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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."
I would think it would be. If you're selling something to someone, and you change what you're selling them, then you've just broken your contract.
It doesn't surprise me at all that Bell would do such a thing, though. I've got a Bell cellphone w/3 year contract. They've added charges left, right and center since I've got it. So I'm tied in, but they're not. I'm going to bitch like hell about this month's bill, though, as the extra charges alone are almost twice what my original contract was for.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
This is what happens when you create a regulatory body by appointing former industry insiders and lobbyists. You get a body that exists to protect big telecom from the consumer. The CRTC only is able to prosper because the average Canadian has no idea just how much worse they make their life. I've had enough I say we move to get rid of them once and for all.
It's recognized by even the most free market-fanatic economists that the government has a responsibility to break up monopolies.
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.
ISP's have two options as their networks become more and more utilized:
1) Expand the network capacity by laying new line, enabling higher throughput of the entire system. This method will incur great cost, but will not create new customers, nor lose customers, nor will it increase profits over current offerings.
2) Throttle network usage to fit current utilization into current infrastructure in a more manageable fashion. This method will incur significantly lower costs than option 1 (lawsuits included), but will not create new customers, nor lose customers (as we are the only provider available to them), nor will it increase profits over current offerings.
What say ye, shareholders?
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
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
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.
So basically what happens is:
Bell's solution: Our customers are leaving to 3rd-parties because they're tired of getting screwed by our messed-up policies and cruddy service. But wait, we control a small part of the lines that 90% of the competition uses. So, in order to not lose customers, as opposed to fixing the issues, we'll just give everyone the same problem and to make their customers' connections suck too.
Sorry, but the "we're screwing everyone equally" answer doesn't add up.
It's plainly anti-competitive, all you have to ask is:
If Bell didn't have the ability to interfere with 3rd-party connections, would this issue exist, and would the other ISP's gain customers. If the issue wouldn't exist, or the other ISP's would gain customers, then Bell is abusing their control of the lines and monopoly therein.
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