Slashdot Mirror
Canadian ISP Ordered to Prove Traffic-Shaping is Needed
Sepiraph writes "In a letter sent to the Canadian Association of Internet Providers and Bell Canada on May 15, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) have ordered Bell Canada to provide tangible evidence that its broadband networks are congested to justify the company's Internet traffic-shaping policies. This is a response after Bell planned to tackle the issue of traffic shaping, also called throttling, on the company's broadband networks. It would be interesting to see Bell's response, as well as to see some real-world actual numbers and compare them to a previous study."
Hurray! Finally my government makes itself useful. Finally they protect my rights.
Wow this is actually good news. The people at Bell Canada are scumbags. At my previous job we had the unfortunate misfortune to have Bell Canada as our ISP. They started slowing down our connection speed which in turn slowed everything in the entire studio down (since we were saving files to a server across town). It used to only take a few seconds to save the files, then it turned into 10 minutes. Bell insisted there was absolutely nothing wrong with the connection. Just doing my job was turned into an ordeal because bell feels the need to tamper with their connections. I hope Bell gets crucified. That would be absolutely wonderful
I have nothing compelling to say
And not only that, but the federal government is making me prove my tax statement when I say, "I don't owe you any money." What is this world coming to?
One thing that confuses the US net neutrality debate is that the ISPs have got massive subsidies in return for apparently better services, which have not occurred. If everyone bit the bullet and accepted they are not going to get them then everything could move on. They have wronged by handing out monopolies and they have wronged by subsidising them. Another wrong isn't going to fix the system. Just allow proper competition. (Yea sorry I didn't get to read this article but i want to go to bed now :) ) Anyway, there was blatantly no net neutrality in the first place.
I think this is a pretty clear effort by the federal government to try to put the matter to bed by giving the big, monopolistic corporation the chance to "prove" that this is "necessary", which they will then accept without question. I've said it before: net neutrality is going nowhere in Canada without a change of government. But that's just my $0.02 CAD.
I would rather have the CRTC ask Bell Canada to provide tangible evidence that the laws of arthmetic failed when they computed the bandwidth available to each customer.
Throttling conjures up a more accurate image. (I think of Homer throttling Bart.)
And if they insist on shaping my traffic, I hope they can shape it into things I'm comfortable with like hearts, moons, and stars.
Careful What You Wish For....
they made promises they can't live up to and now they are handling it by censoring the internet. I don't care if it is "necessary", they screwed up and it should be handled in a responsible way - by upgrading the network
This is funny. If they can "prove" that traffic shaping is necessary, they have essentially proven that they are unable to provide the services they are charging people for. No matter what their proof looks like, they're hosed. Either they will be forced to quit traffic shaping and admit they don't need to do it, or they'll be open to class action lawsuits for failing to provide contracted services.
I don't feel too sorry for them... The telcos tear up the street every couple of years and I still don't have fiber to my house. To hell with them. The concept of fiduciary responsibility to shareholders has gone way too far, and it's time that service companies get a little legal protection when they choose to provide their customers with their contracted service instead of making an extra penny for their shareholders. Just look at the yahoo debacle... The company leadership might actually end up IN JAIL for trying to do the "right thing" for the company and their customers, because a couple shareholders are pissed they couldn't make a fast buck by selling out to Microsoft. That is a complete perversion of the concept of fiduciary responsibility, and our legal system ought to provide for companies that actually attempt to stay in business and fulfill their contracts with their customers.
They won't win by sitting on their hands and had better get moving. They tried that back in US back in the 80s and lost big time. It has taken ATT the last 20 years to lie cheat and steal their way back to government protected monopoly status and they are about to lose it all again. Your government is not the only one feeling redfaced about the pathetic network capacity they got in return for $200 billion and a lot of promisses. The next monopoly break up is not going to leave pieces large enough to grasp - it's going to be spectrum liberation, and that will be the end of all traditional broadcast and telcos. The more they piss their customers off, the sooner customers will realize what a fraud traditional telco is.
even if it is necessary, what are ISPs doing to improve the network and the infrastructure? If they're just siting back and collecting cash for people to use their relatively small, fragile network, then they don't really have an excuse for throttling that way either.
I expect they'll continue to shape traffic even when they can't prove that it's required because the internet infrastructure they do provide is virtually indispensable and there'll be squat the CRTC can do to enforce it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The questions posed by the CRTC are refreshingly blunt and informed, IMO. As a victim of such practices (I am a Rogers victim, BTW) I want to see how they address these specific questions, and how this plays out for their wholesalers.
