The interview with Nora Young of Spark went over general issues of net neutrality, which is why my questions weren’t asked. My questions were a bit more technical and Nora felt they were already answered either in The Current or an article in The Gazette. I’m still not content despite these three pieces.

I’ll lay out my biggest problems with the interviews so far: They all include Bell claiming they need to do this to maintain network integrity, they give no explanation of where the congestion occurs or why they moved their throttling from the transit level to the DSLAM level, and they fudge the differences between wholesalers and resellers.

For example, from the Gazette article:

What they do instead is they buy a wholesale, end-to-end Internet product and put their brand around it. Then they don’t have the ability to manage their own network. It’s the same network shared between retail and wholesale. Those ISPs that bothered to invest in their own infrastructure, this problem doesn’t affect them. The use of the term “leased lines” isn’t quite accurate and I see that in a number of newspaper articles. It’s a very, very important point.

If it’s wholesale, it’s not an end-to-end Internet product. If it’s wholesale, the ISP has to provide their own transit. Bell will just provide the point to point connection that connects the user to the ISP. The ISP provides the connection to the internet. TekSavvy is not an end-to-end Bell technology. It just takes one trip to their DSL sales page to realize that.

This service is intended as a two-tiered option where you can go DSL Unlimited over Cogent (5ms to 15ms more latency) or if you prefer a premium option, DSL over Peer1 (premium routing). The difference between Unlimited and Premium Capped service is in its use of internet onramps. Call for further details!

TekSavvy, along other wholesalers like Eagle.ca, is being throttled even though they’re using an entirely different transit provider. The big question is whether or not this is covered under the tariff as reasonable network maintainence. Is the DSLAM the point of congestion? Is throttling there necessary to maintain the integrity of the network? Is Bell even entitled to throttle at the DSLAM level? No one has tried to answer this.

My inclination is “no.” All of the ISPs that built up transit capacity were able to handle the traffic without their customers complaining. The throttling has impacted all sorts of traffic, not just peer to peer, which isn’t even as big of a hog as YouTube. There are scads of problems without any transparency or even demonstration of why the throttling has to occur at the DSLAM, let alone whether Bell should be allowed.

As the CEO of TekSavvy says,

This is the exact problem and where Bell doesn’t get it. TekSavvy and all third party ISPs are paying for a “slice” of this network, so no, it’s not Bell’s at that point. They’re paid to make sure the infrastructure remains in good shape, but they’re not paid to police it! The flaw in Bell’s thought is in their not understanding that we’ve paid for the right to this space… We’ve paid for multiple Gig-E connections for the data to flow back to; we’ve paid for the DSL aggregation interface (AHSSPI) and we’re also paying on a per user basis (approx $20/month) to have the data relayed directly back to our main point of Interconnect.

So, in short, no, they don’t have rights to this network segment… An easy analogy would be a landlord, who is managing an apartment, gives himself a key to come in and out as he pleases and on top of that decide which tenants friends they let in! I’m not sure about you, but I’m fairly certain, one; the tenant would call the police, but two; you’d land up with a very big black-eye!

The plan of defense right now appears to be writing to your MP (you can look up the appropriate mailing list based on your postal code) and the Minister of Industry Jim Prentice. There’s an easy, convenient mass mail form set up by the Council of Canadians. I’ll be writing a snail mail too.

Also, it can’t hurt to sign the neutrality.ca petition.

With MobileMiser you can set up what they call callback direct. You associate your destination with one of three phone numbers. When you dial this number you get a busy signal like any callback, and then MobileMiser will connect you to your associated destination without any extra dialing. Very cool. This is great for people whose phones don’t have a calling card feature or don’t let you use your contact list in the middle of a call.

Because it’s a callback it is a little more expensive than a dialthrough. I’ll give an example using Toronto prices. Renting a DID (essentially a number for people to dial) generally costs under ten dollars per month plus $0.011 per minute incoming. Outgoing is about $0.02 per minute in Canada/US. Of course volume discounts apply, and I do see some emerging DIDs that have unlimited minutes, but in general the trend I see is outgoing calls cost more than incoming calls to Toronto. A callback that has to make two outgoing calls is going to cost more than a callthrough that has one incoming call and one outgoing call.

