CAIP, TekSavvy, Bell and Throttling

photo credit: mrbill
CBC just had two pieces on the throttling fiasco that’s still going on. One was an interview with Bell’s Mirko Bibic by Spark, the other was from The Current.

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!