Canada's regulators promise expensive internet

A recent ruling by Canadian regulator the CRTC all but guarantees Canadians will face steadily increasing costs for Internet. The recent ruling forces third party Internet providers to provide only metered bandwidth – pay per gigabyte. While in theory there is nothing wrong with paying for services you use , there are several issues that make this ruling troubling. Canada does not allow foreign companies to compete for service in Canada, creating an artificial market from the start.

This applies to cellular service as well, making Canada one of the most expensive countries in the world for cell phone service as well. Now let's get to cable. Essentially, the country in carved up into fiefdoms, with two dominant players – Rogers and Shaw effectively owning the wires and cable service in their regions. Bell and Telus also provide Internet service via their phone lines and some fiber.

Third party Internet providers buy there bandwidth from the big players. But here is the kicker: Rogers, Shaw and Bell are also in the television broadcast business.

Could this simply be a way to ensure revenues as traditional revenues from television migrate to Internet service based ones?  You bet.

But hey, I am Canadian and I'm mad as hell!

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Internet almost out of addresses

The Internet is getting close to running out of IP addresses after the organization (IANA) that handles the Internet protocol addresses assigned two of seven remaining blocks  to the Asia Pacific Network Information Center. The Internet could run out of IP addresses as early as September 2011. The current system provides for 4.3 billion addresses. All is not lost, however. A newer system is in the works – the IPv6 registry system, which should take care of the problem for most people – we hope. 

Egypt goes silent on the internet

In a move that has been anticipated by many, Egypt has literlally pulled the plug on the internet. All ISPs have been ordered to shut down there services, as the government tries to quell protests across the nation. Today, large protests are planned and as demonstated in Tunisia recently, social networking has helped protesters avoid arrest and danger as well as broadcast the events to the world. It's watch and wait for the moment.

From the Renesys blog:

"At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers. Virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide."