Slashdot Mirror
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?
If their network can't take the Net as it is, then they have a few choices:
a) sell slower links to their customers
b) sign up fewer customers (fat chance....)
c) expand the network
Double dipping from customers and content providers is not the way
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.
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.
Do you have any idea how much it costs to get uncontended internet? In the US, $300/mo gets you a T1 (1.5/1.5).
For the vast majority of consumers, if they were forced to use an ISP that didn't "sell more capacity than they can deliver", e.g. an uncontended line, they would prefer not to buy internet at all.
The (sad, perhaps) fact of internet service provision is that without pushing contention to 10~20, prices would be beyond the average consumer's desire to pay for internet.
"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.
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.
The main problem with the current state of ISP's is that they *claim* to sell unlimited / no contention internet access and have no intention of ever delivering. Instead they throttle, block, apply qos, or otherwise impose a hidden limit on the bandwidth you are allowed to use.
If you want to limit the used bandwidth, go ahead. Just spell out exactly what those limits are in a contract with your customers.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
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.
... 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.)
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
they would prefer not to buy internet at all.
Mmm, no. They'd prefer to buy internet with speed appropriate for their desired price range.
For the ISP it's much easier to compete by marketing bullshit speeds they have neither capability nor intention to actually deliver. Competing on price would be much more of a pain, not to mention that the big guys lose the advantage of wider throttling gains than the smaller ISPs can achieve.
without pushing contention to 10~20, prices would be beyond the average consumer
It's not a question of contention, it's a question of labels. It would be entirely possible to sell exactly the same service as today, with the exact same infrastructure as today but with an accurate label. If the connection is throttled, fine, sell the connection as whatever the throttling is at. Consumers don't want that? Then let them go to the more expensive competitor that actually upgrades its infrastructure.
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.
Then the problem is with the ISPs. I get a dedicated 100mbit line to my servers in the Netherlands for less than $200/mo. Dedicated... I can keep it tied at max capacity, both ways, 24/7 if I want. It's not just 100mb to the switch, where it gets squeezed into a micro-mini pipe to the world like they do here in America.
No, I routinely hit peak throughput when serving heavy loads to clients all around the globe. I don't just hit it once either, there were times when all four of my boxes saturated their lines - 400mbit out, just for cheap little me. Meanwhile, I've visited local datacenters that have less aggregate bandwidth across their 50-60 cages, than I have in a half-rack.
So then, if the Dutch can sell me such plentiful bandwidth so cheaply, why can't these two-faced half-bred North Americans do even better with their big bucks and big business ? We had 10mb cable a decade ago. Where my fiber ? Where's my fucking fiber to the downtown high-density tech-capital home ?
Idiots, there is no other explanation. Lazy lying idiots.
-Billco, Fnarg.com