Sunday, February 06, 2011
More UBB
In my burning rage I got to wondering, would a UBB overage charge even hold up in court? In electricity and gas and oil, we have actual standard measures that are applied to what we get. The tools used to provide those services are heavily regulated as are the monitoring tools and methodology behind them. Gigabytes are not. CAN an ISP legally charge us for a unit of measure that doesn't have any backing behind it? Where the ISP itself is the one doing the measuring, and the data itself is circumspect? I mean, when water goes in to your house, that little water meter is kept to a specific standard as set by government rules. Are Rogers or Shaw actually able to prove in a court of law that you used so and so amount of bandwidth? Sure they can say that you did, but its your word against theirs. I've heard of speeding tickets thrown out of court for worse reasons. What if every Bell and Rogers and Shaw customer just downloaded gigs of data, then took the ISP's to court? I'm not a lawyer, but I really don't see how they'd have much of a case.
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I think if I was a Bell lawyer I would argue that transferred bytes is a simple count and as such is not covered by Canadian weights and measures legislation. In other words, there is nothing being measured (or alternatively the thing being sold is pre-measured).
There are some interesting and related ideas out there:
1. Do you pay for just the data? IP overhead? PPPoE overhead?
2. Why do you pay for received data when you have no control over it?
3. What happens when the customers router comes up with a different amount than the providers router?
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