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Bell Canada Throttles Wholesalers Without Notice
knorthern knight writes "The Canadian family-run ISP Teksavvy (which is popular among Canadian P2P users precisely because it does not throttle P2P) has started noticing that Bell Canada is throttling traffic before it reaches wholesale partners. According to Teksavvy CEO Rocky Gaudrault, Bell has implemented 'load balancing' to 'manage bandwidth demand' during peak congestion times — but apparently didn't feel the need to inform partner ISPs or customers. The result is a bevy of annoyed customers and carriers across the great white north."
This isn't specifically throttling p2p traffic. It's using a proxy load balancing system to spread the load during peak hours which may lead to congestion. ISP's all over the world do it, in Australia the 2nd and 3rd biggest ISP's - Optus and TPG both implement transparent proxies for load balancing.
Obviously doing it before the traffic reaches wholesalers is a tad unethical, and I'm not condoning it, but the issue shouldn't be confused with specifically targeting p2p traffic.
Unlike a highway which has a left hand lane for overtaking, the Internet is like a series of tubes through which data packets are propelled at relatively the same speed. When one type of packet starts taking up an inordinate amount of bandwidth, sometimes the tube owners decide to cut back on the number of tubes allotted to those packets and give more tube capacity to other types of packets. Flooding the tube system with any one type of packet degrades the user experience of all users. So it makes sense to protect the user experience of other types of packets by purposefully throttling the antagonist packet types.
What is the result of the throttling? Is it lost connections, or is it just a slowdown of service? If it is just slowdown, I don't think these bandwidth hoggers have a claim. OTOH, if they are losing connection midstream, they too have a right to the road, even if they need to obey a slower speedlimit.
P2P traffic has to get smarter, basically - encryption, port and protocol randomization, methinks. The time has come.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
They just started to release their programs as torrents that are DRM FREE!!!!!
We hope you enjoyed tonight's show! As announced, CBC is happy to present Canada's Next Great Prime Minister to you as a DRM-free bittorrent file which you can download, share & enjoy. First, pick which file you want to download:
Xvid AVI at 720x486
or
264 MPEG-4 at 320x240
Maybe marketplace should do a story about Bell and Rogers regarding this throttling...
Nothing of interest?! What about cricket? Sometimes. And that guy who got killed by a stingray? And .. apologies .. from some guy .. for doing something to native aborigines. The bad guy in The Matrix comes from there?
I wonder if this is why, it was specifically during the 4a-7a time, and all I was running was a couple webbrowsers and two IM clients...
Someone make a LoLCapitalist of "I has an Internez" right now
However in this case, the road doesn't terminate at B, it goes on to C (and so forth). The wholesaler also controls the flow of traffic from B to C (even if the distance is arbitrary or non-existant). Thus the wholesaler in this case is forcing the retailers two roadways to merge in one single lane during peak times.
This isn't about the end users clogging up the highways. This is about the unscrupulous merge sign put up during 'peak' times. The idea is the retailer leased two roadways, and they damn well want to use them. If there are too many cars creating a traffic jam, its up to the retailer to decide who gets to use the carpool lane etc.
(because the article is extremely light on details):
Is how they can be effectively throttling wholesalers. Do they have solid data on numbers of end users?
I don't see how they can be at fault here, it sounds as if they are perhaps making a stand against wholesalers overselling their allotted bandwidth.
Here in Australia, our throttling is done by the ISP's. I suppose, an effect of throttling wholesalers may be that there is a trickle down effect and the ISPs end up doing something to manage their bandwidth.
I record my sleeptalking
Encrypt all traffic. Kill deep packet inspection. What business do they have with the contents of your communications?
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
So, a "terabit" is equal to 8 "Terrabits"?
And let them know you notice, and request that they complain to Bell. I wonder if it is even legal, since they have already paid for the bandwidth.
My rights don't need management.
It's not necessarily that easy.
E.g., there was at some point an article about what Comcast does. They're not targetting the P2P ports or anything. They just look at which client opens a burst of connections at the same time and has a lot of connections going at the same time.
You'd get throttled just the same if you connected a large extended family or lan party via the same proxy/router to the 'net, and everyone tried to download 5 porn movies at the same time, and repeatedly reload Slashdot while they download. You know, all via the browser, plain old HTTP, on port 80.
Basically it's not as much targeting P2P, as just targeting everyone who doesn't behave like one user with a browser.
