We have prepared three charts that show, with dismaying clarity, where Canada stands among 30 OECD countries. We submit that this is clear evidence that the existing competitive framework has failed. The only reason, perhaps, that the recent public outcry did not arise earlier and in greater volume is because most Canadians do not know what they are missing, nor do they realize how costly our inferior service actually is.
In the first slide, Canada is shown as 23rd in terms of what Canadians pay for broadband.
In the second slide, Canada ranks 25th in terms of the speed available to consumers, key to optimizing the Internet.
On the subject of UBB, Bell's arguments centre on light users subsidizing heavy ones, preventing congestion and the need to restrain Internet usage generally.
The third chart shows that all OECD countries except Canada and Australia reject usage caps across the board. Seventeen countries have no bandwidth caps at all. Almost no other country shares Bell's views.
On the subject of UBB, the committee and the public have heard much about the imposition of UBB on wholesale customers like TekSavvy. It has, indeed, been charged to Bell's retail customers--people such as you--for years. We have no problem with what Bell wishes to charge its customers; however, Bell continues to seek to impose UBB on ours as well.
There is no economic justification for this legitimized form of price fixing. When Bell says it seeks a level playing field, that means it wants to force all Canadians to pay exorbitant prices for bandwidth, far beyond the cost of supply, and it wants to keep all the benefits.
The CRTC itself acknowledged that there is little cost-related justification for incremental pricing based on usage. In addition, heavy bandwidth users do pay more because they take more expensive packages, so the cross-subsidy argument is without merit.
Absent in underlying cost, UBB is clearly a punitive tax on usage, where the tax enriches Bell shareholders at the expense of Canadian consumers.
The ostensible reason for the tax is to constrain the growth in bandwidth usage. The chairman of the CRTC himself spoke about disciplining Canadians' use of the Internet. Almost unique in the world, UBB is nothing more than an effort to substitute social engineering for social networking.
The impact of UBB across the board is obvious. Canadian consumers pay unjustifiably high amounts for Internet usage; Canadians are forced to resort largely to conventional television content, such as Bell's newly acquired CTV, while the rest of the world flocks to the Internet-based content like Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix; and without increased demand for bandwidth, there will be little motivation to invest in infrastructure, killing innovation. Indeed, Bell's capital expenditures in relation to revenues ratio has fallen for three years straight.