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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...
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.
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."
It depends how the reselling is implemented. An ISP in Australia could be an AAPT, Optus, or Telstra reseller, which means the wholesaler manages just about everything and the reseller puts their logo on the service and (maybe) handles first line support, and possible does some value adding or something.
:)
Alternatively, the ISP may buy bandwidth from their upstream wholesaler, and manage their own DSLAM's, authentication, etc.
As you say, too many unanswered questions to form an informed opinion. That doesn't seem to stop anyone around these parts though
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can (and should) sue.
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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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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 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.
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