Wirelessnorth.ca

March 27th, 2008Bell throttles indie ISPs

The big controversy in the Canadian tech blogosphere this week is Bell’s move to trottle “P2P” traffic on third party ISPs. [Globe and mail: Bell irks ISPs with new throttling policy ]This is distressing a lot of savvy customers who were relying on indie ISPs like teksavvy as the last redoubt of unfettered access to the internet as the likes of Rogers and Bell have been increasingly and unapoligetically clamping down on any users attempting to actually make effective use of their connections as sold to them.

This trend isn’t just worrying for a few power users. Though Bell paints it as a P2P “piracy” issue but the reality is that it’s the legit content that matters. Today at ICE08, leaders of Canadian broadcasting, content creation and interactive industries are meeting to talk about the future of media. In theory that future is somehow in digital distribution. The key question is how will Canadian content producers distribute in Canada if the ISPs have turned off all the taps?

Businesses should be paying attention. Michael Geist adds:

the business community is left to wonder whether it will soon target business VPN traffic or broadcasters like the CBC for their streamed traffic. This represents a fundamental reshaping of the Internet in Canada as we pay (literally) for the dire lack of competition and independent ISPs gear up for likely legal challenges. Regardless of those outcomes, it will become increasingly apparent that the regulators and politicians can no longer remain silent. Nor should Canadians.

There’s nothing necessarily illegal about the telco/cableco’s policies (though the third party ISPs will be attempting to bring a suit). From Bell’s perspective it would seem a shame to have invested so much in hardware for deep packet inspection and not make the best of it right?

In the long run, it can’t be smart. Shaping and throttling access to the net is flirting is flirting with a larger evil than mere network optimizations and fighting some war on “piracy”. Maybe it’s smart business, but is it smart politics?

As Geist points out, Bell and Rogers throttling effects shows like CBC’s Next Great Prime Minister which is distributed free and legitimately over bittorrent. You couldn’t imagine a better poster child for taking a case to the CRTC. Nothing like interfering with public broadcasting, democratic participation and Canadian cultural content to attract the love of policy wonks.

Talk about hot buttons for regulatory intervention. Stir enough backlash, and this short term business strategy could have long reaching strategic implications.

http://montrealtechwatch.com heri

this isn’t news, bell confirmed last october that they did traffic shaping http://tinyurl.com/2uqnvn

i thought everybody was aware of this, and there is no reason that thirdparty resellers would have unlimited traffic
http://www.hogtownconsulting.com/blog/ Patrick Dinnen

Thanks for shining a light on this WirelessNorth.

I’d have to disagree with Heri on this not being news. It is indeed true that Bell Sympatico started screwing their residential customers with this unannounced throttling policy months ago. But the fact that they are now applying the same policy to their wholesale partners, again by stealth, is a different thing altogether.

The reason, as I understand, that Bell is required by law to wholesale their last mile bandwidth to third party ISPs is to promote competition in the ISP market. Bell applying throttling to other ISPs (such as Teksavvy) who sell their service with proud claims of not throttling traffic is anti-competitive and harmful to Canadian business and consumers.
http://remarkk.com/ Mark Kuznicki

Readers might find this amusing: http://digg.com/tech_news/Bell_Canada_rep_calls_journalist_lemmings_on_Facebook

I sure did! :)
http://www.hogtownconsulting.com/wordpress/archives/bell-canada-stomps-on-network-neutrality/ Hogtown Consulting » Bell Canada stomps on network neutrality

[...] more from: WirelessNorth.ca, Michael Geist, Mark Kuznicki, public sector unions and many, many others. no comments [...]
Dan

heri please…

That notice was not submited to everyone. As you must not know Sympatico and Bell Nexxia are two different divisions of the same company. Sympatico and other 3rd party ISP buy access from the government regulated (at PPPoE frame relay level) from Bell Nexxia.

That notice was in regards to Bell Sympatico meaning it does not pertain to 3rd party companies.

Im fact it was the 3rd party companies that confronted Bell about this last week and they finally admitted that they were throttling them.

Shady business practices, according to TekSavvys own network graphs overall traffic is down as much as 60%. They did this so people wouldn’t leave Sympatico in droves for a much better internet experience.
John Loshen

Well, it was only a matter of time, after all just last month the Japanese were presenting their findings on overall Internet traffic and announced that the 4 main ISP’s had throttled P2P traffic and there are similar proposals being floated around in the UK and France…

In Canada there is No Doubt that the carriers have been overselling their bandwidth for a long time and I agree that this needs to be addressed. CRTC???

Legitimate file sharing traffic using Peer 2 Peer does exist and one great example is a Canadian start-up, 2Peer.com. Their premise is the “Private Internet”, it may sound a bit hokey but I have to say I am a big fan. I can share our personal photos and videos with my friends and family and don’t have to waste time uploading and sharing from a third party site.

With 2Peer I can share privately from my computer with people I authorize utilizing a peer to peer framework. This way I don’t have to worry about pedophiles, stalkers, and so on looking at my personal family pictures or videos. Just look at the invasion of privacy issues with Facebook and MySpace in the past couple months…

So I guess I should be getting my refund cheque in the mail since my bandwidth is going to be throttled because I use software that is P2P based. Nothing like hindering a Canadian start-up at the same time, way to go Bell!

Lesson learned from Jason Laszlo is that you may want to check out your privacy settings before you make comments in a open world or get a service that is private like 2Peer.com.
http://wirelessnorth.ca/2008/06/02/everyday-the-same-again/ Wirelessnorth.ca » Blog Archive » Everyday the same again

[...] with open access provisions. Typical home broadband connections average 3-6Mps in Canada when unthrottled with faster connections available in some areas at higher prices. Canada has no national broadband, [...]
http://www.adblaze.com/752-6.html iphone games music

Nice blog, i have added it to my favourites, greetings
http://www.boat4u.com.au Buy Boats Online

We have an even worse problem in Australia, where the goverenment are trying to throttle ALL P2P traffic.
http://www.pcs4cheap.ca/ cheap compuetrs

p2p traffic being throttled…umm…thats just too bad !

March 27th, 2008Bell throttles indie ISPs

Recent Comments

Categories

Archives

Blogroll