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, up from about 41,000 who had signed by this time last week. Charlie Angus, digital affairs critic for the federal New Democratic Party, has also openly opposed UBB since before the latest CRTC decision was announced.

“Allowing the Internet Service Providers to ding you every time you download is a rip-off,” said Mr. Angus in a statement dated January 20, five days prior to the CRTC validating the UBB regime it first imposed last October. “Canada is already falling behind other countries in terms of choice, accessibility and pricing for the Internet.”

Advocacy groups such as OpenMedia.ca in Vancouver, along with smaller ISPs such as TekSavvy Solutions Inc. in Chatham, Ontario, argue the CRTC decision has stifled competition to provide affordable Internet service in Canada. Whereas TekSavvy and other indie providers were once able to offer connections with no caps placed on the amount of data customers could download in a given month, under the new UBB regime they are required to charge customers an additional fee for every gigabyte of data they consume that exceeds an arbitrarily preset monthly limit.

Consumers havealready started to be informed of the coming changes, with some about to watch their monthly limits drop from 200GB [gigabytes] or more to around 25GB; almost a 90% decrease in available bandwidth.

Several analysts, observers and academics have argued that the profit margins for those overage fees, which can range from $1 per extra gigabyte to $2.50, are far to high for larger ISPs such as Bell Canada or Rogers Communications to justify. Reed Hastings, chief executive of Internet-based video streaming service Netflix Inc., claimed in a letter to shareholders last week that the cost for an ISP to deliver a single gigabyte of data was “less than a penny and falling.”