Kirsten McKnight's List: Internet

• Bell proposed introducing usage-based billing instead of a flat rate for  wholesale customers, a pricing method the company says is in line with changes  it has made to its own retail offerings.
• If Bell were to be allowed to introduce UBB on this service, a cap of 60GB would  be imposed on all of its users, with very heavy penalties per Gigabyte  afterwards," wrote Gaudrault in a letter to his customers on Tuesday, April 14,  the last day interested parties could comment on the proposal.

• Smaller ISPs were given access to the networks of phone companies in the  first place because the incumbents held a natural infrastructure monopoly, which  was initially built through taxpayer funds when they were government-owned. The  rules were put in place to boost the number of competitors selling internet  access to the public, and thus keep prices down and service levels up.

• Usage-based billing (UBB) represents a radical change to current practice and  is not warranted," wrote MTS Allstream Inc. vice-president of regulatory affairs  Teresa Griffin-Muir.

   

  "It would effectively prevent competitive ISPs from offering flat-rated  Internet services, or any other type of offering that didn't follow Bell's UBB  model, since they would have no means of containing their costs, if their  customers were to exceed Bell's usage caps," she wrote.

• Among these initiatives is the CRTC's plan to hold public hearings on July 6  in Gatineau, Que., on the traffic management practices of internet service  providers.

   

  Those hearings were set up following complaints from CAIP that Bell Canada is  selectively slowing down or "throttling" internet traffic generated by  peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications such as BitTorrent or "shaping"  traffic to favour other applications over P2P in an effort to reduce network  congestion.

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• It also reminded me of a student teacher I supervised a couple of years ago who, in an unplanned lesson, used Google to demonstrate the power of AND, OR, and NOT.  The students promptly proved they were better off without them
• For most of the big search engines, AND is assumed.  In my experience, OR makes a very large result list even larger.  And, when NOT is really necessary, it is usually easier to disambiguate on an advanced search screen.
• Flexibility.  Respond to your search results,
• Most of the time, learners have better results when they explore the options on advanced search pages.
• 
   3. Quotation marks
• Search nouns. 
• List your most important words first.
  
• choose your search tools. 

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