It is reported on twitter that the Industry Minister has indicated that the ministry will over turn the CRTC decision to require limits on Internet connectivity in Canada.
This is a good thing. Here are eleven ways that your business could be affected by a limited download internet connection.
Technology’s that run over the internet that could cause your business to take a hit:
VOIP – Voice over IP communications, phone systems, SKYPE or other video and conferencing services.
GO to Meeting – often used for webinars, sales meetings or remote support and collaboration, will could have been renamed ‘Go To Surcharge’.
Wireless: may have no longer been free at your favourite coffee shop or even something you will want to deploy as an enabler for devices to reach the internet. Smartphones, iPads and other new technologies can all use these and consume bandwidth doing so.
Cloud Computing: anything that uses traffic to display data and or stores information via the web. Google Docs, Google Apps that you run your office with, all consume bandwidth. Our own hosted electronic document management service we offer: www.docucapture.com could be affected.
File Sharing services: the convenience of these ‘free’ storage services now have to be reconsidered since if you store and transfer back and forth large amounts of your data you would pay more to do so.
Internet based file backups: while it seemed a great idea to backup your critical business files and data to an off site remote backup facility you may have had to reconsider. Let’s say you have 160 GB of data on your Server, transferring it at a rate of $2 a GB could cost you over $300 more than your base internet plan of $40/Month. And that doesn’t include the daily incremental backups you will want to do!
Terminal Services: often used by companies to connect branch operations to head offices, or run ERP or other large business essential software throughout their organization, would have needed to be thought about as it would no longer be free.
Product Training: many of our suppliers are providing internet based course ware that includes video or other rich multi-media content, it could be ‘bad for business’ and a rich price tag.
Media Businesses: Graphic designers, photographers, wedding videographers, funeral homes or anyone publishing their content or photos would take a hit and their businesses may suffer.
Casual surfing: expect a backlash as employers get tough against employees using Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter or who go onto a video site like YouTube, or just surf the web etc.
Email content or jokes: if you are lucky enough to have that uncle that forwards you all their jokes, videos and other multimedia content they receive, you might not be so quick to laugh and thank him at the next family get together after you get your monthly internet bill. If you have 20 employees and each receives these types of joke emails they could really add up.
This list isn’t exhaustive, but focuses on the uses that will affect businesses directly vs. the usual consumer focused ones such as downloading from iTunes, Netflix or other rich media sites that use bandwidth. Be aware HD content like a typical movie from Netflix is between 2-5 GB per movie, suddenly $8 a month for ‘unlimited’ movies isn’t so great when you watched 10 movies last month that’s 10 X a minimum of $2 GB for another $20 bucks or 10 X 5 GB = $100 bucks! Ouch. Perhaps Bell and the big cable networks were trying to protect their own video rental business, not the internet infrastructure?
It seems the CRTC didn’t understand the implications this could have for business. When it is estimated that huge providers like Bell, Shaw etc. have true costs in the 1 cent range per additional GB; if they can now charge you $1 -$4 per extra GB thats a profit I would love to have: 10,000% markup is pretty sweet, but sure sounds like usury.
It looks like, if the twitter reports can be believed, the government has realized that this could be a powder keg. We need to keep the pressure on to ensure the government intervenes and the CRTC gets a reality ‘check’ that bounces this legislation to the curb. Perhaps someone needs to look into the whole process and see what research the CRTC did into the real costs of such a decision?
What will you do? How would this impact your Business?
You are encouraged to make your views known, just in case the decision is not reversed. You can sign the petition:
Ian Leppert
