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CRTC Rules Bell Can Squeeze Downloads
pparsons writes "Bell Canada Inc. will not have to suspend its practice of 'shaping' traffic on the Internet after a group of companies that resell access to Bell's network complained their customers were also being negatively affected. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission today released a decision that denied the Canadian Association of Internet Providers' request that Bell be ordered to cease its application of the practice to its wholesale customers."
it indicates that the process they call "shaping" is not actually "shaping" the traffic.
after a group of companies that resell access to Bell's network complained their customers were also being negatively affected
That's a misleading statement. Bell resells access to its DSLAM- the "last mile" of copper to users. Generally Bell does not provide a backbone internet connection to independent ISPs. Bell is, in essence, altering the traffic of users and ISPs because Bell is the middle-man, and they want to reduce the differentiation between their internet service (Sympatico) and competitors. As I understand it, Bell has not produced any evidence as to what it costs to have traffic crossing their DSLAM.
An example of how this works (at least how I understand it) is via the company Teksavvy. Teksavvy buys bandwidth from ISP backbones, and resells it to consumers. In order to get a DSL line to the consumer, Teksavvy has to go through Bell because Bell has a de facto monopoly on the installation and maintenance of copper lines. Bell connects the copper line at the user's residence to a Bell DSLAM, which in turn is a network switch that connects to Teksavvy's network (and then on to the backbone). Bell manipulates the traffic crossing their DSLAM from consumers to Teksavvy.
The ruling here was simply that Bell Canada isn't doing anything different for their resellers' customers than what they're doing for their own customers. Basically, the question before the CRTC was, is Bell hindering their resellers' customers in an unfair way? And the answer was, no, they treat their own customers the same way.
As to whether "traffic shaping" should be occurring at all, whether with respect to their own customers or their reseller's customers, that is still to be discussed in a separate hearing that starts next July.
To summarize: this really has nothing to do with "traffic shaping". That hearing is yet to come.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Starting some sort of grassroots "look what the CRTC does to you" campaign on the internet listing everything from degrading HD picture quality and sound in the name of "protecting Canadian advertisers" to allowing the "system access fee" on cellphones to exist. Right now if you ask the average Canadian what the CRTC is and what it does, they don't know. When you tell them what they do- they get angry. Inform everyone and we can maybe make a change
Anon coward is right. Traffic shaping is perfectly legitimate way to make sure that your links are used fairly and efficiently without actually dropping packets. You hold a few packets back in long lasting streams to allow other low latency streams better service and then let them go later. What they are doing is best described as traffic limiting, even if they use traffic shaping to help with this and they are just avoiding calling it what it really is.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
The topic is misleading; the decision made was that Bell was not unfairly discriminating aganist wholesale providers (like Teksavvy) versus their own customers. The CRTC has not yet reached a decision about the whole issue of traffic shaping in general (though they did find that Bell had enough justification to implement it against their wholesalers so as not to discriminate against direct customers). Michael Geist explains it better.
Tomato/MLPPP http://fixppp.org/index.php?p=documentation Tomato/MLPPP is a fork of the popular Tomato firmware (http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato) for consumer broadband routers. The primary goal is to enable users to bond multiple DSL connections using MultiLink PPP (MLPPP), and/or to circumvent Bell Canada's DPI-based throttling by using MLPPP on a single DSL line.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world > > Those who understand binary and those who don't
In Alberta at least, this has ended, you can order "dry pairs" now.
No, it's recognized that they need to break up monopolies abusing their powers to prevent competition from being established or surviving. Monopolies that exist because no other competitors are willing or able, absent market manipulation by the company with the monopoly, to enter the market are okay.
These are rare, however, they exist.
Phone companies monitor their networks, and may monitor calls carried on their network - it is their network
They may incidentally monitor phone calls as a part of normal operations (the lineman plugs into your pair while troubleshooting a problem somewhere) but they don't have the right to just monitor your line for the hell of it.
and you give up your right to privacy (at least privacy from the phone company)
Says who?
I hate to side with telecoms on anything, but in this case I think I need to - as long as people sign up to use a service on company X's network, company X can do whatever they want with the packets that find their way on to the network
I disagree. We've given the telecom industry billions of dollars in tax breaks and preferential treatment (codified monopolies, rights of way, etc) to assist them in building their networks. We have the right to have some say in how they manage those networks. If they want a true free market system then let's bring it on -- I'd love to be able to negotiate with the telephone company for royalties on that pole they put on my property.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.