Because they're not as much hating P2P, as trying to keep the majority of moms and pops sending emails to their kids happy. Those guys don't open 20 connections at the same time, so they don't notice it.
The problem is, basically: The ISPs oversold the bandwidth _massively_, and I'm certainly not trying to defend that, but it would sorta work if everyone didn't use all that. Or if they all had the same number of connections, so they're all inconvenienced equally. P2P programs don't act like that. They keep opening bursts of connections until they saturate the pipe, everyone else be damned.
Think of the following example, basically. Let's say I'm lucky enough to have an 100 mbit/s Ethernet connection to my best buddy's ISP, and decide to share it with the whole neighbourhood. Essentially, I'd be a mini-ISP there. Now I don't want one guy saturating it all, so let's say I connect everyone to my hub via only 10 mbit/s Ethernet. I'd have enough bandwidth for 10 of them. But I figure most of them are old people and don't surf much, so I let 40 people connect there.
It's already oversold, but let's hope it works out.
Now if everyone used a browser and, say, 1 connection at a time, worst that can happen is that all 40 download a movie at the same time, and they all see 100/40 = 2.5 mbit/s bandwidth. That's only at peak times, so probably most will understand it, and some probably won't even do the maths there in the first place.
But then come some people with P2P clients. Those don't play that nice. If they don't get the whole 10mbit/s, everyone else be damned, they'll open more connections until they do. So now as little as a quarter of my users can saturate my whole backbone connection. The other 75% will suck air through a straw. Their 1 connection vs the two dozen connections of the P2P guys means they'll be happy if they see 100 kbit/s on their downloads. They can probably go brew a cup of coffee even while a simple site like Slashdot loads.
Now they _will_ complain.
That's the ISP's problem in a nutshell: P2P makes the traditional oversell no longer work. A minority of users running P2P stuff full time, can stuff everyone else's pipe, and massively amplify the effects of oversell for everyone else.
Not because it's P2P, but because it opens that burst of connections.
What can you do there?
1. Stop overselling. That costs money, so I don't think the ISPs will do that any time soon. Especially since they dug themselves into a nasty hole where they advertised more and more bandwidth and lower and lower prices, and they can't afford to actually deliver that to everyone. The only way to do that is to raise prices.
2. Start charging per MB, and let free market economics solve who gets how much bandwidth. The moms and pops just reading their emails would probably pay cents, while if someone wants to download the whole internet, well, if they can afford it, why not? Downside, it would be extremely unpopular, and again it's a hole that their own marketing dug them in.
3. Target anyone who opens ridiculous numbers of connections, to stop them from squeezing everyone else out. Downside, it's easy to overdo it, and now P2P users will suck air through a straw and see analog modem speeds.
4. Implement some kind of smart scheduling, so
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
you seem to want to talk about my country... do tell me more.
I'm a Teksavvy client and very happy with them. You call up and still talk to a person who's actually a part of the company you're calling (in Chatham, Ontario). And quickly. I like the fact that when you talk to them they treat you like you're an intelligent person instead of just an account to be dealt with.
I was actually considering dropping my Bell telephone number to move completely to voip at Teksavvy after I found Bell adding things to my phone bill that I never asked for. Now to go to voip would require me to get dry DSL service from Teksavvy and probably end up paying more per month than I could for a basic phone bill but I'm seriously considering it just to avoid having to talk to Bell any more.
I know that the back end is still run by Bell and that the money I pay for dry DSL would probably mostly get passed on to that company anyway but at least I could trust that nobody could decide to add a long distance plan to my account without consulting me first.
My big concern with moving to voip-only is that Bell will abuse their position to degrade VoIP calls.
more of the same on Twitter.
I moved when my VPN sessions started getting hacked up because of that stupid Roger's "if we can't see the traffic, we'll throttle it just in case it might be p2p" move. I'm now at Teksavvy, which means I'm impacted by this too. No winning for me!
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Now who's gonna bell the cat?
It's just saying "eh" a bunch in the sentences.
Which is how they learned to spell Canada, by the way. C, eh! N, eh! D, eh!
/Dives behind desk before the RCMP polites me to death, because I've been waiting for a proper Canadian thread to use that joke and couldn't hold back anymore. With credit - I think - to Bob and Doug.
