Well, I’m throttled
Update: Check out the damage that Bell (BCE, BCE.TO) has done. All traffic has fallen two third to three quarters. This includes UDP, which BitTorrent does not use for its payload. Why did its traffic go down then? Kudos to TekSavvy for being so transparent. They aren’t saving any money on this either, they were not forewarned so signed commitments for 2.6 gigabit of bandwidth with the expectation they’d grow to meet that. Now they’re far below so overpaying tremendously. Now, back to the original story.
I’m about to be throttled. Unfortunately I had to hear about this from an American site. Here’s the story as it unfolded: Page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4. Once again, here’s my HTTP mirrors for NIN’s Ghosts, and for Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister.
To understand the debate you have to know a little bit of history about phone lines in Canada. It’s a little like our railroads. We’ve got a huge expanse of land and a sparsely distributed population. In order to ensure that less populated areas would still be served, the state granted a monopoly to Bell with the condition that they serve even unviable areas and give a good level of service.
That state sanctioned monopoly has ended, but Bell owns almost all of the copper going to everyone’s homes. The CRTC wanted to foster competition so in 1997 they forced Bell to lease the copper to smaller, third party ISPs. (Even then Bell resisted.) The ISPs would then provide their own internet connectivity.
It’s important to note that these ISPs are not reselling Sympatico. They are leasing the copper and providing their own connectivity. They’re not congesting Sympatico backbones. And now Bell has started to throttle these third party ISPs.
As TekSavvy’s CEO Rocky Gaudrault puts it in the dslreports forums and article,
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!
I’m with TekSavvy. I’m going to be throttled. What am I supposed to do? I left Rogers to avoid throttling and now this happens. Good luck Rocky.
You can join the regrettably named Facebook group (at least the description was updated to be more accurate.) Also, watch neutrality.ca, michaelgeist.ca and dslreports.com.
