Gov't Docs Reveal Canada's Net Neutrality Enforcement Failure 109
An anonymous reader writes "An investigation into the enforcement of Canada's net neutrality rules reveals that virtually all major Canadian ISPs have been the target of complaints, but there have been few, if any, consequences arising from the complaints process. Michael Geist obtained internal CRTC documents on all net neutrality complaints and found
that Rogers was the top target, primarily for throttling access to World of Warcraft. Other notable cases include Bell throttling access
to hotfile.com and Barrett Xplore, a satellite Internet provider, rendering VoIP unusable. Despite the revelations, there have no fines, no audits, and the CRTC has even refused to investigate some cases that appear to raise obvious net neutrality concerns."
For remote locations it's great! (Score:4, Informative)
I work with a couple oil companies here in Alberta, and at their drilling sites you'll usually only have internet via a shared connection from data logging companies.
You barely get high-speed, but if you use a lower quality codec and are careful about setup the call quality is as good as a cell phone call. Which compared to nothing makes satellite internet awesome! :)
-Matt
Re:VOIP via satellite? (Score:4, Informative)
My thoughts exactly. VoIP is my day job and I can tell you that once pings exceed 200ms things get questionable. If there's low jitter, it can work and just have a delay like old intercontinental satellite PSTN links, but usually this is not the case. Any satellite connection using fixed dishes and thus geostationary satellites (a.k.a. everything marketed to home users) has an absolute minimum latency caused by the "last mile" of 472ms. This could only be achieved at the equator, anywhere else would be farther away and have greater latency but I don't feel like doing the math for Canadian latitudes.
tl;dr: VoIP on consumer satellite internet connections is stupid, end of story.
Re:VOIP via satellite? (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry to rain on your parade... But ping latency has little to do with voice quality(unless you are using a horrid codec that has super crappy buffers...).. most of the quality comes from jitter.. (Packet to packet delay) as long as you have a fairly steady stream of packets moving (IE your buffers don't run empty then get a wack load of packets then go empty for a while again) You quality should be fine... if there is a large amount of latency you will start to get an echo if poor/cheap handsets are used... but with a proper/robust echo cancellation this can be overcome... But once you start hitting 800+ ms of latency the talking delays do get annoying but the quality is still there.. Please stop using latency as a measurement of VOIP quality... what your really looking at is jitter... on FDD networks with high latency thats usually a sign of high congestion and you will get alot of packet clumping which is the real reason why quality starts to go to crap(The codec can't handle that amount of clumping hence the inconsistent quality of the VOIP call)...