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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.
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
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.