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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."
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.
Bell started throttling my connection, so I switched to Teksavvy. Unfortunately Bell controls the wires so my connection is still being throttled. It's regrettable that Bell still gets some of my money, as Teksavvy has to buy its bandwidth from Bell, but they're getting less of it. As a bonus, the exact same internet service is cheaper from Teksavvy than from Bell. If enough people would switch, Bell might change its policy.
Also in today's news, Bell's Canada spokesman Bibic said that internet congestion is a real problem and claims that the throttling had nothing to do with [b]Bell's new video service[/b].
Read radical news here
If other protocols were impeded, soon, all P2P would look like HTTP.
I am a customer of Sympatico Bell, and I can assure you that, unlike what the interviewee would make you believe, traffic is throttled all day, every day. I don't use bittorrent too often, but whenever I start a download, it goes from ~500 KiB/s to ~30 KiB/s within the span of two minutes. The speed stays the same overnight. Not exactly a peak period... Sad thing is, I'm using Cogeco for the summer, and they're even worst, uploads are pretty much completely blocked. :(
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.
Look at the Bell provided graphs:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20567537-
Their ATM capacity is around 170 Gbit/s and their backbone traffic is around 125Gbit/s. They have 45Gbit of spare capacity and this is Bell's own numbers so who knows if they're inflated or not. Also, their DSLAM capacity is enormous so where exactly is the congestion? Maybe there are some DSLAMs that are congested but that's why you upgrade, not throttle your entire network and all 3rd party traffic over the ATM network.
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!
I think bell canada has really shot itself in the foot with this one. If they are complaining that their lines are saturated they should install more infrastructure. Someone else pointed out that Europe has many countries with a larger population that have moved towards net neutrality without any infrastructure or network congestion issues. Seeing as bell has started throttling the service to customers who have already paid for a certain amount of data, they are in fact not delivering on their promise of providing said data. I was happily surprised by the insightful remarks on the cbc interview with Mr Mirko Bibic from bell. The full article can be found here http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/05/30/tech-qandabibic.html. Most consumers seem to have seen through his marketing speak. With the lawsuit from the consumer rights group and the government motion to move towards net neutrality it`s starting to look like Bell`s excuse for throttling is going to be what galvanizes Canadians towards net neutrality.
"Bell started throttling my connection, so I switched to Teksavvy. Unfortunately Bell controls the wires so my connection is still being throttled."
Looks like win-win for Bell. The get most of the revenues, and don't have to provide internet backbone bandwidth or tech support, they can now mess with your connection and don't even have to listen to you complain.
Bell gets about $20 out of $30 for just providing the throttled last mile. $30 out of $40 if you are on Dry DSL. So Bell gets to keep most of the money and they reduce over-head. I don't think they are going to be defeated by this.
I am with Vianet and being Bell throttled. I am canceling all Bell services (third party DSL, landline and long distance) and moving to Cable + VOIP.
I am actually denying Bell every penny of revenue they get from me. I will also tell them exactly why they are losing a long term customer and all associated revenues.
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?
People understand how to conserve resources when it directly affects their economic well-being. (Witness unsold SUVs stacking up at car dealerships.) If ISPs are running out of bandwidth, then they need to charge people in a way that more directly relates to their use.
Bill per GB, and set peak and non-peak rates. Be transparent about it though. People should be able to see how much they have used at any time, receive alerts when they cross some preprogrammed levels, and even choose to throttle themselves down when they cross a certain number of GB per month, or just during peak hours.
Make people responsible for their usage, and give them the tools to monitor/control it, and you'll find this problem will fix itself.
Yeah, thats how my ISP (claims) to handle it to...
DL 5MB/UL 512KB
But it throttles that 5MB seemingly randomly, ocasionally I can get up to 600k/s download (using BT, HTTP, FTP, etc doesnt matter) other times 15k/s... noon, midnight, weekday, weekend doesnt matter... and 2 or 3 times a week, it just shuts down entirely for about 3 hours somewhere between 9PM and 9AM...
So i assume one of two things.
1. they don't know what they are doing.
2. they most likely dont know what they are doing.
They behave like an infected computer... unless their hardware is constantly dying, inwhich case see assumption 1. or 2.
We've seen this. Every single day, the ILECs pour a lot of money into improvements. The spend the money on
... Ok, well isn't that ENOUGH!?!?
1. Lobbyists
2. Campaign contributions
3.
4. Oh, ok, a few bucks now and then on basic improvements in areas where they can DEFINITELY get a profit on them in the short term.
Now, that all works very, VERY well to improve the company. The profit margins of the company, that is.