The problem isn't a company that wants to harass P2P users here (though that could potentially be a problem with many ISP's in the future, particularly Comcast and other ISP's who could be bought off with Hollywood cash), the problem are companies like Bell, AT&T, etc. who have oversold bandwidth while not building up their infrastructure to match. In other words, they've sat on their asses and not build up their networks and backbones the way they should have been doing, all while continuing to promise "unlimited" bandwidth--and now they're mouths are writing checks their asses can't cash.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
From personal experience bell treats any packet that's encrypted as P2P traffic and throttle's it too. There's really not much you can do. :S
David
More encryption is counter-productive.
No sig today...
So does Home and Away! *shudder*
You have no clue about what you are talking about. No doubt they do stuff like that in Australia but if you would have bothered to read the newsgroup threads on this at dslreports you would have found out that:
1. Bell is throttling P2P traffic between 4:30PM and 2AM. This affects BitTorrent and all other forms of P2P
2. All other traffic is full speed
3. All P2P is capped at about 30kbps between said hours
In fact this is exactly what they do to their own Sympatico users but now applied to all 3rd party resellers.
I used to run an ISP, and all of our contracts with upstream carriers (we were multi-homed) included guaranteed bandwidth. Either this ISP negotiated a very risky contract to save a few bucks, or they are getting screwed by their upstream, and owed some free service!
It wasn't clear to me from the parent whether Bell is throttling ONLY the 3rd parties, or whether they were actively throttling their own customers-areas as well? It would be even more infuriating if this bandwidth "calming" only affected the smaller ISPs who are leasing Bell lines. Bell throttles individual customers, but what about blanket areas, which is what the article would imply.
All my other utilities have tired/metered service - electricity, water, even the phone (10 cents per call). Why should the internet utility be the sole exception? I suggest the following solution:
- $15 a month for economy service (~50 gigs limit)
- $30 a month for standard service (~200 gigs limit)
- $45 a month for premium service (~500 gigs limit)
- $100 a month for unlimited
That's a similar structure to how electricity, water, and phone utilities are priced for consumers (albeit with differing dollar amounts). And yes I think that's entirely fair. The more you download, the more you should pay, because you are hogging more bandwidth than I am.
And the internet utility can take the extra dollars and use them to buy new servers and lay additional cable to support their high-demand customers, rather than block access to P2P or Itunes.com.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Or better yet how about time of day service like electricity. If I download in off peak hours my rates per gig would be lower than when downloading during peak hours. If you don't download at all you just pay the base amount for keeping service.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
It happened to Primus and it took bell 6 months to fix the problem.
Now were finally getting all of our slow speed issues resolved.
Actually, that's exactly what Teksavvy (the ISP mentioned in the summary) already does (though they don't have as many levels as you suggest, but they add in the twist of additional per gigabyte charges once you exceed your monthly limit).
http://teksavvy.com/en/resdsl.asp?ID=7&mID=1
Though I don't know if the graduated pricing is shared with the wholesaler.
Hosers.
Nothing of interest ever happens in Austria. Ha! I'll bet you never saw the Sydney Opera House or took the bridge to New Zealand!
Besides. Paul Hogan is from Austria. Paul Hogan RULZ!
And their beer is the best. I *love* Heineken.
U R A Tard.
Mod me offtopic if you want, I think its funny that every article that comes across has the "censorship" tag. This, again, really isn't censorship. They're not censoring anything from you. They are not saying you can't look at something. They are just prioritizing their traffic. Again, not saying they are right in doing so, but its not censorship.
I switched from Bell to Teksavvy dry DSL + VoIP with BabyTel. Excellent quality since I enabled QoS on my own router (linksys with Tomato), and the service is A+.
I got to keep my phone number, but it cost me some $$: to be sure that the number is not reassigned before it is transfered, I followed these steps:
1- sign up with Babytel
2- send a "number portability" form, signed, by fax to Babytel
3- wait 30 days for the move to be done
4- profit! Bell cuts off my phone line automatically when the number is gone.
Total cost: 1 month's fees due to the overlap (25$ Bell line + 12$ for the Babytel line).
Total hassle: fill and fax 1 form, email twice to Babytel to know the procedure and confirm.
Total time spent with Bell: no phone, no mail, just the final bill for the amount of 0$.
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
The more you download, the more you should pay, because you are hogging more bandwidth than I am.
LOL "hogging". If you aren't using the bandwidth, it shouldn't matter if I use it, no?
Tell you what: instead of insulting everyone else, tell the ISP to switch to those terms. The ISP will laugh in your face, since they're making plenty of money as it is, and stand to make far more extorting millionaires like google and amazon and itunes than they'd be able to get out of the end users using your silly plan.
