The Shrine

Canada's cable / telecom monopoly puts our US ones to shame... I bet Time Warner and Cox are drooling over this.

Tessian wrote:Canada's cable / telecom monopoly puts our US ones to shame... I bet Time Warner and Cox are drooling over this.

Oligopoly. There's actually 2 companies that control the vast majority of our TV, Internet, and cellphone market (Bell and Rogers) with another western-only one for TV and Internet (Shaw) and a cell-only major third party (Telus). All but Telus were actually monopolies at one point and still very much act like they still have that kind of power (probably because in reality, they have it.....). Hell, I get my Internet through a third-party purchaser of Bell's service (Primus) and I'm actually being choked by Bell now during "peak" hours 'cause they recently won the right to do that even though the bandwidth is sold to a third party at a pre-determined rate.

Really, it's fucking sad the state of our telecommunications are in thanks to the waste of a government agency we have in the CRTC. And the type of ruling in the link above puts us even further behind the rest of the world.

That's very sad, what a step back for Canada's high-speed internet. I remember in 1995 being charged per minute for internet usage--I thought that was a thing of the past.

Want to stream NetFlix? Too bad, sucker.

ManaMan wrote: I remember in 1995 being charged per minute for internet usage--I thought that was a thing of the past.

Want to stream NetFlix? Too bad, sucker.

Well, the latter is causing the former. Not to say that I agree with Bell's pricing model, though. Companies like Comcast are doing caps of 250GB a month and it seems to be working out. A cap of 2GB, even on a 512kbps service, is pretty insane. Oh, and the fact that the highest service is 5Mbps. Is that the standard or is that shitty 2Mbps the standard.

Meanwhile, we're researching 50Mbps service, as a high-level tier, and the standard 10Mbps service is much better than most of the guys.

5MB is actually the standard for the secondary companies. I believe Bell and Rogers actually have 7MB as their slowest. But what does it matter when you get punished so damned badly for using it? Defeats the entire purpose of having that kind of speed to begin with.

And like I've said before, there's a lot more reasons other than torrents the 60GB limit is ridiculously low. If you stream radio, TV shows, or movies, like to grab lots of demos or videos on your 360 or PS3, play lots of online gaming, or have a couple of kids who are YouTube addicts, you can get killed without even using a torrent client. It's woefully inadequate and that's before we even start talking about the negative effect that'll have on business in this country. Considering how large our land is, you would think that the government would want to promote better and cheaper access to all parts of the country as it could very much benefit a large portion of our population but the CRTC rulings are doing the exact opposite.

We actually have the infrastructure and, if you can afford it, the service to match or better the vast majority of the countries in the world. Problem is, the lack of competition cause by the lack of real oversight means we also pay more than nearly every other civilized country in the world for our access.

All I can get in the St. Louis metro-east area is 1.5 Mbps max. I'd be in no danger of hitting a cap.

ManaMan wrote:All I can get in the St. Louis metro-east area is 1.5 Mbps max. I'd be in no danger of hitting a cap.

No cable over there? Or does the cable suck that bad?

Do be careful opening that link zeus included. One of the banner ads or something (I wasn't paying attention, opened the link in a new tab and finished reading this thread) on that site auto-redirected me to some faggy weak virus/malware page.

kali o. wrote:Do be careful opening that link zeus included. One of the banner ads or something (I wasn't paying attention, opened the link in a new tab and finished reading this thread) on that site auto-redirected me to some faggy weak virus/malware page.

Never had that happen here

Im never going to click a zeus link again.

Flip wrote:Im never going to click a zeus link again.

Like you ever did anyways.....

But seriously, I have no idea what you guys are talking about. I had no re-direction at all

kali o. wrote:Do be careful opening that link zeus included. One of the banner ads or something (I wasn't paying attention, opened the link in a new tab and finished reading this thread) on that site auto-redirected me to some faggy weak virus/malware page.

Nah, I'm pretty sure it's that you have spyware on your machine.

SineSwiper wrote:

kali o. wrote:Do be careful opening that link zeus included. One of the banner ads or something (I wasn't paying attention, opened the link in a new tab and finished reading this thread) on that site auto-redirected me to some faggy weak virus/malware page.

