Internet bills reduced for thousands

Thousands of Canadians received emails recently telling them that their Internet bills will go down at least for the next few months.

The lower rates could affect customers of third-party Internet companies like TekSavvy and Distributel. They come as a result of an October decision by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that found that the owners of the wires: Bell, Rogers and Vidéotron, for example, were charging too much for third-party companies to access them.

The CRTC had ruled in 2010 that the companies were only permitted to charge the price of operating the wires plus a 10-per-cent markup. However, in October the CRTC found the providers had set their rates far too high.

“Competitors that provide retail Internet services to Canadians using wholesale high-speed services must have access to these services at just and reasonable prices,” CRTC chairman and CEO JeanPierre Blais said in a statement at the time. “The fact that these large companies did not respect accepted costing principles and methodologies is very disturbing. What’s even more concerning is the fact that Canadians’ access to a choice of broadband Internet services would have been at stake had we not revised these rates. As always, we strive to create a dynamic competitive telecommunications market for Canadians.”

The CRTC has cut proposed rates for network access by up to 39 per cent and reduced the rate for the transport of Internet data by up to 89 per cent.

In an email to users in Quebec, TekSavvy said it was lowering its rates on an interim basis. Customers paying for speeds of 15 megabits per second to download and 10 megabits per second to upload, saw their bills slashed to $30.95 from $39.99, for example — a 23-percent discount. Prices are not the same everywhere in the country, so individual plans may vary.