All they have to do is continue to refuse to spend money to upgrade their service, and they can continue to extort more money for less work and/or capital outlay. Capitalism at its finest!
I think P2P, including bittorent should add UDP support.
Why?
1) It will be a lot harder for ISPs like comcast to track who sent what packet as UDPs only have destination addresses. Further over a shared channel like cable, it would be rather hard to figure out which of their customers originated a UDP packet.
2) For incoming traffic they will only know these packets need to go to this IP address, they cannot track who sent them, this will virtually break their traffic shaping.
Further each UDP packet can be encrypted to hide its true origins. I think this could work.
Now with all this we will need to make sure how to assure packets were delivered properly, but that is just a solvable technicality.
Bell is not an upstream carrier in this case. This is a tariffed (government mandated) last mile service. The contracts and pricing are identical for all wholesale customers (with some minor variance for volume). Wholesalers purchase last mile service from Bell, which is then aggregated and backhauled to an interconnect with Bell (called an AHSSPI - Aggregated High Speed Service Provider Interface) and dumped on the respective wholesaler's network. The wholesaler is not necessarily purchasing Internet transit (which is a completely separate service) from Bell (your "upstream carrier"). This is being done at the CO-level, long before it hits the wholesaler's network and is not being done on their transit services.
So you think a retail ISP has end-to-end Internet CIRs [Committed Information Rates = guaranteed bandwidth] from their Tier 1? Why don't you just ask for 6 9's uptime in the SLA [Service Level Agreement] while you're at it.
Technical issues aside, anyone who has had the displeasure of dealing with Bell will know what I'm talking about. They have horrible customer service and constantly pass new rules to squeeze more out of their customers. To make matters worse they are acting like a monopoly, passing excessive fees off to their resellers then offering "discounts" to customers that go to them directly. Anything and everything to ensure that they regain their monopoly.
They should be charging resellers per MB using their real costs (as opposed to making profit on the underlying infrastructure) and they should keep their hands completely off it at that point. If the reseller wishes to "shape" traffic or impose caps that is *their* business. Bell the infrastructure should separate itself completely from Bell the internet provider.
They who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We used to have tiered service. Consumers rejected it soundly as soon as services started selling unlimited service.
And it's not "fair" as you put it. We already pay for tiered service. Downloaders usually want faster speed, so they pay more money. We pay different amounts of money for different connection speeds. Adding bandwidth tiers on top of that will turn ISP billing into a horrible mess that is almost impossible for consumers to understand. When that happens, expect the ISPs to start finding ways to screw the consumer by tacking on extra fees for this and that until we end up with something as horrible as cell phone billing is now....
Besides, your plans have lots of problems:
Metered billing for ISPs is a terrible idea. Period. It causes more problems than it solves. ISPs are simply going to have to stop lying to their customers and actually be honest about how much bandwidth they are really providing for the money. As I said yesterday on this same topic, the only acceptable tier system is one that gives people lower priority for bulk downloads so that those transfer don't interfere with casual web surfers' usage, but does so on a continuously-updated basis and does not cut the bulk downloads any more than is absolutely necessary. Description here.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Almost all internet service in Canada is already tiered and metered; Bell Canada provides (in Quebec) 30GB/mth with the connection, charges $1.50 per GB over that, and STILL throttles.
TekSavvy charges $30/mth for 5mbit down 800kbit up DSL, with 200GB cap, $0.25 per GB over (averaged over two months), or $10 for 100GB. There is also an unmetered cogent-only service for $40/mth.
Pretty much everybody has caps/overage charges these days. Clearly the fact that ISPs are still throttling despite the incredibly low caps indicates that the throttling is about profit, not congestion.
I'm a Teksavvy customer, and my biggest frustration thus far has nothing to do with their company at all, but rather that any ADSL provider in the area (North York/Toronto, Ontario) needs to use Bell's lines. This means that Bell gets to tack on an extra charge to my bill, but there doesn't seem to be any requirement from them to provide a decent level of service.
In my case, after the initial (dry-loop) connection is made, *I* have to pay for any future Bell calls. Further to that, I have a straight run to my Bell CO, but apparently that run is quite a bit longer than is feasible for high-speed DSL. The end result is that my 5000k-down/800k-up plan actually comes out at 1500k-down/512k-up. Bell won't fix it, Teksavvy can't do anything with the Bell lines, and the customers get screwed because Bell's still making plenty of money off the reseller without needing to upgrade their infrastructure.