Selling a specific accessible 'bandwidth' of internet access and then throttling it is not a fair business practice. Even if the terms of service include an allowance for such throttling, the provider should clearly and explicitly make sure the buyer understands such controls. Otherwise, you have buyers like myself who pay for 6mbit wondering why we are not getting 6mbit 24/7, 365. Thats what I bought, just as it was advertised. 6mbit internet access. It didn't read an ad saying 'sometimes 6mbit, mostly 3, and if you use it a lot, then almost none'. For an ISP to advertise a product one way, then provide the product differently is disingenuous and debateably illegal.
Well, now that our government is going to try and force ISPs (bell, anyways) to leave packet shaping alone ... all we need to do is get some real politicians back into power (none of this minority/conservative crap) and our country will officially rock (again).
How would a Canadian regulatory body react to a communications provider only providing confidential capacity information under some sort of confidentiality agreement? I've seen FCC ID files with the device's theory of operation fully redacted under a rather flimsy pretext, and the devices are nothing an hour or two in a well-equipped lab with someone who reads Chinese fluently won't completely decode.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
BELL is not the only one failing in providing the average user's demands for more upload and download bandwidth.
To further add to this, most of the ISP's upload bandwidth do not satisfy what most customers WANT considering that we live in an era of sharing hi-def videos and hi-def photos. All of the ISP's can do much much better.
With regards to the throttling at BELL, the CRTC should focus on the following:
-Enforce all ISP's to provide a much higher minimum upload bandwidth for everyone. If they don't, they lose their ISP status. The Minimum upload bandwidth should follow Moore's Law considering the hardware being manufactured certainly does.
-Enforce net-neutrality and disallow DPI(Deep Packet Inspection) simply on the fact it is destroying user internet performance and driving up average user cost.
-create name-branding/association guaranteeing the ISP & Network Hardware you buy is "Net-Neutral INSIDE".
DPI is analogous to Anti-Virus Software on computers. When a computer is running without a virus detector all the computer's performance speed is dedicated to the normal functioning of the computer. When an anti-virus software is running on a computer, it goes without saying the computer's normal functioning performance is chopped in half and possibly even more because the computer CPU time usually dedicated to user programs is now sucked up into ANTI-VIRUS activities inspecting all upcoming computer instructions for threatening actions like (unexpected file deletions, unexpected file-reading, unexpected network activity). The entire user experience is reduced and the typical user grows with impatience because of all of the time wasted with these ANTI-VIRUS activities.
In order to understand the negative impact on the average user's internet performance experience,
I will give a scenario that the average user can do and relate to showing fast and slow internet speed.
Have the average user buy a cheap combination router/firewall box. Connect his computer to it and connect the router to the DSL socket in the wall. Once connected to the internet, the user goes to a website, a delay occurs and then the web page displays. It could be 3 seconds, 5 seconds or more. My experience has been around 5 seconds. I will name this delay DPI-DELAY.
Now ask the same user to remove the router/firewall box.
Instead as the user to connect a DSL modem directly connects to the computer. The user will observe a faster internet performance experience because there is NO DPI-DELAY. The user will have a web page in 1 second instead of 3 to 5 seconds or more.
After trying these two different scenarios, the average user will have a better understanding about the time saved by not using any hardware/software that has inherent DPI-DELAY. HARDWARE doing DPI wastes everyone's time.
You will have a greater appreciation in this difference if the user visits many different web sites and the measures the DPI-DELAY for each of these. There is a significant different in time saved when not using DPI HARDWARE.
BELL and the other ISP's have the same hardware other countries have concerning the mirroring of packets in order for governments to listen to everything. I don't have a problem with that.
The truth of the matter is that the DPI/Traffic Shaping/Throttle hardware BELL is starting to use is not just for traffic shaping. That's why there is such a large DPI-DELAY now. BELL like every ISP in every country, have some obligations to the government who want the average user to pay for the government's real-time DPI sniffing hardware for "National Security's sake". I do have a problem with the fact they deliberately restrain our service until the government has that hardware that can sniff our packets to the point the government is blue in the face.
My point here is there are requirements for the average user and then there are requirements for the current governments in power. As it stands, these requirements are clashing because the DPI-DELAY is and wi
It seems to me that since Conrad Von Finckenstein was appointed as chair of the CRTC there has been a lot of stone-walling/reduction of crap the major telcos have been trying to pull up here. I've heard from some that this is because he actually wants to understand technology. Personally, I think he just hasn't been offered a large enough bribe.
bzzt. wrong. Telcos and cable companies have agreements with cities prohibiting competitors from running lines. That is part of the monopoly they are granted. Fixed price leasing was supposed to offset that.
