RSSBell Canada admits to throttling broadband P2P traffic
By Tim Conneally | Published March 26, 2008, 11:57 AM
After an accusatory finger was pointed at Bell Canada for shaping traffic before it even reached ISPs, the company has admitted to the act, saying it has the right to do so.
Bell Canada says it implemented "load balancing to manage bandwidth demand," but did so without informing ISPs or customers. Canadian ISP Teksavvy, a service reportedly popular among P2P users because their traffic is not throttled, first noticed the "load balancing," and confronted Bell.
In October, Bell Canada's ISP Sympatico admitted that it had been using Internet traffic management measures on BitTorrent, Gnutella, Limewire, Kazaa, eDonkey, eMule, and WinMX which representatives said "use a large portion of bandwidth during peak hours." It was mentioned a number of times in Sympatico's support forum that it had been done only during peak hours to provide fair bandwidth allotment for all.
Bell Canada acknowledged that all BitTorrent and P2P traffic is now affected, not only for Sympatico customers, but to customers of other ISPs who have connections through Bell. Customers have speculated that it has been done to prevent other ISPs from offering faster connections -- an anti-competitive measure -- and have begun a letter writing campaign to the Canadian Competition Bureau.
The group letter reads, "Bell Canada has overstepped its authority and are flexing their muscle (infrastructure control) to impose their will on independent competitors. I am a customer of an independent ISP who has purchased bandwidth and my provider is at the mercy of this underhanded tactic being employed by Bell Canada."
The telecommunications company plans to have systems fully in place by April 7 to fully control bandwidth consumption. Bell claims to have the right under contract to do so, and leaves ISPs no choice but to accept it for the time being.
Net neutrality is a topic of great debate in Canada, as traffic throttling has become commonplace there. Rogers Yahoo was one of the most publicized instances of P2P traffic shaping, but now that Bell Canada is automatically doing it, many ISPs throttle traffic simply because they must.
No reply had been received from Bell Canada as of press time.
Quoted from a Bell/Sympatico notice recently posted in other forums had this info in it. As Bell/Sympatico would never release the actual numbers, Here is somewhat of an extrapolation.
"Important Usage Billing Changes
dated March 13, 2008"
"only 5% of our base exceeds 60GB/month. In fact 82% of customers stay under 10GB /month."
This leave 13% of customers using between 10 and 60GB/month.
So using the above info at worst case usages:
82 x 10GB = 820GB
13 x 60GB = 780GB
820GB + 780GB = 1600GB
1600GB/95 = 16.8 GB
In effect 95% of Sympatico's own user base average about 17GB a month at worst.
Now lets say the other 5% use 500GB a month on average per user:
5 x 500GB = 2500GB
1600GB + 2500GB = 4100GB
4100GB/100 = 41GB
so as per Bell/Sympatico's numbers: overall, I don't see a real issue here with total amounts of bandwidth used, as 41GB is not a huge amount in our present internet world....
So what is the real reason for capping and traffic shaping?
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|Hmmph! Read more over at DSL-Reports
http://www.dslreports.co...nfirms-Throttling-92973
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|Ridiculous act.. Consumers like us are really helpless to these monopoly corporates.
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|How are you helpless? If you and enough people stop being customers of any company, they will be forced to change. Attitudes like "We're helpless" are just what corporations LOVE to hear. Then they know they've brainwashed you.
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|This goes to show how much you know before posting a comment like that. All Other ISP's in Canada that are not on cable go through Bell. So it does not matter what company you go with as they ALL get throttled... So tell me, those who don't want Cable (which is also throttled here BTW)are supposed to go where again?????
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|Is Verizon the only smart ISP in North America? They don't throttle internet traffic at all on their FiOS internet service.
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|Verizon is not the only smart ISP in NA.
Videotron is also.
But don't think it's heaven... They are all bas**** at on point...
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|Videotron throttles also!
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