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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."
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.
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.
Your argument makes sense for some ISPs, but not for this specific situation:
1) Teksavvy supplies it's own bandwidth, and only leases the 'last-mile' connection from Bell Canada.
2) Teksavvy does oversell, but currently keeps up with it's traffic even at peak times.
3) Bell is throttling P2P on Teksavvy's last-mile, even though it has little impact on their ability to provide service to it's own customers.
4) The type of throttling they are doing is interfearing with QoS systems in routers that ensure VoIP works. It is causing reduced quality in VoIP services.
5) Selectively throttling specific protocols is a slippery slope. What's to say that they don't decide that VoIP is the next service that gets eliminated because it competes with their local phone service?
This is a blatant attempt by Bell to remove a competitive advantage from competing ISPs.
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.