Bell Canada Throttles Wholesalers Without Notice 239
knorthern knight writes "The Canadian family-run ISP Teksavvy (which is popular among Canadian P2P users precisely because it does not throttle P2P) has started noticing that Bell Canada is throttling traffic before it reaches wholesale partners. According to Teksavvy CEO Rocky Gaudrault, Bell has implemented 'load balancing' to 'manage bandwidth demand' during peak congestion times — but apparently didn't feel the need to inform partner ISPs or customers. The result is a bevy of annoyed customers and carriers across the great white north."
Throttle Bell Canada! (Score:4, Interesting)
But what about the CBC? (Score:5, Interesting)
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264 MPEG-4 at 320x240
Maybe marketplace should do a story about Bell and Rogers regarding this throttling...
Re:Just before everyone gets excited.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not for anyone else. Even then most of them don't use the proxies for their "business" plans.
And they don't implement them for "load balencing", they get that (well, as close as you can) for free with BGP. They implement them because it saves money.
This is not about transparent proxies, they only affect unencrypted HTTP traffic. It's about low level QoS (Which should be OK if well implemented) or something more along the lines of the recent Comcast stupidity
It's not necessarily that easy (Score:5, Interesting)
E.g., there was at some point an article about what Comcast does. They're not targetting the P2P ports or anything. They just look at which client opens a burst of connections at the same time and has a lot of connections going at the same time.
You'd get throttled just the same if you connected a large extended family or lan party via the same proxy/router to the 'net, and everyone tried to download 5 porn movies at the same time, and repeatedly reload Slashdot while they download. You know, all via the browser, plain old HTTP, on port 80.
Basically it's not as much targeting P2P, as just targeting everyone who doesn't behave like one user with a browser.
Because they're not as much hating P2P, as trying to keep the majority of moms and pops sending emails to their kids happy. Those guys don't open 20 connections at the same time, so they don't notice it.
The problem is, basically: The ISPs oversold the bandwidth _massively_, and I'm certainly not trying to defend that, but it would sorta work if everyone didn't use all that. Or if they all had the same number of connections, so they're all inconvenienced equally. P2P programs don't act like that. They keep opening bursts of connections until they saturate the pipe, everyone else be damned.
Think of the following example, basically. Let's say I'm lucky enough to have an 100 mbit/s Ethernet connection to my best buddy's ISP, and decide to share it with the whole neighbourhood. Essentially, I'd be a mini-ISP there. Now I don't want one guy saturating it all, so let's say I connect everyone to my hub via only 10 mbit/s Ethernet. I'd have enough bandwidth for 10 of them. But I figure most of them are old people and don't surf much, so I let 40 people connect there.
It's already oversold, but let's hope it works out.
Now if everyone used a browser and, say, 1 connection at a time, worst that can happen is that all 40 download a movie at the same time, and they all see 100/40 = 2.5 mbit/s bandwidth. That's only at peak times, so probably most will understand it, and some probably won't even do the maths there in the first place.
But then come some people with P2P clients. Those don't play that nice. If they don't get the whole 10mbit/s, everyone else be damned, they'll open more connections until they do. So now as little as a quarter of my users can saturate my whole backbone connection. The other 75% will suck air through a straw. Their 1 connection vs the two dozen connections of the P2P guys means they'll be happy if they see 100 kbit/s on their downloads. They can probably go brew a cup of coffee even while a simple site like Slashdot loads.
Now they _will_ complain.
That's the ISP's problem in a nutshell: P2P makes the traditional oversell no longer work. A minority of users running P2P stuff full time, can stuff everyone else's pipe, and massively amplify the effects of oversell for everyone else.
Not because it's P2P, but because it opens that burst of connections.
What can you do there?
1. Stop overselling. That costs money, so I don't think the ISPs will do that any time soon. Especially since they dug themselves into a nasty hole where they advertised more and more bandwidth and lower and lower prices, and they can't afford to actually deliver that to everyone. The only way to do that is to raise prices.
2. Start charging per MB, and let free market economics solve who gets how much bandwidth. The moms and pops just reading their emails would probably pay cents, while if someone wants to download the whole internet, well, if they can afford it, why not? Downside, it would be extremely unpopular, and again it's a hole that their own marketing dug them in.
3. Target anyone who opens ridiculous numbers of connections, to stop them from squeezing everyone else out. Downside, it's easy to overdo it, and now P2P users will suck air through a straw and see analog modem speeds.
4. Implement some kind of smart scheduling, so
Re:Just before everyone gets excited.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:However in this case... (Score:3, Interesting)
What seems to have happened from my point of view, is that the wholesaler used to put the resellers before its own retail clients before, and now put everyone at the same level. I expect the wholesaler to be called before the CRTC.
Can't Escape Bell (Score:5, Interesting)
I was actually considering dropping my Bell telephone number to move completely to voip at Teksavvy after I found Bell adding things to my phone bill that I never asked for. Now to go to voip would require me to get dry DSL service from Teksavvy and probably end up paying more per month than I could for a basic phone bill but I'm seriously considering it just to avoid having to talk to Bell any more.