Did Sympatico throttle on a user-basis or based on geography? Either way, there must be some sort of legal recourse that the wholesalers could take?
I attempted to make a complaint in regards to Bell's heavy handed ways a few months ago through the CRTC only to be sent to this link: http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/info_sht/t1003.htm . Which essentially says "You're shit out of luck because the "market is competitive", and we all know that is just an absolute crock. All this infrastructure was essentially built with Canadian Taxpayer money when Bell was a monopoly, so how Bell can't be responsible to any public agency is just disgusting.
I get my phone and internet directly from Bell, and I am a Bell bondholder. Bell's p2p is excellent, there is no need to be conned by outfits like techsawy that you're getting anything better.
Well, in a series of tubes you get the Bernoulli effect and when a tube is throttled, the speed of the data increases and the pressure on the data flow decreases. The decrease in pressure can lead to the data boiling, causing cavitation. The cavitation and collapse of the data steam bubbles can cause severe damage to the tube walls...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Why would they want to do that when they can charge you $100 for unlimited then cut you off at 50GB? Least that seems to be the modus operundi (sp?)
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
But why should internet connectivity have to be like other services?
When a core ISP buys fibre, whether or not the bandwidth is used on the fibre it still costs them the same (yes they can choose to make huge profits, but bear with me).
Electricity and water come from somewhere, if they aren't used it doesn't cost the suppliers the same.
Voice calls are typically priced by time and not by data transferred.
So why not:
1) When there is contention "premium priority" traffic always takes precedence over "normal priority" traffic.
2) Users get some "dialer" where they can switch premium priority on and off (and it allows users to turn off premium priority automatically).
3) packages are $Y a month for X hours a month of traffic at "premium priority"
4) You can purchase extra premium hours for $Z
5) If you run out, your traffic is still carried but at a lower priority.
The benefit is the ISP can still oversubscribe users - they will have a good idea of how much they can oversubscribe, even if users leave their PCs connected all the time downloading and uploading.
So users keep their P2P running, and if they really want their P2P or game to be fast they can "dial in", it doesn't matter whether the user's P2P is encrypted or not, the ISP can tell how much priority to give that user.
It might sound like a step backwards to "dial up", but the connection can still be always on, just crap most of the time when you don't care so much.
In contrast the typical charge per GB schemes don't allow an ISP to oversubscribe efficiently. say everyone signs up for premium and unlimited, if 10% _really_ want a fast download, while the other 90% users online keeping P2P running continuously etc are actually asleep and/or don't care, how does the ISP figure out who to give crap service to?
With my proposal if there are too many requests for premium service, a responsible ISP can actually say "Sorry too many premium users already" and reject the request, while that might piss off the user, the user doesn't end up paying for premium and not getting premium.
The ISP can do "peak" and "off peak" rates and all the joys of time of day/week/month based pricing. Most ISP users are humans and live in the real world, they eat, they sleep, they go to work (and misuse their company connection), so I daresay even with ubiquitous computing, most won't be needing "premium priority" all the time.
Phone service in the US is mostly flat-rate. Mine is nation-wide flat-rate. Water is almost flat-rate, while electricity is as you say.
I would have no problem paying for premium service, BUT I WOULD EXPECT THE LINE TO STAY UP, NEAR-ZERO PACKET LOSS, AND NO THROTTLING. When the ISPs can deliver premium service, I can consider buying it. Until that blessed day arrives, they can dispense with the false advertising and be clear about the limitations of their service. Then I can shop for the least restrictive service and let the free market do its magic.
>>>"We used to have tiered service. Consumers rejected it soundly"
False. Consumers did not reject "per gigabyte" tiers because no such animal has ever existed within the U.S. Some of the ISPs had time limits, but never gigabyte limits (you could download as much as you wanted).
Also, tiers based upon speed have proved themselves to be inoperative, because the professional liars.... er, salespeople exaggerate. They sell 10 megabit and then backwards-kludge it to 1 megabit through limits.
Therefore it would be smarter to based the tiers on a measureable, unalterable quantity - 50 gigabyte, 200 gigabyte, 500 gigabyte, or unlimited gigabyte. That way the control is in the hands of the customer. Want more? Pay more. Need to save money? Lower your gigabyte usage.
Simple.
Just like how consumers control the numbers of Watts of electricity used (or not used). Same principle.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I complained to the CRTC this morning about shaping the traffic they wholesale resell. I agree that Bell should be able to throttle their own customers as much as they like. But the whole point of forcing them to resell their network access was to create competition -- to give us our choice about what ISP offers which features that we like. But now they are throttling their competition. We don't have a choice. Everyone touched by this should be complaining to the CRTC about this.
