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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."
I mentioned this in another thread but Rogers has figured out how to deal with the big downloaders; drop the cap level that you are allowed to download and start charging for anything over the cap. I wonder how long it will take before people move. Mind you, I think everyone else is doing the same thing (except Teksavvy)
If it is advertised that I will get x number of tubes, and the contract I have signed with my ISP states that I will get x number of tubes, then goddamnit, I need to get x number of tubes. If your infrastructure is incapable of suppling all the people with the contracted number of tubes then you need to increase the capacity of your infrastructure. If your business plan was 'counting on users to not use the contractual number of tubes' then your business plan sucks and you should be penalized handily.
If your infrastructure is big enough you need to stop limiting the number of tubes I use except at the contracted rate.
Either way it is not something that should be arbitrary. If you don't want me to download using P2P, fucking say so up front and I will not sign a contract with you and will get my tubes from somewhere else and you can try to stay afloat with customers who are happy for you to filter their traffic and limit their tubes. Yeah, I'm sure that will work out well for you.
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It's a slowdown, however it's not uniformly applied: Web traffic is unaffected. VoIP, on the other hand, is. If you have one of those nifty VoIP QoS, they become quite useless. When previously subjected to throttling, I was unable to place or receive calls despite geting web seed tests of 4Mbit down, 500kbit up.
The next thing you have to consider is where the limiting is happening: in between the the customer and the 3rd party ISP. Teksavvy, for instance, doesn't believe in throttling and buys the required capacity. Bell is suddenly not allowing them to provide this service level to their customers.
I strongly advise you not to touch a working DSL connection until Bell's labor dispute has been resolved. If you disconnect now, you probably will not get a working, new connection until sometime in December.
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.
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.
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.
No. It's not load balancing. It's fixed-speed throttling.
All blacklisted (or non-whitelisted, we're not sure yet) traffic is throttled to 60KB/s from 4PM to 5PM, and from 30KB per second from 5PM until 2AM.
There are two problems with your load-balancing allegation:
1) Load balancing would imply that provisioning of available bandwidth would be balanced, rather than limited to very specific thresholds
2) Users reported that speeds were perfectly fine before throttling; the network was able to handle all load without throttling or balancing. In order for load balancing to make sense as an explanation, there would have to have been congestion.
Further problems are that when blacklisted traffic is detected (P2P, for example), the users' entire connection is throttled (killing off VoIP service even with QoS). If the user is using a whitelisted service (HTTP), no throttling is performed. This IS protocol-specific.
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.
That's one big load of crap. Here's why:
A) You misunderstand UDP if you think packets using it don't have a source address. They do. The protocol just natively avoids the statefulness of TCP's 3 way handshake.
B) You misunderstand cable technology. Cable uses DOCSIS, which still has local addresses, which can still ultimately track you down. Packet shaping will just have to happen closer to the users, where your modem's "MAC address" is still significant.
C) Have you ever heard of egress filtering, something the providers are already doing at the edge to prevent you from spoofing out massive amounts of randomly sourced packets that are not even coming off an address space belonging to the provider?
D) What the heck do you think will happen at the receiving end when one user begins receiving hundreds of simultaneous packets from seemingly random sources, all destined to his own IP address? Do you think packet shaping only works in one direction?
Back to the drawing table my friend.
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.
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.
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