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ISPs Race to Create Two-Tiered Internet
An anonymous reader writes "The ISP race toward a two-tiered Internet is picking up speed. This
article from Michael Geist
points to a wide range of examples involving packet preferencing,
content blocking, traffic shaping, and public musings about premium
charges for faster content downloads. ISPs are now reducing
access to peer-to-peer applications, blocking Skype, and, scariest of
all, lobbying Congress to let them do it."
Port 80 sounds like a good choice.
Try port 443. ISPs may send your outgoing port 80 to a transparent proxy, and such a proxy could simply drop traffic it doesn't understand, crippling port tunneling without affecting web surfing. Typical port 443 traffic is already encrypted, so if they block any of it they risk all their users complaining.
You're right in putting the legal solutions ahead of the technical solutions for this one, though. If someone is selling lemons their customers should be talking to a lawyer, not a mechanic.
I don't know about Fido & Rogers, but Telus was a mostly western company and Clearnet mostly eastern. After the merge, they had solid national coverage. It seems more like a fast and cheap way for Telus to expand into eastern Canada rather than getting rid of a rival.
The barrier to entry for the cell market is very high now. We probably won't see a new cell providor in Canada for a long time now, and rates will stay where they are.
Is that why Virgin Mobile just started up this year? With lower rates than everyone else?
The thing that really stops major competition in the cellphone world is not cost-of-entry for new providers, it's things like service-provider locks on phones and non-transferable phone numbers. I doesn't matter how many providers there are if you can't easily switch from one to the other.
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