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Bell Canada Official Speaks Out On Throttling
westcoaster004 brings to our attention an interview with Mirko Bibic, head of regulatory affairs for Bell Canada, discussing the ISP's traffic-shaping practices. This follows news we discussed recently that a class action lawsuit was filed against Bell for their involvement in traffic shaping. Bibic reiterates that internet congestion is a real problem and claims that the throttling had nothing to do with Bell's new video service. CBC News quotes him saying:
"If no measures were taken, then 700,000 customers would have been affected by congestions during peak periods. We want to obviously take steps to make sure that doesn't happen. So this network management is, as we've stated, one of the ways to address the issue of congestion during peak periods. At the end of the day, the wholesale ISPs are our customers and we generate revenue [from them], so we want to make sure we're serving them to the best of our ability as well."
Someone who pays for health insurance, and happens to be chronicaly ill, shouldn't be put on the slow lane just because it costs more to treat him. Same goes for P2P traffic, don't discriminate me bro.
s. We want to obviously take steps to make sure that doesn't happen.
Oh yeah? Then add more bandwidth. Problem solved. Delivering as advertised is not a value added service!
This is just the same excuse that other telcos are giving for overselling their bandwidth vs their customers needs. These telcos need to learn how to provide enough bandwidth for peak times if that is what they're selling. If someone were to pick up a telephone at peak times and get an all circuits are busy message regularly during peak hours than there would be hell to pay.
We need to stop letting them get away with selling service to us that they cannot provide. As consumers we need to look towards other providers and build a market for service providers that don't pull these kinds of games. We also need to make it clear to these companies that their selling us services they cannot deliver is not acceptable to us. The only way they will ever get that message is through their subscriber numbers. As long as the big telcos and ISPs have the bulk of the customers they will never see the light until an exodus towards alternatives starts.
The only way that an exodus towards alternatives will occur is if we the people move in that direction and help the smaller companies build themselves up by moving to them.
This is all about overselling which has to be done to a certain extent but when the peak times cannot regularly be met then it is too oversold. Unfortunately consumers these days are sheep and will stay with these companies because they are cheaper/easier to get service from.
If they were serious about addressing congestion, they'd prioritize traffic flows and be done with it. I don't think anyone would have a problem with putting P2P at a lower priority to HTTP. Of course, that doesn't help their master plan of billing content providers for tiered service, so they don't do it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Then tell all the big site owners to cut out all the tube clogging, virus riddled advertisements. Or charge them extra for it.
What?
This is what happens when ISPs sell customers more capacity than they can deliver. They should lose this because they promised a product they couldn't deliver and that's fraud.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
If all the big service providers invested more profits into increasing infrastructure instead of giving shareholders, board members, and CEO's another 1.5M dollar raise this year, they wouldn't have to throttle back the bulk of their customers, the lowly single user. As happens elsewhere, big business gets the gravy while we get what's left on the bone, thrown, without a though of consequence, to their diamond and gold encrusted loafers.
If other protocols were impeded, soon, all P2P would look like HTTP.
Ok, so they need to manage "congestion", so why is it a hard cap of 30 KB/s on downstream instead of say 100 KB/s?
And this DOES have something to do with their video site, you're launching a bandwidth intensive application which will be used during prime "congestion" hours. Disgraceful.
I believe them.
The problem is, how will we ever know whether or not a particular provider is throttling traffic in a fair and neutral way for the overall benefit of its customers... or whether it is cutting deals to favor business partners... or certain industry segments (the RIAA and MPAA come to mind)... or even political parties?
If common carriers are allowed to do this, how will we know when they stop serving the public and start serving themselves... and how will we able to stop them?
They've chosen to solve their problem in a cheapjack, lazy, sloppy way that virtually guarantees future abuse.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
What do you mean by "impeded"? I'm not advocating blocking anything in the slightest. However, you can prioritize highly interactive traffic (IM, HTTP, SSH) over bulk data like FTP or P2P transfers. This lets all the packets through, but doesn't make browsing impossible just because a tenth of an ISP's customers are downloading screengrabs of the new Indiana Jones.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It's because Bell started forcing third party ISPs to do it even though they have to pay for dedicated links between Bell's equipment and the ISP.
