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Bell's Own Data Exposes P2P As a Red Herring
dougplanet writes with news from the Canadian-throttling front: "As ordered by the CRTC, Bell has released (some) of its data on how torrents and P2P in general are affecting its network. Even though there's not much data to go on, it's pretty clear that P2P isn't the crushing concern. Over the two-month period prior to their throttling, they had congestion on a whopping 2.6 and 5.2 per cent of their network links. They don't even explain whether this is a range of sustained congestion, or peaks amongst valleys."
Anyone else find it funny that the article links to a video in it's "rgbFilter podcast"? Could it be that the explosion of streaming video is one of the real causes of network congestion, not a few "copyright infringes"? Never!
Capping transfer per month at ridiculously low levels is not necessary though, they get plenty of money to pay for what people use, and lets face it, this is a quasi-socialist ISP environment, people who barely use their connections are paying for those who use the connection all the time.
Might not be fair, but the ISPs have nothing to complain about, they have been taking peoples money without having to provide much in return to most of them for a long, long time.
FYI, the bandwidth Bell is traffic shaping, which this case arises out of, is (1) not Bell customers (Bell simply provides the last-leg of the DSL connection - the DSLAM, I believe) and (2) not using Bell's backbone internet connection.The traffic is from, for example, Teksavvy (ISP) customers to the Teksavvy backbone. Bell is just an intermediary.
Teksavvy gets last mile copper, and DSLAM to peering location at 151 Front St, in Toronto from Bell. If they had peering at each CO and remote, then Bell really would have no justification to impose throttling. Bell is claiming that some network links between the DSLAM and edges of their network are inadequate. What's particularly greasy is that Bell negotiated transit bandwidth agreements with third party ISPs, and then pulled this throttling crap on them. So Teksavvy negotiates a multi-year agreement with Bell for X Gbps transit, so that they can serve their clients during peak hours and be prepared for anticipated growth of their subscriber base. After being locked into transit contracts, Bell starts throttling during peak hours, thus changing the bandwidth that Teksavvy would need during these hours. Further, they don't provide third party providers information about WHICH clients are throttled, putting third parties at a further disadvantage for planning bandwidth needs. The Supreme Court of Canada just cleared the way for the sale of Bell to interests which are financing the sale to the toon of 34 billion dollars of new debt for a company with annual profits of about 4 billion dollars. I'm not at all surprised that Bell is electing to spend a relatively small amount of money on throttling boxes, rather than making any real investment in infrastructure.
An ISP in Japan will also soon be throttling their user's bandwidth.
Yes, they are creating an upload cap of 30GB per day. Not per month, per day .
I for one, welcome our Japanese ISP bandwidth capping overlords! Please?
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
And they got mighty supporters. Imagine someone being able to create a network without having to shell out millions if not billions just for the infrastructure. In fact, a halfway well off person can start an internet TV network.
A worldwide TV network, just to make matters worse (for those that oppose it, that is).
Can you see how not only established TV networks but also governments don't really like that idea? It's already bad enough that Al Jazeera spills counterpropaganda against Fox, now imagine anyone being able to do that. Worldwide.
I could well see that some governments don't really like that idea one bit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In comparison, the tiny Netherlands with all that cheese and those cows seems to have a lot of consumer ISPs to choose from. Here's a partial list:
Alice Comfort
Argeweb
12move
Abel Telecom
CompuServe
Concepts
DDS
Domestix
EDPnet
Fiberworld
Filternet
GreenOnline
HCC Net
Het Net
InterNLnet
KPN ADSL
Orange
Planet ADSL
Primus
Qfast ICT
Quicknet
Scarlet
Solcon
Speedlinq
SpeedXS
Studenten.net
Supersnel ADSL
Tele2 ADSL
The One Hosting
Tiscali ADSL
TweakDSL
Unet
Vastelastenbond Internet+bellen
xsDSL
XS4ALL tip
ZIEZO.biz
Even bloody Compuserve (yes that one!) will sell you 20down / 1up ADSL for 19.95 euros a month. For another 5 euros a month they'll add PSTN phone termination and a DID. 30 euros monthly for 20 mb down is most typical now. And little traffic shaping if any, to my knowledge.
In fact providers such as XS4all make a political statement against such practices, when they can under legal and contractual agreements, as they do with their statement of privacy too.
For more complete info: http://adsl.startpagina.nl/
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
in socialist Sweden, we have shitloads of examples of government owned monopolies doing very well, and when they got sold out to the private sector, all of a sudden they start effing people over for profit. The electricity market is a very good example of this.
i find your lack of faith in science disturbing!
I am a network engineer. 90% is a really high threshold for calling something congested. Also, 15 minute averages are better than a lot of measurements I've seen, but are far from perfect - lots of "microburst" type activity can cause a noticeable loss in performance over a much shorter period than that.
Bittorrent-type flow patterns do tend to cause microburst issues - it might be that Bell CA needs to implement some more fine-grained measurements to see whether the thresholds are still the right ones for them.
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