>>>"Commercial movie download services are going to have a much harder time getting business if users start finding that they have to pay higher fees because they downloaded too many movies in a month."
Yes.
Oh well. (shrug) If downloading movies requires a $100 a month "unlimited gigabytes" connection, thus making DVDs a cheaper option for customers, so be it. That's the free market in action, where one type of product (downloading) competes with another type of product (dvd) for consumer dollars.
That reason is why I buy more DVDs than downloads.
It's cheaper to get the DVD, than to pay for more gigabytes.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I'm a look communications ADSL subscriber, and the last couple of days, whenever I use torrent (encrypted or not) my download/upload speed doesnt go beyond during the evening 30Kbytes/s, while I'm on 5Mbit/800Kbit DSL line. I though look was bought by rogers, but apparently it leases its lines from Bell.
>>>"But why should internet connectivity have to be like other services?"
That was the same thing people were asking in the 1990s. They said "internet is different and doesn't have to follow the same rules as old-style brick-and-mortar business". Then the bubble popped in 2000 and they discovered that internet truly does need to follow the old rules (profit or go bankrupt).
Same applies to internet billing.
You can't sell everybody the same product, because not everybody is downloading the same amount of data. Some just read email (megabytes) while others download music (gigabytes) while others download movies (terabytes). Since the data amount changes according to each person's wants, it makes sense to change the amount of money charged based upon those bytes.
$15 for low "bytes per month" users
$30 for medium
$45 for high
$100 for unlimited
Also: I don't see why it's necessary for ISPs to oversubscribe their lines. As we can see, that's not working very well, what with P2P or Itunes connections getting disconnected or blocked. Imposing extra fees is a good way to limit traffic (look at "time of use" fees being applied to California highways) by encouraging customers to self-limit themselves to save money.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
If you bother to read it, my proposal attempts to deal with what you say.
It is easier do "Time of use" fees with my proposal than with "bytes transferred" schemes.
For the average user, there's no difference between a gigabyte limit and a time limit. Either way, it's something the average user won't ever hit, but they still react negatively because they don't want the risk of hitting it ad having to pay more. For downloaders, there's no difference between the two, either; either way, there's a cap in the amount of data that can be downloaded. Users screamed that they didn't want a limited Internet experience.
Also, you're wrong that download-capped plans never existed. Cell carriers still do data quantity tiering for Internet access. Why is the iPhone providing the highest traffic volume of any comparable device? Why is it so popular while cellular-based services for computers completely failed to catch on in spite of lots of promotion by the cell carriers? Because consumers want unlimited service, and all the iPhone plans (at least in the U.S.) provide that at a consumer-friendly price, while most of the other unlimited services are $100 a month, with tiered quantities available at a lower price. Users spoke and said in one voice, "We don't want a limited Internet."
Why? What possible reason could there be for continuing to allow these companies to oversell their bandwidth? These sorts of systems always end up going the same way: within a couple of years, the people who were paying less are now paying what they were paying before, and the people who download a lot are paying more. Everybody is getting the same service as before, the telco is making more money, and they aren't using that money to buy additional bandwidth, so service continues to suck.
There's no shortage of backbone traffic. The ISPs just have the desire to screw customers and make every last cent they can, and as a result, they aren't buying the upstream bandwidth that we are more than paying for already.
In Europe, you can get service for the equivalent of $45 a month with no download caps and an average speed of 10 or 12 Mbps. In the U.S., we pay about the same amount for barely a tenth that average bandwidth (1.7Mbps average). We're already paying way too much for what we get. The ISPs are screwing us, and you folks seem to want to roll over and keep letting them. Why? We should demand better service and lower prices for that service. There's no excuse for what Comcast and the telcos are doing to us, and there's absolutely no excuse for us to allow them to restrict our usage of our Internet connections even further. We're already behind and you want us to be further behind? Uh... no. In fact, hell no.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Heineken is a dutch beer.
Bell has the same policy here in Ontario, but I pay a $25/mo fee for unlimited service. As a bittorrent junkie I routinely upload 200+ GB/mo and I haven't been throttled yet.
If you make a stink about their bullshit monthly bandwidth caps(my line is capable of transferring 30GB in 12hours for example) when you setup your account, you can arrange a plan that isn't completely insane. Of course if you just accept what they offer to every other pleb you can get stuck with caps. And this doesn't cover the fact that their call-centre assholes will likely tell you they're doing one thing with your bill and then actually do another, and that you'll probably have to use the Sympatico Direct forum at dslreports to get your bill sorted the way they promised it would be originally.