I know that the back end is still run by Bell and that the money I pay for dry DSL would probably mostly get passed on to that company anyway but at least I could trust that nobody could decide to add a long distance plan to my account without consulting me first.
My big concern with moving to voip-only is that Bell will abuse their position to degrade VoIP calls.
Already moved (Score:3, Interesting)
Min
Re:Can't Escape Bell (Score:3, Interesting)
I get that you're probably joking but QoS can make a huge difference from what I understand. And there are cases where providers have decided not to honour the QoS flags on voip protocols. Coincidentally these providers also have a voip offering of their own where they don't have a problem meeting QoS needs.
Re:Can't Escape Bell (Score:3, Interesting)
Since the service and support from teksavvy is so great (not that I often need support), I immediately asked them about their voip plans, and the teksavvy rep actually recommended against using their own voip service, saying it wasn't yet reliable enough (this was about 2 years ago, the situation might have improved).
That level of customer service and honesty is what makes teksavvy so great.
But I digress... I ended up switching to a dry line and vonage. The big piece of advice that I can offer you is to give up on keeping your phone number. It shouldn't be a problem, but the combination of canceling your number (to move to a dry line) and canceling your number (to transfer it to the voip) puts you into some sort of bureaucratic catch-22 situation.
Actually it felt more like a Kafka novel. I spent almost two weeks arguing with bell about it -- with each call having to re-explain the situation to a new clueless and pissy telemarketer.
If you can figure out how to transfer your number AND switch to a dry dsl line at the same time, kudos to you.
Aside from that... once I got my router setup with a good voip-friendly firmware, I haven't had a single problem with my setup, and would recommend it to anyone.
Re:Share the road (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's not necessarily that easy (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, this is the only thing that they should be doing as "overselling" can, and should, be treated as what it is: a rampant case of criminal business fraud. I am quite dismayed that none of these companies are facing the prosecutors yet on charges of false advertising, bait-and-switch, fraud and other lovely items from the crook's menu. As things develop however this is becoming a more and more likely to occur as other prominent commercial entities are begining to suffer from this activity and are likely to begin to lobby the relevant regulators themselves.
In short, it is against the oldest and most firmly established principles of a society based on trade that what you sell is what you are claiming to sell. The entire marketplace operates based on the idea that sellers of crap will get penalized for doing so, no matter how flowery their sales pitch or how fine their fine-print. However in the case of the major ISPs their activities were up to now (unwisely in my view) protected by various governments based on an idea that copper/cable wiring has to be controlled for civic practicality reasons. So the governments, after some palms were greased, chose the worst of all possible choices: instead of municipality owned last mile conduits, they allowed protected monopolies to form to manage the last mile of copper, coax, fibre, whatever. And now we are paying for this.
Fortunately, as I said, the odds of these monopolies getting in serious trouble of criminal nature are increasing rapidly as their activities are pitting them more and more not only against consumers but also against other businesses, many also capable of greasing governmental cogs.
Re:But what about the CBC? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or better yet how about time of day service like electricity. If I download in off peak hours my rates per gig would be lower than when downloading during peak hours. If you don't download at all you just pay the base amount for keeping service.
Re:It's not necessarily that easy (Score:3, Interesting)
What's so dishonest about #4? As a DSL customer (not an ISP) that approach seems perfectly reasonable to me, so long as the ISP is upfront about the average bandwidth that can be expected and not just the peak. I'd much prefer a decent protocol-agnostic load balancing system to bandwidth caps, hidden or otherwise, or the much higher prices that would result from eliminating "overselling". Bonus points if they only throttle connections to their upstream provider(s), as opposed to their own local caches (e.g. Akamai) and other local customers.
I think the per-MB rate idea has merit as well, particularly if different rates can be set for low-latency vs. bulk data (QoS to be set on the client side). Unfortunately, as you said, it would probably be rather unpopular at first, even though it's likely to be less expensive for most users than unmetered bandwidth. There would need to be some way of blocking packets upstream of the ISP, however, so that the customer doesn't get charged for unsolicited port scans and the like.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
They who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We used to have tiered service. Consumers rejected it soundly as soon as services started selling unlimited service.
And it's not "fair" as you put it. We already pay for tiered service. Downloaders usually want faster speed, so they pay more money. We pay different amounts of money for different connection speeds. Adding bandwidth tiers on top of that will turn ISP billing into a horrible mess that is almost impossible for consumers to understand. When that happens, expect the ISPs to start finding ways to screw the consumer by tacking on extra fees for this and that until we end up with something as horrible as cell phone billing is now....