...it may be. Just like airlines selling more tickets than they have seats. If too many people show up, whose fault is it? It is exactly the same situation.
When we signed up with Telus 7 years ago after they killed off all of the dialup services by not allowing them to actually use all of the phone lines they were leasing. Sound familiar? At that time they advertised unlimited service and there was nothing in their service agreement about a cap. That is why we went with them instead of Shaw, the only other ISP at that time, who had faster service (6mb vs 1.5mb), but had a Comcast style floating cap. Things were fine until TelusTV came out. All of a sudden, they didn't have enough bandwidth. So they cut the top 5% or so users. We got a phone call saying 'we are cutting you off....now.' There were complaints to the CRTC. Shaw and Telus suddenly had to actually tell people what the caps were. Cap was suddenly 5G/mo for Telus and 30G/mo for Shaw. The only other provider is Xplorenet. $60/mo for 500k satellite w/ $300 install fee after rebate. They also offer wireless service outside of the cities. They aren't allowed to point their towers into urban areas. Telus even sued to limit the height of their towers to drive their costs up. Yeah, they traffic shape too. You said 'if people would stop being idiots and start refusing to agree to these contracts' Oh, really? What are our options? Telus changed our contract without notice. Our continuing to pay the bill was legal acceptance, even though there was no notification. So much for the contract. Both of the other providers have similar terms. Out east they have ISPs that offer unlimited service with their 'unlimited service' but it is only the smaller ones offering that. The same ones required to use Bell for last mile. You know, the ones screaming because Bell is throttling their customers too?
Crime amongst the wealthy is a considerable problem. Corporations (and other obscenely wealthy folk) commit these crimes because they can, and they know that even if they are caught, it becomes more of an inconvenience than a problem. Compare that to a middle-class home, who would be devastated by fines that the rich can simply take in their stride. It's a one size fits all approach, and it doesn't work.
I propose that we scale fines to the income of the guilty party. Give out fines as percentages of yearly income. You could take the income records from last years tax time and fine a certain portion of that amount. If you commit a particularly serious crime, you may be charged as much as 50% of your yearly income, which would be equally devastating for anyone, no matter how much money they have. Fines would become a deterrent for all. Suddenly, breaking the law routinely doesn't seem to be such a financially viable business strategy.
Of course, the deterrent factor becomes less reliable on the very bottom of the scale. If a person has no money, then there would be no punishment, and consequently, they could do what they want. It also wouldn't cover damages to specific parties. We wouldn't want a situation where the fine is less expensive than the damage of the act itself. Whatever the problems, though, I think this idea has potential.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
The Liberals are worse than the Tories. Of course, if we give the Tories some time in office that will correct itself.
It's not clear to me why people are bent out of shape about P2P traffic getting a lower QOS. As long as it's not blocked altogether, who cares if you can swipe* a movie in 24 hours instead of 2-3 It's not like the movie will suck any less if you get it 15-20 hours faster.
Likewise, I'm surprised people complain about the heaviest users getting throttled to even usage for lighter-weight users. It's a concept OS schedulers have done for years--run to quanta and your priority drops (yeah, it's an imperfect analogy) and it's reasonable for the network to do the same thing. Maybe I've different expectations, but I expect to be given good service for bursty traffic and I'd expect to be throttled if I kept stuffing my link day in and day out.
I'm amused when people complain about "well, they should just spend some money to build out enough infrastructure." It's amusing because they do spend a boatload of money on their infrastructure with the primary beneficiaries being the heaviest user. Bandwidth is like Vegas--you build it and they come. In Vegas' case, "they" make them money where in an ISP's case, their addicts cost them money.
Maybe I'm just sitting here with 15Mb/2Mb and lacking empathy. Someone explain: why am I supposed to care about P2P traffic getting throttled? Is it the slippery slope of "well, they'll get your [low-traffic] VPN next?" Or is it just the social stigma of being a leech?
*anyone know how much P2P traffic is actually for copyright violation? I and most other networking people I work with presume it dwarfs legitimate use.
Would be nice, after BC shows how it's traffic is exceeding its system capabilities and preventing broadband users from being able to achieve the speeds they purchased if the ruling authorities dropped the hammer on Bell by telling them: You shouldn't have oversold your network in the first place, and then made them rebate all their profits for the last 10 years to their ratepayers.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The more things change, the more they stay the same, it seems.
Uhhhh... Bell Canada doesn't have to do anything. BCE does (sort of separate). BCE offers the GAS service this complaint is about (which is what this tariff is discussing). It is sold under the "Nexxia" trademark.
