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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."
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Maybe marketplace should do a story about Bell and Rogers regarding this throttling...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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BULL-SHIT.
In late 2007 Bell/Sympatico started throttling p2p to 30KB/s between 5pm and 1am (when you're paying for a line capable of >400KB/s).
IMMEDIATELY all the technically savy customers (like me) **dumped** them and switched to TekSavvy and other competitors. It was only a matter of time before all of us managed to tell all of our friends and family, and bit by bit Bell's customer base was going to be EATEN ALIVE.
I DOUBT LIKE HELL there is actual congestion on Bell's common-infrastructure WAN links inside city limits, before they reach the point where it splits into the Bell-internal network and all the reseller's internal systems.
I GUARANTEE that Bell is just being cheap-asses with bandwidth to the net, and suddenly they discovered that their cheap-assness was NOT flying in the competitive market. So they've invented this reason to throttle everyone (since they control the common infrastructure - the "to the door" bits - that the CRTC *forces* them to re-sell at set rates to competitors).
Here:
Customer----(fat ass pipe)----PeeringPointForResellers------Sympatico-----(cheapass tiny pipe)-----Net
Customer----(fat ass pipe)----PeeringPointForResellers------Competitor-----(fat ass pipe)----------Net
BellSympaticoThink: "oh jeeze, we're getting raped by our competitors, maybe if we claim we're having congestion problems with the "fat ass pipe" that we're being forced to share with our competitors, then we'll have a level playing field? Yeah, fuck-em."
Now:
Customer----(fat ass pipe with packet shaping to make it suck as much as Sympatico)----PeeringPointForResellers------Competitor-----(fat ass pipe)----------Net
"there, now we won't loose any more customers".
FUCK SYMPATICO. I was being lazy about switching away from them, but now I'll do it just to save the $10 a month that the cheaper competition would save me.
PPS: I've been with BellSympatico 8 years, on their most expensive plan, and now I hate their guts and can't stand to pay them money. This is enough to make me want to drop my land line and go with VOIP, even if the latter is shitty quality and service.