Besides, your plans have lots of problems:
Metered billing for ISPs is a terrible idea. Period. It causes more problems than it solves. ISPs are simply going to have to stop lying to their customers and actually be honest about how much bandwidth they are really providing for the money. As I said yesterday on this same topic, the only acceptable tier system is one that gives people lower priority for bulk downloads so that those transfer don't interfere with casual web surfers' usage, but does so on a continuously-updated basis and does not cut the bulk downloads any more than is absolutely necessary. Description here [slashdot.org].
Re:Share the road (Score:4, Interesting)
Throttling all http connections while I'm using a bittorrent client is the problem. I have no empirical evidence at hand to show that even the bittorrent traffic is throttled. As soon as I make a bittorrent connection, all other protocols are throttled to zero throughput. When I close the bittorrent client all returns to normal. It's that simple. If my http download rate can hit the 3.5Mbps as advertised but bittorrent cannot, and while using bittorrent total bandwidth allowed seems to drop to some 56kbps... well, that is not protecting anyone, it is forcibly throttling my traffic. I can download ISOs using http connections ALL FUCKING DAY LONG... start one P2P connection and I get roughly 56kbps total. What is happening is NOT about managing bandwidth usage, it's about mangling P2P usage.
I would be just fine and happy if all I could get was 3.5Mbps all day long with any protocol. I'd happily share that among my vonage, internet radio, several computers etc. When I open the bittorrent client, all bandwidth is dropped to near nothing and http traffic and smtp traffic (as far as I can tell) are cut off.
So, what you think is merely bandwidth management is actually p2p mangling, pure and simple. This was not always the case, it is something new that TimeWarner has started recently. No, I do not download movies and music illegally, so it is me, the honest user who is inconvenienced by all these anti-file sharing methods. I am penalized by the dimwitted people who think they know how to stop the **AA from dying. It takes a great deal of effort not to take out large WSJ ads telling the **AA to fuck off and die right along with timewarner et al.
Sure, you can say that I signed the contract etc. but god damnit people, I signed up for 3.5Mbps without regard to protocol used. Thanks to my good fortune, in the nice area where I live it's Time Warner or satellite. I don't have a choice of three or four ISP's.
So what is a cable company supposed to do? So many customers, so big is the Internet. How are they to balance the traffic and needs? Well, I can tell you this, it's not nearly as difficult as they would like congress and the fcc to believe. If you promise 3.5Mbps, deliver it or discount the price! period!
If you bought a 1st class ticket to the Orient, and half way through the stewardess tells you that you have the share your seat with someone else and there will be no discount or rebate... well, you have every right to be pissed off. I'm paying for 3.5Mbps worth of room in the tube and I EXPECT to get that much. I don't want half a lane for my car, or a bike path, I want the full passenger vehicle lane width. If my family is in the damn car I don't want to be forced to use the back roads. It really is THAT simple.
If they want to throttle traffic and shape it, then fucking discount the price of the service. period. If you take your car to be worked on and pay for guaranteed workmanship, you don't want to find out later that the work was faulty, that oh, that doesn't apply to YOUR type of vehicle, whether it was in the fine print of the last page of the contract or not.
Re:Just before everyone gets excited.... (Score:5, Interesting)
In late 2007 Bell/Sympatico started throttling p2p to 30KB/s between 5pm and 1am (when you're paying for a line capable of >400KB/s).
IMMEDIATELY all the technically savy customers (like me) **dumped** them and switched to TekSavvy and other competitors. It was only a matter of time before all of us managed to tell all of our friends and family, and bit by bit Bell's customer base was going to be EATEN ALIVE.
I DOUBT LIKE HELL there is actual congestion on Bell's common-infrastructure WAN links inside city limits, before they reach the point where it splits into the Bell-internal network and all the reseller's internal systems.
I GUARANTEE that Bell is just being cheap-asses with bandwidth to the net, and suddenly they discovered that their cheap-assness was NOT flying in the competitive market. So they've invented this reason to throttle everyone (since they control the common infrastructure - the "to the door" bits - that the CRTC *forces* them to re-sell at set rates to competitors).
Here:
Customer----(fat ass pipe)----PeeringPointForResellers------Sympatico-----(cheapass tiny pipe)-----Net
Customer----(fat ass pipe)----PeeringPointForResellers------Competitor-----(fat ass pipe)----------Net
BellSympaticoThink: "oh jeeze, we're getting raped by our competitors, maybe if we claim we're having congestion problems with the "fat ass pipe" that we're being forced to share with our competitors, then we'll have a level playing field? Yeah, fuck-em."
Now:
Customer----(fat ass pipe with packet shaping to make it suck as much as Sympatico)----PeeringPointForResellers------Competitor-----(fat ass pipe)----------Net
"there, now we won't loose any more customers".
FUCK SYMPATICO. I was being lazy about switching away from them, but now I'll do it just to save the $10 a month that the cheaper competition would save me.
PPS: I've been with BellSympatico 8 years, on their most expensive plan, and now I hate their guts and can't stand to pay them money. This is enough to make me want to drop my land line and go with VOIP, even if the latter is shitty quality and service.