Anyway, point being "pretty much everyone" doesn't include those of us who make a point not to pay for a crappy service with absurd limitations.
If you are no longer able to determine the bandwidth one has purchased without using it, the time has come to move to 24/7 saturation usage as per your terms of service. If you contracted for Gigabit bandwidth you will need to use Gigabit bandwidth 24/7 to guarantee terms of service and not unknowingly fall victim to the theft of service known as 'traffic shaping'. TCP/IP needs an extension that pads up any traffic to the ToS prior to moving it off your systems (BGP?). This unfortunate feature would prove ToS and mask real usage in transit. Needless to say it should be equally easy to trim from the real traffic on reaching the other endpoint, which like cookies, should be a capability reserved to your destination. It is your bandwidth after all - you are paying for it. It is time to use it - all of it, all of the time.
or the common carriers could return to carrying any and all traffic under common, untouched, conditions and leave the bandwidth usage decisions to those that have contracted for it. We understand the bait and switch game the carriers play, and in general have no problem so long as they behave as common carriers, but when you shape traffic - it ain't common no more.
He may be a bit harsh, but to be fair, he can tell the difference between Austria and Australia
They who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
They who do learn from history are doomed to watch it be repeated.
History teaches us that we do not learn from history.
In this case, client side applications are being suppressed through network traffic policies.
Complain here: http://www.crtc.gc.ca/RapidsCCM/Register.asp?lang=E
Beauty, eh?
Properly tiered billing is much better for the consumer (and the provider).
-You can pay for a fast speed, but just 5 gigs per month (if all you do is email and surf the web a little, but want it fast).
-You can pay for a slow speed and say 1 gig per month if you are a grandmother type (just emailing the kids/grandkids, etc)
-You can pay for a slow speed and 100 gigs per month if you're a bulk.... "sharer" and just care about it getting down, now when it gets down
-You can pay for fast and 235892389432 gigs per month if you're crazy
It doesn't confuse people with cars, nor with utilities. You charge them for a speed, and for usage. As long as it's done properly (average bill stays the same) it's better for all involved.
It's what's done here in Australia, and the only problems are:
-Telstra fucking around on local exchanges (refusing to resell adsl2+, putting out RIMs, refusing/charging too much for LSS and dry pairs)
-Telstra being the only major provider of international traffic
The first is being legislated around and "fixed" by companies putting out their own last mile solutions
The second makes intl bandwidth expensive for resellers, making bandwidth expensive, but that is being fixed by companies putting in their own links.
Now actually, in a perfect world (and to refute what I've just said, all lines would be uncapped (speed wise) and you'd pay for usage. Contention, caused by usage, is the ONLY thing that costs ISPs money. It doesn't cost them more to provide you with uncapped (up to 8M) ADSL1 than with a capped 256kbps ADSL1 line. The jump from ADSL 1 to 2 does require a new DSLAM, but most of the DSLAMs sold in the last few years are 2+ capable already.
is that I'm a Sympatico enduser/subscriber and my internet service has been noticeably slower. I thought it was only a problem with my particular LAN until my professor stated in class his Sympatico service was slow lately.
We're talking noticably slow(er) pretty much every minute of the day lately.
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You'll notice that when you chose internet it directs you to the link that i posted above, explaining the CRTC does not have jurisdiction over internet services because they are now a "competitive market".
Link: http://www.crtc.gc.ca/RapidsCCM/warning.asp?page=internetEng.htm&lang=E
The biggest problem is that you only have three choices with total data volume limits, all of them bad:
Introducing total data volume caps into an existing market is suicide for an ISP. That's why Comcast refuses to publish what those magic numbers are. It's not because the numbers are embarrassingly low. It's because the mere publication of a number causes them to be seen as inferior to other services that don't have a maximum total byte count associated with them, and customers will react accordingly when choosing an ISP.
