Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Bell Canada Throttles Wholesalers Without Notice

Posted by kdawson on from the because-it's-my-last-kilometer-that's-why dept.

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."

2 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. You are soooo wrong. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Just before everyone gets excited.... by Guspaz · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.