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Canadian ISPs Limiting Access To CBC Shows
An anonymous reader sends word that, even as ISP interference with BitTorrent traffic is easing in the US, the issue is heating up in Canada. Major Canadian ISPs are limiting access to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's shows, made available online using BitTorrent. This issue has burst onto the scene due to smaller ISPs, such as Teksavvy, blowing the whistle on the fact that Bell was expanding its traffic-shaping policies to smaller ISPs that rent Bell's network. These events have sparked a formal complaint by the National Union of Public and General Employees, which represents more than 340,000 workers across Canada, to the regulatory body, CRTC, and calls for change in Parliament.
The CRTC's response will probably be similar to the one I received when I tried to file complaint against the grossly incompetent & abusive TELUS: "The CRTC does not regulate the business practices for Internet Service Providers." The CRTC is absolutely steadfast in their position.
The only body willing to oversee Internet issues is the CCTS or "Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services." This entity is completely funded by the telecom industry. If you need help, they're utterly useless and will basically tell you to take a hike.
>Note: this only affects ISPs which resell bandwidth. Those with their own equipment can still circumvent this.
Bell is throttling the connection path to the DSLAM. Unless your ISP has a connection directly to your house, you are still affected. Next time read the facts first.
re: "I can only speak for my ISP in Canada (Shaw). They throttle Bit Torrent on the default ports it would appear, but not on any other ports."
I'm with Rogers since they took over @Home's market when it went bust. The throttling is ridiculous but only on the upstream, which now varies between 1-10KBytes/sec. All ports are affected and encryption doesn't help. It did for a short time, but they caught on and started throttling all encrypted traffic which caused work-at-home business users on VPN's to go ballistic.
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A sig is redundant.
He said there has been no backlash from customers, despite the incidents of the past week. I call bullshit. I used to work for Sympatico's technical support so I KNOW. If a customer complained about traffic shaping, no matter how savvy they are and how much evidence they presented, we would have just told them bit torrent is not supported. Regardless of the fact that the problem has nothing to do with bit torrent, that's where the blame would go. If we escalated something like this we would get written up for it. There is no backlash because management ensures they won't hear any backlash.
Actually in this case you're a bit behind, Canada does have a system for letting small independent ISPs setup with low cost exactly so there is competition in the marketplace. The big players are required to wholesale their last mile at government regulated prices. There are independent ISPs that oppose traffic shaping, TekSavvy is one of them, the problem here is that the big players are throttling in the last mile so that independent ISPs have throttling like it or not. TekSavvy plans to fight this one to the end, but right now they're throttled by Bell. What Bell is doing is likely illegal, but they don't give a crap, TekSavvy has been stealing Bell's customers since Bell started throttling their own customers. Bell didn't like that so they decided they would take TekSavvy's competitive advantage away.