The other problem with charging by usage is that a customer can get royally screwed by other people. With a 5Mbps internet connection, you can eat a 30 gigabyte transfer limit in 13 hours. All it takes is some jerk doing a DDOS ping of your router box and they can basically deprive you of your ability to use the network for an entire month all while you're gone to work over the course of a couple of days. As far as I'm concerned, I shouldn't be held responsible for traffic unless I generated it personally, and when it comes to computers, that's a really hard thing to prove. With business connections, at least they can afford the occasional Slashdotting. With home connections... not so much.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
That's just there to stop people from complaining that Bell has blocked their porn site, or throttled their _own_ customers. It's not to say that the CRTC does not regulate the industry at all. They already do. The only reason why 3rd party DSL providers exist is because the CRTC forced BELL to lease their network access out. If Bell stopped allowing those 3rd party DSL providers any network access at all, then the CRTC would be all over them. What they are doing now is half-blocking them. It is completely their jurisdiction to enforce their own regulations forcing Bell to give last-mile access. Now, independent of that, we can argue as to whether Bell is allowed to do what they are doing. And the CRTC gets to make that decision. But consumer feedback is one way they will judge the impact. Besides, after warning you about internet regulations, they still let you file a complaint. So COMPLAIN!! EVERYONE COMPLAIN!
The great white north? Its not that cold nor is there much snow here. Its spring time(thats right) and all that white stuff is gone. Among other things, I wish Teksavvy was available where I live...(South eastern BC)
Indeed my fellow Canadian....
Your rant did far more to bring Oz into the thread than the previous post possibly could have.
>>>"LOL hogging. If you aren't using the bandwidth, it shouldn't matter if I use it, no?"
It matters if I'm trying to reach my Spamcop Email account, but cannot, because you have the lines tied up. You need to pay more money (say $100 for unlimited gigabytes), so the ISP can use those extra funds to buy more cable, and provide the additional bandwidth to support your "greed" in downloading.
i.e. You use more, you should pay more, to support the extra infrastructure required for your habits.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
>>>"Why? What possible reason could there be for continuing to allow these companies to oversell their bandwidth?"
There isn't any reason. Which is why I propose charging more to people who demand more bandwidth, rather than try to pretend everyone uses the internet equally. Why should someone who downloads 1000 gigabytes pay the same $15 a month I pay when I'm only downloading 10 gigabytes? That makes no sense.
(It would be as if my neighbor was burning his lights/heaters 24 hours a day, while I lived with just one lightbulb, and yet we both pay the same $15 electricity bill even though the neighbor used 100 times more electricity. Illogical.)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Bell killed off the $25/mth unlimited plan, and will likely remove it from customers like you.
They're also getting rid of the $30/mth overage maximum as of June, although that's only on new customers. For now.
I doubt you'll be in as good a mood when you're throttled and paying $1.50 per gig over your 30/60 gig cap.
So other people send you packets you don't want, and you pay for it?
A theoretical flaw in your plan. I can just stream UDP at you for free on my unmetered account and you have to pay extra to your ISP.
Excellent information, thank you!
I recognise the address 151 Front Street as that of the Toronto Internet Exchange, and, indeed, http://www.torix.net/ lists Teksavvy as a peer.
But what do you mean by TSI's own transit providers? What are these transit providers owned by Teksavvy? And why would Teksavvy bother with transit providers if they're already set up in the Toronto Internet Exchange exchange?
For over a month I have been wondering what has happened to my Contivity VPN Tunnel to work, it repeatedly fails to setup, drops connections within minutes of setting up right when I need it most (early evening after work). Yet early each morning when I get up, it is working perfectly. It was working perfectly for months previously at all hours.
I left Bell Sympatico DSL long ago due to poor service and I am with a 3rd party DSL provider. It never occurred to me that Bell would be throttling my traffic at a 3rd party ISP.
Bell might get some sympathy by claiming they are only hampering those nasty file sharing bandwidth hogs, but it appears to me they are messing up just about everything. My connection to work is now completely unreliable.
I believe the only recourse I now have to offer my complaint to Bell is to Cancel/downgrade any remaining Bell service I have(Phone, Sat TV, Cellular), and tell the call center drone to record my reason why they are losing the revenue.
Is there anyway I can prove my VPN work connection is being interfered with by Bell??
bottom line i got the top service offered by bell 250k
with unlimited download
i have used this service for over 10 years
paying my $40+ fee
they phoned me last year and tryied to trick me into buying faster capped service i said no
so i guess because they can't provide said services because they now have to many customers on there service
which i would say is Antiquated
and need of upgrade
because they cannot support the amount of users they are providing
there way of dealing with it is providing high speed dialup
to there high speed customers
really sad way of doing business
BEll canada is doing the ssame to me and my cohorts by capping at 60 gigs and charging a dollar a gig after that till the some of 30 dollars is reached .