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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!!!!!
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Maybe marketplace should do a story about Bell and Rogers regarding this throttling...
I thought you were just trying to bring Australia into it.
./ thread nowadays is jammed full of "Me Too!" Aussies.
Every single fucking
Guys like Zonk and Scuttlemonkey don't help matters, with their attempts to spam this site with any-and-every Australian non-story they can find.
It's bad enough for those of us non-Americans sick of the US-bias in all things, but to see Australians trying to claim every open slot left over is annoying as hell, because nothing of interest happens in Australia, yet interesting news from other parts of the globe goes unreported.
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...
Goatse
You nerds love it.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Hosers.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
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
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....
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??