Nah, I'm pretty sure it's that you have spyware on your machine.

You can be pretty sure of whatever you want, after 20+ years, I'm not a PC noob you cockgobbler.

Everytime i click the link, i win a free iPad. Eat that suckaaas!

kali o. wrote:

SineSwiper wrote:

kali o. wrote:Do be careful opening that link zeus included. One of the banner ads or something (I wasn't paying attention, opened the link in a new tab and finished reading this thread) on that site auto-redirected me to some faggy weak virus/malware page.

Nah, I'm pretty sure it's that you have spyware on your machine.

You can be pretty sure of whatever you want, after 20+ years, I'm not a PC noob you cockgobbler.

Cockgobbler, huh? :-)

Zeus wrote: Cockgobbler, huh? :-)

That's my post-edited version. Hey, it's like having problems with the starter on your car and then some random guy tells you that you probably just need gas -- it's eye punch worthy.

As it was that linked site/page had at least 4 banner ad entry points with random providers - the quality of the providers vary greatly and many of them don't check the submissions carefully (spend a little time on the pirate bay with IE and see what I mean).

I don't have anything to say about the actual content of the article though...it pisses me off, but what can I do? Move?

Fake virus scanners seem to be the new recent trend for malware and they're all over the place. I had one pop up from an ad on a fairly big fan site last week too.

kali o. wrote:

Zeus wrote: Cockgobbler, huh? :-)

That's my post-edited version. Hey, it's like having problems with the starter on your car and then some random guy tells you that you probably just need gas -- it's eye punch worthy.

As it was that linked site/page had at least 4 banner ad entry points with random providers - the quality of the providers vary greatly and many of them don't check the submissions carefully (spend a little time on the pirate bay with IE and see what I mean).

I don't have anything to say about the actual content of the article though...it pisses me off, but what can I do? Move?

Make it a point not to buy from Bell or Rogers or Shaw, even if the other guys are the same price or a shade more. It's like the gas companies, the only way you can make them listen is for everyone to get together and pick on one company (I vote Rogers) and not buy from them. What do you think Rogers would do if 1 million people left them all at once? Same with the gas companies to break our retail cartel here. If everyone didn't buy from Shell for 1 month, do you think they wouldn't start dropping their price to bring people in?

Gas outs never work.

SineSwiper wrote:Gas outs never work.

Eventually they certainly will. People just have to have the will and the desire

So, there are still lots of places for sale in the States Zeus. You can find a great foreclosure cheap.

Imakeholesinu wrote:So, there are still lots of places for sale in the States Zeus. You can find a great foreclosure cheap.

Why would I move to an even worse situation? There's a lot more to life than cost of telecommunications and we pretty much waste the US in nearly every one of those areas

Zeus wrote:Eventually they certainly will. People just have to have the will and the desire

Unless a large chunk of population abstain for a long time (ie: sacrifice), it won't work. And since large chunks of population don't like sacrificing anything, it never works.

Only when the price of gas was a bigger sacrifice than getting a better MPG car did people change their habits.

SineSwiper wrote:

Zeus wrote:Eventually they certainly will. People just have to have the will and the desire

Unless a large chunk of population abstain for a long time (ie: sacrifice), it won't work. And since large chunks of population don't like sacrificing anything, it never works.

Only when the price of gas was a bigger sacrifice than getting a better MPG car did people change their habits.

That's what I keep saying. People won't put effort and time forth to do what's required. But they sure as hell will complain about it every chance they get. So we all just sit back and get it up the ass. If you're not willing to do something about it, don't fucking complain.

That's why I don't think the gas up here in Canada will stay over $1 a litre for too long. People seem to accept it for a day or two, week at max. But once it's viewed as being a permanent increase, they will change their habits. And trust me, the retail cartel keeps trying to push it above that, the market just won't accept it.

Scareware (fake virus scanners) is one of the major issues we're dealing with right now. Not so much at the work place, but people get compromised at home by these things, which allow even nastier stuff to get on their systems, then the bring some shit to work on a USB stick and we have to deal with it :p

Sitting in an ethical hacking and incident handling course this very minute, actually. The instructor swears often about scareware.