It took a pandemic to do it, but most Canadians finally have unlimited home internet usage. The question now is, for how long?

Most major internet service providers have risen to the challenge of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis by relaxing overages, or the fees they charge customers for exceeding monthly allotments. The gestures effectively mean that the large majority of Canadians, forced to stay home amid social-distancing measures, can now stream and download as much as they like.

But many ISPs have also indicated the easements will eventually end — Bell intends to start charging overages as usual starting April 30, while Rogers will follow suit on May 31. When that happens, more than half of Canadians — according to CRTC figures — will have to go back to watching their usage.

Industry observers say now is a good time to question why caps exist at all — and whether ISPs should even try and squeeze the proverbial genie back into the bottle once normalcy returns.

“Everybody has known caps were bull for some time,” says Dwayne Winseck, a Carleton University communications professor who also heads the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project. “You don’t need to discriminate (service) on the basis of data allowances. That turns an infinite resource into a finite one.”

Unlimited home usage only became common in Canada recently, after a long and protracted regulatory battle between big telecom companies including Rogers and Bell and independent internet service providers such as TekSavvy, Egate Networks and Start.ca. The independents essentially rent portions of the bigger companies’ networks to provide service to their own customers.

The battle began around 2010, when Netflix expanded to Canada. Industry critics argued that the large, vertically integrated broadcast-telecom companies were instituting monthly caps along with overage fees to discourage streaming and thereby protect their TV offerings.

The companies retorted by saying that caps were necessary to prevent congestion on their networks.

In 2009, the CRTC stepped in and ruled that telecom providers should invest and expand their networks as the primary means of combating congestion, with caps that discouraged streaming to be used as a backup.

The regulator then put into place a capacity-based billing system for wholesale ISPs, wherein those companies could essentially purchase virtual traffic pipes from network owners. In doing so, the CRTC rejected a usage-based approach — where wholesale ISPs would be billed for every gigabyte used by their customers regardless of time of day — that network owners had favoured.

The capacity-based model meant that independent ISPs had to provision their bandwidth needs only for peak hours, which was evenings, when customers were streaming the most. Usage at other times was lower and therefore inconsequential to that provisioning.

The decision ultimately allowed indie providers to offer unlimited packages at reasonable rates, which forced the big carriers to follow suit.

Since then, the number of Canadians who subscribe to unlimited has grown substantially. Rogers reports that the “vast majority” of its customers are now on unlimited packages while Bell says most of its subscribers are. TekSavvy, the largest independent with 300,000 customers, says almost 90 per cent of subscribers have unlimited.

Nationally, however, the situation is far from where the CRTC would like it to be. In 2016, the regulator established goals of having download speeds of at least 50 megabits per second, and unlimited usage, available to 90 per cent of Canadians by 2021.

According to the latest CRTC figures, only 47.5 per cent of Canadians actually subscribed to unlimited services as of 2018, up from 14 per cent in 2014. The Canadian Internet Registration Authority reports a lower total, with only 40 per cent of subscribers unlimited as of 2019, up from 29 per cent in 2016.

Talk of congestion, meanwhile, has fallen by the wayside as network owners have indeed upgraded their networks to handle ever-rising traffic. Even during the pandemic, when Canadians are being forced to stay home and network traffic is increasing commensurately, experts say the nation’s networks are in relatively good shape.

“There’s no huge spike and it’s not going to break,” says Jacques Latour, chief technology officer for CIRA, which manages the .ca website domain name. “It’s totally manageable.”

Given the lack of congestion and the intent behind the CRTC’s 2016 universal-service objectives, Winseck says caps continue to exist only to make network owners more money.

“It was to be a temporary measure to be used sparingly,” he says. “But data caps just became a new line of revenue, completely unhinged from any rationale in congestion.”

Spokespeople for both Bell and Rogers say that capped plans provide choices for customers based on their usage and budgets, but some indie ISPs agree with Winseck and have phased out such options.

London, Ont.-based Start.ca, for one, says network usage only matters during the evening, so counting gigabytes at other times of day only serves to alienate customers.

“All a network cares really about is whatever your download is at peak time,” says Gabriel Blanchard, the company’s director of network operations. “If you download like crazy outside those hours, I really don’t care.”

Paul Andersen, president of Toronto-based Egate Networks, which caters primarily to small business, says his customers hate caps and don’t want the hassle of tracking their usage.

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“It’s hard to understand in an always-on world how much data you’re using,” he says. “They aren’t technologically savvy in that regard, it’s not their core business, so they appreciate that we can give them a flat-rate charge.”

Some indie ISPs continue to sell cheaper capped plans on lower-speed services and expect to do so once things return to normal as a way to cater to price-conscious customers. But, they say, they are only doing to so to keep their wholesale costs down and would prefer to offer unlimited to everyone.

“Our view has always been that data caps are an artificial scarcity,” says Andy Kaplan-Myrth, vice-president of regulatory and carrier affairs for Chatham-based TekSavvy. “As we all move to higher-capacity fibre networks, capped plans become more and more ridiculous. The only place for it is exactly where we use it.”

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