With that out of the way, AFAIK, Nexxia is not (and never has been) an ISP*. They provide access to the last mile copper via their transit network to several hundred actual ISPs (as referenced in this slashdot article).
The numbers Nexxia will need to come up with are to be derived from the data they have surreptitiously gathered from their network links to the ISPs they actually serve.
I know the media is too stupid to understand the difference, but slashdot? Argh! And in this case its a very important distinction: ISPs using Nexxia's service had no say in this, it just happened without Nexxia announcing it, and it now means ISPs no can longer provide the service they advertised and paid for (unthrottled internet) no matter what they do. This is because the majority of Nexxia's territory is now served by Nexxia's remotes. While the CRTC has mandated ISPs can install their own equipment in DSLAMs and COs, that only covers about 40% of Ontario/Quebec, the rest of the customers are served from remotes, which are next to impossible to get access to.
* - Actually, I'm somewhat incorrect on that. Nexxia does wholesale to ISPs IDM access, that is dial-up ISP service wholesaled to ISPs so they can offer service across Canada without having to put dial-up modems in each city. As you can imagine, this service is rapidly losing its value.
There is a big point you are missing. The independent dsl internet providers do not rent bandwidth from Bell.
Bell supplies the link between the customer and the internet providers own links to the outside internet, which makes the whole situation even more comical.
Independent providers pay Bell for this link, at a certain set speed, and now bell is pulling the rug out beneath them and asserting what applications can get full speed through this internal link.
What you're missing is the fact that our societies are highly corrupt, even though we tell ourselves that corruption only exists in Africa or China.
There is absolutely no way that a government will fine a company like microsoft half of it's annual income. Not only will they argue that they're too important to society (jobs, economy) to be endangered by government action; they'll go out of their way to call in favors, bribe officials (usually in ways that stupid/immoral officials don't see as bribery), lobby continuously, even after previous lobbying efforts are pulled down by the people, or even replace staff in government with staff more willing to see things their way.
Corporations are the new kings. Literally. Get used to it, until revolution comes.
No matter how rich you are, you only get about 80 years on this planet. So jail time is the only equitable solution: it is equally bad for rich and poor alike.
So you need in a corporation, the CEO and the Board put on selection for jail time for malfeasance of the corporation. Then the people in the chain of command down to the one that did the deed needs to be up for jail time. And if someone is fingered for having told the noob to do this, they get put toward it too. If the CEO/Board can show that they were being deliberately misled despite their best efforts, then their jail time is commuted down to the person they have as the one doing the flim-flam (if the court and/or jury buys it).
And employment of people jailed should be followed at each level. So if your grunt can't get employed after a jail term, neither can the CEO.
Fines should come from these people and no bonuses should be allowed for those the court deem responsible for those fines.
We have this law here in sweden that can land you in prison if you purchase sex. Selling is ok, though. UN ordered an examination of the law, but the govt came in and essentially said "Well it's ok as long as you don't question the intent behind the law or the law itself". So basically they've said that no matter what the study shows, the law will remain in place, even if the law turns out to do more harm than good.
Sure they do in a way. They don't pay Bell for access to the internet but they're still renting ATM access and gigabit links to their own data centers.
The CRTC has a long record of sitting on its bureaucratic ass and doing nothing while ownership of Canadian media has concentrated to a degree most nations would find frightening, while telemarketers began entering peoples' homes to prey on the elderly and vulnerable, and while it became more and more difficult for average people to obtain redress for outrages inflicted on them by cable companies and telcoms.
