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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."
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
This isn't the US nor is it the EU, it's Canada. And the CRTC is here to protect consumers, etc. And guess what. They actually do there job some of the time. Welcome to a country where corruption isn't total in government orgs (at least yet).
I recall seeing Bell advertisements that DSL from Bell was better than cable, because there are "no slowdowns". I also recall advertisements, but I can't remember if they were specifically Bell advertisements, that your bandwidth was dedicated. I didn't really believe it then, and now it seems that neither does Bell.
Ok, I'm gonna take a wild guess here and say that you have no idea what you are talking about, and no idea what this whole matter is about. Here's what happened:
People who didn't want Bell's throttling read Bell's contract and decided they didn't want it. Instead, they went and got their internet service from a competitor. Unfortunately, since Bell owns the wires, every competitor in the DSL business has to rent bandwidth wholesale from Bell. At first, Bell didn't throttle the wholesale bandwidth, and the competitors could then offer contracts that had no throttling to their customers. Then, without notice, Bell throttles the wholesalers. So even though people read the contracts and refused to agree with throttling, they still get fucked by Bell even though they get their service from a competitor. Reference here.
Repeat after me: People read their contracts, refused the throttling, went with a provider that didn't throttle, and got fucked anyway. Please... stop talking out of your ass now.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
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?
The Liberals are worse than the Tories. Of course, if we give the Tories some time in office that will correct itself.
The throttling occurs to 3rd party ISPs who lease access to the Bell owned last mile. This is governed by the CRTC and Bell has to provide it. They implemented this throttling for traffic going to someone Else's network. That's the main problem is that they are interfering with traffic that is not theirs. It just has to travel over their ATM network but the contract is between the customer and the 3rd party.
Bell is paid by the 3rd party ISPs to carry this traffic and the amount they get for this is usually around 80% of what the 3rd party ISPs charge for monthly internet access. They say they are doing this because the network is saturated and all these 3rd party ISP customers are causing congestion. From their own numbers this isn't true and their networks is only at around 50% capacity. It's not clear if Bell is legally allowed to throttle or interfere with traffic going to 3rd party ISPs and especially that they did it without telling any of the other ISPs. What has happened with many other ISPs is that they have already bought dedicated bandwidth expecting the amount of traffic before the throttling. Bell implements the throttling and now they have a huge unused portion of bandwidth that they can't use. Also they are paying bell for many Gbps connections that they can't use due to this and Bell won't give them their money back. Instant profit for Bell.
Because Bell is doing the traffic shaping where they have no business dong it: Between the end users and the isp.
Bell rents the lines out by tunneling the pppoe connection right to the reseller isp so the isp can traffic shape if they want to. Bell has right to force business decisions on third party isps since they pay for all of the resources they use.
But in Canada, companies cannot make contribution to political parties.
Be relentless!
In an ideal world, there would be free competition, but that's not the situation we find ourselves in. Why? Because Bell has a huge advantage as a result of the network that it built, over the last century or so, while operating a government-granted long-distance monopoly, and with much direct government assistance. I mean, they've been charging the same ludicrously low rate for years all the while increasing the available bandwidth and a small percentage of people abuse it and take more than their fair share. Why is this a problem? If you take too much - you have to pay extra, otherwise expect to be throttled back. If ISPs customers use more bandwidth, the ISPs pay for it. It's up to them, not Bell, to decide how to pass that cost along to their customers.
Where do you get this ridiculous notion that no one is paying for this bandwidth?