So, is the convenience of having this associated number worth paying MobileMiser‘s 4.9c per minute over xpresscall‘s 3.33c per minute? Not to me, but still, very cool feature.

Neutrality.ca has just shown a glimmer of life. It’s said that it’s been migrating to a new owner for about a month now. This time Kevin McArthur has posted a few links before the handover. He’s also begun to bring up his old sites.

There’s no Canadian clearinghouse of neutrality information in his links. Canucks are sleeping through the debate and the lack of a Canadian clearing house isn’t helping things.

The current neutrality.ca site is pretty bare:

Net Neutrality Canada

Thank you for your support, this site is currently being migrated to a new owner. Please check back soon.

In the mean time if you are looking for information on Net Neutrality, please see the following URLs

• Michael Geist
• Move On [USA]
• SaveTheInternet.com [USA]
• Digital-Copyright.ca
• Online Rights Canada
• CIPPIC
• Electronic Frontier Foundation

The shutdown of this site had some collateral damage. If you are not looking for neutrality.ca we will be restoring these domains shortly.

Thanks,

Kevin McArthur
StormTide Digital Studios Inc

I’m always on the look out for ways to get cheaper airtime. My plan includes free incoming calls while I’m in my local zone, so when I heard about Jajah I saw an opportunity. What Jajah does is call both you and your recipient, then form a bridge between you two. Now rather than being an outgoing call on your cell phone it’s an incoming call. The person who initiates the call will have to pay Jajah, about three cents US per minute in the US and Canada. That’s a lot cheaper than using my package minutes!

Unfortunately my phone isn’t officially supported by Jajah. Even worse, I can’t install any J2ME applications that aren’t approved by Fido. I could just use a callback instead, but what kind of geek would I be if I didn’t at least try to work around this?

I discovered that Jajah submits its requests through either a SMS or a HTTP request. Jajah has two numbers to send SMSes to, unfortunately neither one was reachable from my phone. The US shortcode wasn’t routed from Fido and the European one returned an error in German. Oh well, I get free data but not SMS, so this is no big loss for me.

There are four basic requests you can make over HTTP. You can place a call, request your balance, request the number you’re calling from, and change the number you’re calling from. All of these requests require a numeric user ID and PIN. Unfortunately, these aren’t related to your typical Jajah username and password. I noticed that my PIN stayed the same even after I changed my password so it’s likely randomly generated when you create your account. Not to worry, it’s not difficult to find.

To get your username and password, first log in to Jajah and download the client from the mobile tools page.

The make and model of the phone doesn’t matter, just make sure you select Download to PC. Save it to somewhere easy to find and then extract the JAD file. Open it in notepad to and look for your USER-ID and USER-PIN fields.

With these UID and PIN numbers you can construct a number of URLs in order to make Jajah requests. I’ve hacked up something in javascript to help. If you point your JavaScript-enabled phone to my script (conveniently located at http://imaddicted.ca/other/jajah-javascript.html – doesn’t that have a nice ring to it?) you’ll find four text boxes, four buttons and three radio buttons.

Anything you do will require you to enter in your User ID and PIN. Making a call will also require your destination number, changing your origin will require your origin number. There are three different modes of operation for this script: Bookmark, Go to and Link.

The most convenient method would be Bookmark. When you select Bookmark and click one of the buttons the script will attempt to create a bookmark that’ll carry out the function you selected. Unfortunately, this is an Internet Explorer only feature and doesn’t work on my phone. Maybe Pocket PC users will have some use for it.

The next best option is the Link feature. This will create a link for you to bookmark. I noticed that my Hiptop2 doesn’t update the link text but it does update the link URL, so it’s still usable. For those whose phones don’t support that particular javascript method there’s one more hope.

That hope is the Go to method. What this feature does is execute the command by moving your browser to the command URL. After it has executed you can bookmark the page you’re taken to in order to save yourself some effort next time.If the Go to feature doesn’t work, well, you’ll need to construct the URLs yourself. Have fun!

Tip: Right now there’s no validation at all on this script. Remember to properly format your phone numbers: Use three digit country codes and remember your area codes. Americans and Canadians, your country code is 001.

Tip #2: I’ve got some plaintext sample URLs posted.