But the Incumbent local exchange carrier companies (the ILECs -- other wise known as TPC) in North America have spent so much money on discouraging competition through regulation that they have made their own business very expensive to run. They also have policies going back to the late 1800s of treating jobs as cogs in a machine with replaceable parts, so their labor relations are geared towards replaceability and strike-resilience. It's very inefficient.
And in a business where things can be automated up to wazoo, the ILECs are hamstrung by unions and their own evil need to have huge headcounts so that their lobbyists can pressure their unions to pressure the politicians to do as their lobbyists demand. Need for headcount reduces desire for automation.
You want more bandwidth? Push for campaign finance reform. Whenever you hear ANYTHING that a local ILEC wants from a politician, call your local reps and tell them you wont vote for them again if they vote for what the ILEC wants. Then, after any election, whether your anti-candidate wins or loses, call them and tell them that they didn't get YOUR vote because they voted with the ILEC.
Only by removing the best business model the ILECs have (preserving the status quo and gaming our democracy) will you get ILECs which listen to customers.
I think that while Bell may likely win the battle at the CRTC, they have fallen far behind in the PR battle, and are scrambling to catch up.
/. reading, torrent downloading geek friends, but from all manner of non-tech-savvy friends, family and clients. Any and all net problems are now attributed to Bell:
Since the traffic shaping controversy began, I've been surprised by the number of negative (towards Bell) comments I've heard about it. Not just from my
A website is slow -- is this that Bell 'throttling' I've been hearing about?
A (sketchy) website in China is down -- Bell
The internal university network is slow today -- Bell
Skype is unreliable -- Bell
my VOIP is saying 'all circuits are busy' -- aargh. Bell
My DSL connection was down -- Bell's really throttling my internet now!
I hear these things and have to laugh. I think Bell's really shot themselves in the foot when it comes to customer perception and mind-share.
... BUT, truth in advertising laws should kick in. They should only be allowed to advertise their DSL service at the lowest throttling speed. So if you buy service X that throttles protocol Y down to 20kb/s, then Bell should only be allowed to advertise that service as a 20kb/s service.
They should also not be allowed to throttle wholesale bandwith that other DSL providers buy unless those providers agree to the throttling (and advertising restrictions.)
This is actually an issue for several of my clients who use P2P for backup purposes, etc. So I watch what is going on in terms of throttling. I can demonstrate that Bell Canada is throttling P2P at just about any time you care to mention, including 4 A.M. Sunday morning. Does Sunday morning sound like a peak period to you? Or does this smell like more B.S. (Bovine Scatology)?
Fortunately, this issue won't be affecting my clients for much longer at all. I have nearly completed a P2P application that does all its work over port 80, and as far as the ISP is concerned, the traffic will be indistinguishable from loading a series of web pages with large graphics.
I dare them to throttle HTTP.
One exception: Speakeasy, who lied to me during pre-sales chat, stating I could use 100% of my bandwidth 100% of the time, and that they don't regulate their connections at all -- ultimatley called me up and told me if I didn't download less than 100G a month, that they would terminate me.
They then had the gall to try to silence me with a threat of an early termination fee, and took many months to properly pay me back for the pre-paid month of service that I didn't get.
They are assholes. They should burn. But Patriot.Net? Capu.Net? Silcon.com? All great ISPs that let you do what you want.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
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.
when I had a single 56k dial-up connection that was shared among four computers congestion was the norm. In such an environment, even viewing a single web page often filled the available bandwidth. This made browsing from multiple computers at the same time nearly impossible. To counteract the issue, I implemented a single SFQ QOS on my router and within minutes after turning it on, the congestion was well under control.
Congestion primarily occurs due to more data being sent than can be received during a specified amount of time. Consequently this often results in unnecessary retransmissions of data and increased congestion. By dropping data which would otherwise be duplicated during a retransmission, congestion is relieved and the flow is normalized.
One must therefore ask, why have they not implemented a QOS at the locations where congestion is known to occur?
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.
Not one. I worked in their tech support for nearly 5 years and never once got a complaint about congestion. Plenty of complaints about slow speeds - but those issues were always due to poor sync - crappy 100 year old phone lines rusted to the point where you had to keep getting them to repeat themselves over the static. If a customer called to have line work done, if the problem was outside the demarc - they were promptly told no. Inside the house they would do because they get to hose the customer for a few hundred more dollars - for each visit (minimum 3 because they won't fix it right the first time.) Usually the technician would show up at the customer's house, call in to their dispatch that the customer wasn't home (although they never bothered to check) and leave a bill in the mailbox. If the customer didn't pay it they'd simply get their services cut off.