And that's why Bell's "response" is fronted by their head of regulatory affairs - whose role in life is to keep this entire discussion in so-called public hearings before a regulatory tribunal, the last place you'll ever find an actual member of the general public. Bell has survived for over a century in Canada by ensuring a) that nobody but economists, lawyers and policy wonks ever gets a word in edge-wise; and b) that even when ordered to play nice with new entrants (unbundling network for resale, etc), they will keep coming up with ingenious ways to drag their feet on progress. And they've succeeded brilliantly, partly because non-facilities-based competition doesn't work. But what the telcos, and cablecos, really don't want, in Canada or the US, is for the great unwashed public to discover... FTTH! And that all the copper plant they're squeezing the last dollar out of (for DSL and DOCSIS) is part of a holding pattern to keep typical residential bandwidth down in the 5 Mbps vicinity. In other words, a scarce resource. What's this horsemanure about "uncontended interntet" and freakin T1 lines? That's where the ILECs want the debate to stay. Meanwhile, anybody get a glimpse of the OECD Broadband Report released 2 weeks ago? The one that shows the US dropping - again - among the 30 member countries in BB rankings. And Canada coming up with one of the lowest FTTH scores on the planet. This debate's gotta move to a 3-to-5-year horizon - to a day when throttling is a non-issue, and the real issues resolve to whether residential pipes are still under the control of providers who lie through their teeth, never spend a dime on technical innovation and will fight to the death to own both the pipe and the content.
They should be able to do what they want on Sympatico, but that is supposed to be separate from Bell Canada. Bell Canada has to give access to 3rd party companies. That means the 3rd party company pays Bell for dedicated links over their ATM network. The 3rd party provides their own connection to the internet backbone. Bell is only providing ATM transit. That is the problem. Bell Nexxia is supposed to be separated from Sympatico. One is an internet service(Sympatico), the other is the core network.
They are screwing with data for other companies. Imagine that Peer 1 started throttling torrents over their network because they say it takes up too much bandwidth. People would be outraged.
Bell sells a capped service. They say you can get 60G/month. So it should be easy to figure out the average load on the network with everyone under this Cap. If Bell can't actually provide the service they sell, then they should set the cap at a level they can support.
/95% = 1.58 kB/s
Think for a second how oversubscribed Bells network is. Here you can use Bells own claims. "5 percent of users generate 60 percent of its total traffic":
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080519-regulators-want-answers-from-bell-canada-on-p2p-throttling.html
So how much are those nasty 5% capable of gobbling down?
If you max your cap that is 2G/day. Say all of it is in the peak 12 hour window (but actually heavy downloaders run 24/7).
So 1G/6hours. 167MB/hour = 45 kB/s. This is the most on average, that the theoretical bandwidth hogs can use. Bell advertises a service that is 10 times that speed. So if everyone was a peak user and only used it during the peak window, bells network is over-subscribed by 10 to 1 vs the evil bandwidth hogs.
BUT these are the evil 5% choking down 60% of the bandwidth according to Bell. How much does the other 40% (good users) average? So (60%) = 5% x 45 kB/s = 224kB/s, so (40%) = 150kB/s
So a "good" user averages 1.58kB/s, less than modem speed. If sold a 5mb/s connection (Bell advertises up to 7mb/s), they are oversubscribed about 300 to 1 on what they expect from users.
So is a 300 to 1 over-subscription fair? Perhaps bell should be forced to tell it's customers their target average usage for their network. In Bells case that seems to be 1.5kB/s average if used a lot by everyone. Is this adequate for a service sold as up to 7mb/s fast and never shared??
http://www.bell.ca/shopping/PrsShpInt_Perf.page
"Consistently fast service that's never shared"
High speed always on, never shared internet connections are not the telephone service, with 5 minute hold times and 2 hours a week usage. This is multi-hour/day usage. Attempting to solve bandwidth problems by traffic shaping traffic you don't like is a never ending cat and mouse game that doesn't address the real issue: Over subscription of the network or a completely incorrect usage model. This has to be addressed regardless of any traffic shaping. What is next shaping youtube? Voip? VOD? How can this be justified when you start offering VOIP and VOD services.