I doubt whether they will ultimately require any more of Bell than a statement saying "There's congestion. Honest. "
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I worked for an outsourcing call centre that took tech support calls for Bell Sympatico internet service for 2 and a half years (the majority of this time I was a senior support tech [tier 2]). My tenure with them has only recently ended (February) and I was still there while they began traffic shaping. In the 2 and a half years I worked there I only received 2 calls that I could attribute to network congestion (the sync and error rates between the modem and line card were perfect but they would inexplicably get slow speed in the evenings and I have never seen a case where latency was an issue, that wasn't related to sync problems or port forwarding). From what I have heard through the food chain there, these issues were extremely isolated and my experience (and the experiences of many of my coworkers, may I add) this certainly seems to be the case. I have high hopes that the CRTC will repeal this nonsense once and for all. P.S. I am in the maritimes (NB) and our version of Bell, called Aliant doesn't traffic shape or have any bandwidth caps on DSL. :p
The issue is not backbone bandwidth. Bell has multiple OC192's and probably OC768's+. These are already there, probably heavily unutilized, and used for more than just Internet traffic (i.e. LAN extension business traffic). The justification for shaping traffic is to minimize peering costs with other ISPs. I have no idea how Bell went so wrong in the court case. If I were them, I'd fire the lawyers... but ultimately, I'm hoping this works out for the end-users. Personally, it would suck for our pipes to be shaped, or torrent traffic interfered with. But also, as end-users we have to understand that you can't go around using multi-hundred million dollar backbone infrastructures for a $40 (or whatever) flat monthly fee with unlimited use. just my 2 bits.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
It's more a mockery of the rights of all your citizens. The company should be free to do whatever idiotic plan it wants, and watch its customer base crumble and disappear in response. The government is basically saying that unless the company can show that some idiotic scheme the company wants to do is actually necessary, then the company should not be allowed to make that bad choice. If they're allowed to do that to big companies, why not to a small company, started by a friend of yours, or your neighbor. And if they can do it to small companies, why not to individuals? This is more of the government telling people what's good for them and preventing them from doing what the government deems unnecessary or bad. The same thing happens with gun rights and smoking in the US.
Note: I have never and would never smoke, have no interest in owning a gun, and agree that packet shaping is idiotic and bad for business. With that said, this is not a good day for the rights of Canadians.
So you're basically saying that because the government does not allow competing lines to exist, then we need further government restrictions on existing lines? How ridiculous! The solution that upholds everyone's rights, rather than make a mockery of them, is to remove restrictions preventing the existence of competing cable lines, and allow competitors to put down their own lines. Then we will finally see the end to idiotic schemes by government-granted monopolies. Until then, go ahead, feel free to demand that the government stop packetshaping. The company will simply find another idiotic scheme to try out, and the cycle will continue. In the meantime, the government will see how much it can restrict large companies, and slowly extend similar restrictions to small companies, and eventually, individual citizens. If you refuse to uphold the rights of large companies, you make a joke of your own rights and the rights of your friends and family.
And the same thing happened in the US with companies like Rhythms. In a nut shell the people who owned the wire tripped on power cables, disconnected networks by accident. Always took day to fix and harassed Rhythms out of business. And I can say, they had good service until the games with SBC. It was good while the government assured it was fair, but decayed immediately when the government left the scene.
The real solution is to say the home owner owns the wire and _anyone_ to the pole can use it for no charge. Take away the dominance and open up competition. Make it illegal for any city to limit franchise access to less than say 4 companies. Allow wireless to the pole for rapid deployment. Make it easy to compete against these Bells and Telus companies. Maybe even broaden this up and include Rogers and Shaw.
I knew of a case in a small community where Telus said internet, ISDN was $250 mo. plus a hefty install charge. They stated they couldn't do it cheaper. Some entrepreneurs did high speed for $79 month. All of a sudden Telus could do it for $29 and put them out of business. The rates are now back up to $79 in that community. A typical story in this business. It is also why savvy investors don't invest in alternatives, they know Bell/Telus/MTS in their regions are monopolies.
If I tried to offer US satilitte TV and a wireless Internet in my neighborhood with a mesh network, how long would it be before I needed a good lawyer?
The REAL message to ISP's should be:
"If you can't deliver it, don't advertise it. If you won't spend money on your infrastructure, then don't complain that you can't deliver it".
The problem is obvious: ISPs are spending more and more money advertising services they can't (or can barely) deliver (further depleting the amound of bandwidth available per customer), INSTEAD of upgrading and maintaining infrastructure to support the needs of their current consumers. Insteadt, they spend massive amounts of money advertising a service, and when the customer holds them to task and asks them to provide it, the ISPs claim that they can't, since their current customers have "gobbled up" all the available bandwidth, and their isn't enough left for them to deliver the service promised.
There really *is* a bandwidth shortage, but whose fault is it?
A) Users using the service they paid for and were promised?
or
B) ISPs who want to advertise instead of upgrading infrastructure to deliver what was/is promised to new and current customers?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
You dumbfuck. The Tories are in office. They've been in office for over the past two years...
I mean really compared to other nations we trail in bandwidth speeds...Hardware is more powerful then ever and they claim they can not upgrade when other nations have far faster networks. Seems like the kind of thinking that is done about oil. So long as it is there why bother investing in the future.
What a joke. Why are their lines the only choice? Because the government will not allow alternative lines to be put down. We wouldn't have this problem if not for government restrictions to what competitors can do.
Requiring them to lease their own property is likewise a mockery of everyone's rights.
That you can't see the obviousness of the problem is another symptom of the growing desire to live under the rule of a nanny-state.