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Vuze Study Exposes P2P Throttling By Canadian ISP Cogeco
urbanriot writes "Despite a growing number of complaints on the popular North American consumer broadband site BroadbandReports, employees working for the Canadian cable internet provider Cogeco have publicly denied interfering with torrents on their network. However, a recent plugin put out by the Vuze team exposed Cogeco of being the second worst ISP globally, of those tested. So far, Cogeco has failed to respond to these findings, but recent coverage from the mainstream media and Michael Geist may prompt them to finally admit to their controversial practices."
The report by the Vuze team has some interesting information about other ISPs from around the world as well. Prior to this, Bell Canada was taking most of the flak in Canada for traffic management.
For those who are bored to RTFA and dig through its links, there is a handy Bad ISPs list maintained by the Azureus team.
That being said, there are many ISPs who also do p2p traffic caching, which is not inherently a bad thing. Certain block lists consider those wrongfully malicious as well.
Competition doesn't do much good when the ISPs are allowed to lie. Some good, yes, but in order for competition to do it's thing, users need to be well-informed before they purchase.
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... when it's transparent and disclosed. If ISPs believe that traffic shaping is a legitimate cost management solution that most customers wouldn't mind, then fine, make the legitimate case: use traffic shaping and disclose the existence of traffic shaping in your plans the same way maximum bandwidth is disclosed, and we'll let the market decide. Personally, I believe that enough customers wouldn't mind traffic shaping, bandwidth throttling and caps, etc. that in the future we might see different priced "tiers" of internet service, which is fine with me as that would make service pricing more representative of internet use. My ISP wants to bandwidth cap my internet service? Fine, if they disclose these caps at the time that I sign up. Then I'd be free to negotiate with another provider or sign up for a better plan. It's the fact that ISPs today advertise one thing and then deliver another that's truly offensive.
The sneaky underhanded meddling with the service of customers that have existing contracts just undermines the ISPs' case and suggests to regulators and customers that they aren't interested in honestly selling a service.