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Net Neutrality Debate Intensifies In Canada
MrShaggy tips us to news that the debate over Net Neutrality in Canada is coming to the forefront following the recent discovery that Bell Canada was throttling P2P traffic on the access it had sold to wholesalers. Michael Geist's blog notes a video recording of comments from a member of the Canadian government, as well as coverage from Canadian media. From Ars Technica:
"The Canadian government has in the past pushed the CRTC to deregulate the telecom industry, an approach still backed by Minister of Industry Jim Prentice. Prentice also wants to stay out of the current net neutrality debate, which would seem to be a de facto vote against the idea. He was asked in the House of Commons this week whether his government would do anything about the current Bell/Rogers traffic-shaping controversy. According to the Globe & Mail, Prentice said only that "we will continue to leave the matter between consumers on the one hand and Internet service providers on the other."
I didn't mention the 70's games. You really need to read more carefully. And I do support egalitarianism, but the fact that I support it doesn't make it true. The fact that I support it doesn't change the fact that the net is indeed elitist.
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Bittorrent doesn't segment its transfers for speed. The transfers are to and from different hosts - they are segmented for swarming, for the distributed nature of the protocol.
Segmented TCP transfers such as with download managers should not be, with modern TCP stacks, normally faster than single ones except in cases of major packet loss (in which case the network is already screwed).
Bittorrent is dependent on lots of other networks; it goes slower than a single TCP transfer from a fast network.
Thanks to modern TCP stacks, segments would not get a bigger slice of the pie under a congested network (a situation which, incidentally, should never happen if there is sufficient overhead; if you need to throttle, you need more upstream for your current contention ratio or you need to reduce your contention ratio - or stop taking on new subscribers if you don't have the capacity).
Laying last mile cable is very expensive - I'd guess there's no law saying someone couldn't lay cable and compete it's just they'd have to charge 10* as much to get their investment back.
In the UK we have much the same situation, with BT owning nearly all of the last mile cable (and the cable companies have said they can't afford to build any more cable, so most parts of the country can't get that and may never do). BT is under heavy regulation so that must offer access to that at competitive rates equally to everyone, and the system works well - there's a *huge* amount of competition... ISPs can either put their own DSLAMs in the exchanges (again under regulation they're granted the right to do that) or rent BT lines right up to their building if they like, and many combinations in between. As a result everyone has access to literally hundreds of ISPs offering differing levels of service - it all goes through BT copper in the end but that doesn't really matter.
You don't shape the last mile btw. that refers to the cable between the exchange and the house. It's typically just copper wire that happens to have dual use for either DSL or dedicated circuits. You need to open up competition at the exchanges since that's the first point that shaping can actually happen.
No. Actually Teksaavy has TWO options:
- Bell which is lower in price, but throttles the bandwidth due to limited cable availability.
- Rogers which is higher in price, but uses that higher cost to buy extra cables & doesn't need to throttle.
- (Are you sure there's no third company? Like AT&T or Sprint or MCI?)
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So you see Teksaavy DOES have options. Each of these 2 choices has a drawback (throttling on one hand; higher price on the other), but that's life in a nutshell. You have to weigh the pros and cons, and then decide what you're willing to live with. ("Do I buy the $4 tropicana, or the $2 store-brand that tastes blah?")
If you're looking for a third option that's both Cheap and Throttle-free..... well it doesn't exist. The technology has not reached that point yet, because high-bandwidth to the home is still relatively new (5 years old). Maybe in 2020, yes, but not in 2008. (You might as well demand Intel/Motorola sell you a 3000 megahertz processor in the year 1980... not going to happen, because the tech did not exist.)
I said it elsewhere, and I'm repeat it:
- The internet is not Harry Potter. It's not magic. It has real-world limits (bandwidth on one hand; cost on the other).
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
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As a Rogers customer, I can say by experience that Rogers throttles as well as Bell (and has ridiculously low bandwidth caps), so you're back to actually no choices. But don't take my word for it - google (try "rogers throttling bittorrent") will give you a bunch of sources for this, such as this story.
Yes, the situation is the same here, except that they are doing traffic shaping on the last mile. Last mile however goes a little further than you state because while the wholesale ISP has infrastructure at a Bell Canada exchange, traffic has to go through copper wires, then through Bell servers to the exchange where the wholesale equipment is located (even if it happens to be at the same exchange, as data off lines is aggregated at a Bell server somewhere).
We can purchase DSL from other ISPs, but they rely on Bell Canada for this last mile, and Bell Canada has taken it upon themselves to traffic shape EVERYTHING. I'd argue that this is primarily to ensure that their own "Sympatico ISP" doesn't suffer a massive loss of customers when people abandon them for third party ISPs, due to traffic shaping restrictions.
There is an alternative to Rogers, at least in parts of Ontario. CIA/3web http://www.cia.com/ offers a 5 Mbit cable Internet service over Rogers' network for about $33+tx/month. I have it and I like it. I can't say whether throttling takes place, but I have a CIA IP address and not a Rogers one.