it seems like they aren't completely opposed to capacity-based solutions, and they listened pretty closely to the 95th percentile proposals. It seems like they're far less likely to go with per-user UBB and, instead, go with some sort of aggregated congestion-related fee. That's not the worst thing in the world, as long as it's aimed at peak usage instead of off-peak usage. (That's probably the best part: they seem to be receptive to the idea of peak billing instead of general usage billing.)
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2011 03:06
|
|
|
Bell's position seems to literally come across as "we aren't going to build out any more capacity for existing subscribers, so we have to beat the living hell out of their wallets until they learn to be loving content with what they have". That's what all that "disincentive" poo poo comes down to. They want to build out capacity, yes, but only to suck in new customers and convert people from satellite to IPTV. Good ol' Internet access can get hosed. (Which kind of nicely fits into the whole "post-PC" thing, doesn't it? Bell's interests are much like Apple's interests: converting people from using programs on their computer to using apps on their smartphones. If you're going to push people away from PCs, choking the poo poo out of wireline internet usage is a damned good way to do it.)
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2011 09:01
|
|
|
So if TekSavvy's a mess right now (well done, guys, bringing in people who don't know the industry or the culture), then who do you recommend for Internet access?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2012 09:25
|
|
|
Martytoof posted:Canada's netflix is -- basically -- a joke. Lone Rogue posted:In Canada? Nobody.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2012 17:48
|
|
|
Lone Rogue posted:I can tell you that the reason why it's only feasible on paper is due to what happened between Rogers and Teksavvy in December. Teksavvy paid for IP blocks from Rogers and Rogers just so happened to screw it up for over a month in giving the wrong areas said IP blocks. We had to put a ton of money out of pocket to set people up temporarily with free fibre 12mbps until their cable Internet worked again. It was an absolute disaster and we couldn't do anything about it. Rogers just "accidentally hosed up" and cost us likely a thousand customers we were never getting back.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2012 20:36
|
|
|
Lone Rogue posted:It's too bad because it used to be top notch. It was difficult for me to find legitimate complaints online and the few I found here I ended up assisting the guy with it and getting everything straightened out.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 7, 2012 17:19
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 20:25 |
|
|
Lone Rogue posted:Yeah, the guy came in with his, "big ideas" and telling a company hitting their greatest growth numbers that, "you are running things wrong and you'll be shut down in six months if we don't change". His big idea was to start paying attention to call statistics and publicly list everyone's numbers so we could have friendly competition. Man, there ain't nothing like arrogant quants who think that a halfassed set of statistical variables give them Godlike Insight. Lone Rogue posted:I don't know what has changed since I left in January other than Rocky eventually came back despite splitting his time between three different companies and the new location. I have great respect for Rocky and feel that if he was full time with the company, a majority of the problems they've dealt with in the past year wouldn't exist. Amazing. This would get rejected by any producer in Hollywood as being WAY too cliched.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2012 23:04
|
|