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Bell Canada's Misinformation About Throttling
rsax writes "Bell Canada's chief of regulatory affairs Mirko Bibic has been attempting to justify the throttling of the last-mile connection to independent ISPs. As is typical, Bell Canada is abusing people's confusion between issues around Network Neutrality and the last mile natural monopoly. If people continue to confuse these two related but separate issues, Bell Canada and other incumbent phone and cable companies will win this critical debate."
You're mistaken. Teksavvy for example does NOT purchase wholesale internet access, they have their own routes and peering agreements.
we do?
that's news to me, having never had to pay to receive a call either on a landline or on a mobile....
I don't think so.
For far too many years to remember, I have never ever paid to receive a call, either via landline or mobile (cell).
We have always paid to make calls, any "free" minutes your package may have, are of course included in the package price.
The only time you have to pay to receive a call is when the caller reverses the charges (call collect), but even then you have the option of whether to accept the call or not.
The only other thing I can think of that may be close to what you're talking about is Pay As You Go (PAYG) mobile contracts, where there is often a minimum top up payment required to keep the number (and SIM card) active.
Yeah, I'm afraid that's actually total crap. I don't know where you got that from - the only times you would pay to receive a call on a UK phone are:
1) You accept a reverse charges call.
2) You have taken your UK mobile overseas and receive a call. Then you'll pay a (ridiculous) Roaming charge to receive the call.
Those are both perfectly reasonable (in principle, if not in the actual scale of the charges)
If its a good deal or not really isn't the issue (yet).
If my ISP wants to throttle my connection to a specific speed, or only of specific protocols, they can. But goddamnit they NEED to tell me this BEFORE I sign up, so I know what I'm buying.
If I purchase an "unlimited" plan at 10mb's, I expect unlimited usage of that 10 mb like because well shit thats what I'm paying for isn't it?
If my ISP does not want to invest in infrastructure to support growing traffic demands thats their business (a poor decision I think but hey I'm not a stockholder) and therefor can no longer deliver unlimited plans, they need to own up to that. If my ISP can't give me unlimited they need to advertise what they are giving me.
The GP noted he was a happy customer because there was no bullshit, he pays a certain amount and he knows exactly what hes getting.
He didn't sign up for an unlimited plan at 15 mb and find out it drops to 2 mb after the first 10 minutes, he's not getting cut off with no notice because of some sketchy rule in the ToS that lets his ISP decide hes misbehaving, certain services aren't slower than others. He's got a net connection, its got a limit (though if you need more than 95 gigs a month clearly its time to cut back on the pron), but he knows exactly what those limits are.
Sounds fairly decent to me.
Finally it should be interesting to note, since his ISP is selling him throughput, not the connection it self, that it actually provides the ISP incentive to make sure his connection is as fast as possible. A faster connection means hes more likely to go over his limit and incur an extra surcharge, in this case they WANT your BT to work well because if you go nuts on it they make more money.
In fact Teksavvy even gives its customers a choice of which routing they would prefer, unlimited over Cogent or 100gb/month over Peer 1 (lower latency)!
http://www.teksavvy.com/en/resdsl.asp?ID=7&mID=1
"The avalanche has already started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote." - Kosh
Not even close to true. In fact Smaller ISPs pay for the bandwidth used at two points:
They pay for the link based on size between their PPPOE authentication servers and Bell's ADSL equipment. If this link fills up it's not Bell that suffers it's the ISP. (I've seen it happen)
They again for outgoing bandwidth with whatever carrier they go with.
There is no performance reason for Bell to throttle the PPPOE connections going to other ISPs. If the other ISP mismanages it's network then either they pay extra or the customers get mad and leave.
Also the option to lease the lines is a terrible idea. Under the current regulatory structure Bell has to rent out space in it's main buildings but not in it's "remote co". If you can't get a good DSL signal from Bell they route your lines through a remote CO so your connected to DSL equipment closer to your house.
A company I used to work for tried to setup their own equipment and connect customers and what we found was that at certain distances Bell's standard ADSL was outrunning our ADSL 2+ (24mbps) equipment. Now that Bell is also going 2+ there is no speed advantage at any distance.
This isn't really a debate about network neutrality. This debate is about Bell throttling traffic on OTHER People's networks.
Bell has no legitimate business interest in how third parties run their network since said third parties have to pay for any resources used.
This is about Bell wanting to raise prices for it's own customers but needing to make sure theres no competition for them to jump to first.
you're confusing two types of bandwidth. the way bell's infrastructure work is this:
every lines terminate into a DSLAM.
then if the DSLAM is bell's they will either:
forward the entire L2TP(or ppp, same thing) tunnel over a dedicated line that they forced teksavvy to install and terminate it on teksavvy's equipment, at which point teksavvy can do whatever the hell they want with the traffic
or
bell terminates it on their own equipment and then sells "bandwidth" to the outside internet
both of these solutions can be thottled, and you'd still get the "choose your routing" part
there is another option for resellers, which is installing their own DSLAMs in bell's colo centers. it is expensive, and ill defined. any maintenance you might have to do is expensive as hell, bell charges you the full cost for whatever changes are to be made (including plugging in a customer's line into it).
some resellers use this type of colo, but usually they are geographically limited (you need dslams all over the place to physically serve every customer's lines)
The band depends on where you live.
And yes, bell offers dry dsl. And they don't even charge an additional fee. That's the only thing keeping me with bell right now. That extra $10 that I'd have to pay anywhere else is just enough to keep me.
:x
This GAS (Gateway Access service) access is the part that is regulated by the CRTC (tariff 5410). It is the term for "last mile aceess". Any DSL provider uses this service from the incumbent telco. From there they need backhaul bandwidth to their own Internet peering.
In Soviet Russia, Nigel makes plans for you!
SaskTel just upgraded their Saskatchewan infrastructure. They upgraded 10 cities in the province, with a total population of around 600K people. It cost them ~$300 million.
You want to invest $500 per person? With no guarantees about ROI? That's 600K people who also could use a competitor's service.
It's safe to say that the barrier for entry is pretty high.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!