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Bell Canada Throttles Wholesalers Without Notice
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Mar 25, 2008 05:53 AM
from the because-it's-my-last-kilometer-that's-why dept.
from the because-it's-my-last-kilometer-that's-why dept.
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."
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[+]
Net Neutrality Debate Intensifies In Canada 163 comments
MrShaggy tips us to news that the debate over Net Neutrality in Canada is coming to the forefront following the recent discovery that Bell Canada was throttling P2P traffic on the access it had sold to wholesalers. Michael Geist's blog notes a video recording of comments from a member of the Canadian government, as well as coverage from Canadian media. From Ars Technica:
"The Canadian government has in the past pushed the CRTC to deregulate the telecom industry, an approach still backed by Minister of Industry Jim Prentice. Prentice also wants to stay out of the current net neutrality debate, which would seem to be a de facto vote against the idea. He was asked in the House of Commons this week whether his government would do anything about the current Bell/Rogers traffic-shaping controversy. According to the Globe & Mail, Prentice said only that "we will continue to leave the matter between consumers on the one hand and Internet service providers on the other."
[+]
Technology: Bell Canada's Misinformation About Throttling 120 comments
rsax writes "Bell Canada's chief of regulatory affairs Mirko Bibic has been attempting to justify the throttling of the last-mile connection to independent ISPs. As is typical, Bell Canada is abusing people's confusion between issues around Network Neutrality and the last mile natural monopoly. If people continue to confuse these two related but separate issues, Bell Canada and other incumbent phone and cable companies will win this critical debate."
[+]
Technology: Vuze Study Exposes P2P Throttling By Canadian ISP Cogeco 117 comments
urbanriot writes "Despite a growing number of complaints on the popular North American consumer broadband site BroadbandReports, employees working for the Canadian cable internet provider Cogeco have publicly denied interfering with torrents on their network. However, a recent plugin put out by the Vuze team exposed Cogeco of being the second worst ISP globally, of those tested. So far, Cogeco has failed to respond to these findings, but recent coverage from the mainstream media and Michael Geist may prompt them to finally admit to their controversial practices."
The report by the Vuze team has some interesting information about other ISPs from around the world as well. Prior to this, Bell Canada was taking most of the flak in Canada for traffic management.
[+]
Bell Canada Launches Its Own Online Video Store 106 comments
rsax writes "Bell Canada recently announced that it is launching a downloadable video store just as it is caught up in a government inquiry into its traffic-shaping practices. Some consider this a conflict of interest since several content providers were in the process of distributing TV shows using P2P technology before the Bell throttling issue started getting media coverage. Bell's FAQ states that it is not available for Mac users right now (and not Linux either of course) because they are using Windows Media DRM. They do, however, invite feedback on their site."
[+]
Technology: Canadians Organizing a Rally For Net Neutrality 125 comments
taylortbb writes "Canadians are fighting back against Bell Canada's traffic shaping (recentlly discussed by Slashdot here and here) by organizing a rally in support of network neutrality. The rally is being backed by a long list of organizations including Google, two major political parties, three ISPs, and two major unions. It's set for Tuesday at 11:30am on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The only question that remains is, will the government listen?"
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Share the road (Score:3, Funny)
What is the result of the throttling? Is it lost connections, or is it just a slowdown of service? If it is just slowdown, I don't think these bandwidth hoggers have a claim. OTOH, if they are losing connection midstream, they too have a right to the road, even if they need to obey a slower speedlimit.
Re:Share the road (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
However in this case... (Score:5, Insightful)
However in this case, the road doesn't terminate at B, it goes on to C (and so forth). The wholesaler also controls the flow of traffic from B to C (even if the distance is arbitrary or non-existant). Thus the wholesaler in this case is forcing the retailers two roadways to merge in one single lane during peak times.
This isn't about the end users clogging up the highways. This is about the unscrupulous merge sign put up during 'peak' times. The idea is the retailer leased two roadways, and they damn well want to use them. If there are too many cars creating a traffic jam, its up to the retailer to decide who gets to use the carpool lane etc.
Parent
Re:However in this case... (Score:4, Funny)
Let me try to break it down to something simpler.
Imagine there were an infinite number of Supermen. Where would they fit? How super could he be if there are an infinite number of him taking up all the space in the universe?
There wouldn't be any space left for Lois Lane or even the planet Krypton. You sometimes need to remove a few "super" users to make room for the normal people.
Parent
Re:However in this case... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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.
Parent
Throttle Bell Canada! (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Parent
Re:It's not necessarily that easy (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Teksavvy supplies it's own bandwidth, and only leases the 'last-mile' connection from Bell Canada.
2) Teksavvy does oversell, but currently keeps up with it's traffic even at peak times.
3) Bell is throttling P2P on Teksavvy's last-mile, even though it has little impact on their ability to provide service to it's own customers.
4) The type of throttling they are doing is interfearing with QoS systems in routers that ensure VoIP works. It is causing reduced quality in VoIP services.
5) Selectively throttling specific protocols is a slippery slope. What's to say that they don't decide that VoIP is the next service that gets eliminated because it competes with their local phone service?
This is a blatant attempt by Bell to remove a competitive advantage from competing ISPs.
Parent
But what about the CBC? (Score:5, Interesting)
We hope you enjoyed tonight's show! As announced, CBC is happy to present Canada's Next Great Prime Minister to you as a DRM-free bittorrent file [www.cbc.ca] which you can download, share & enjoy. First, pick which file you want to download:
Xvid AVI at 720x486
or
264 MPEG-4 at 320x240
Maybe marketplace should do a story about Bell and Rogers regarding this throttling...
The answer is always the same (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
How to Escape Bell in 4 steps (Score:5, Informative)
I got to keep my phone number, but it cost me some $$: to be sure that the number is not reassigned before it is transfered, I followed these steps:
1- sign up with Babytel
2- send a "number portability" form, signed, by fax to Babytel
3- wait 30 days for the move to be done
4- profit! Bell cuts off my phone line automatically when the number is gone.
Total cost: 1 month's fees due to the overlap (25$ Bell line + 12$ for the Babytel line).
Total hassle: fill and fax 1 form, email twice to Babytel to know the procedure and confirm.
Total time spent with Bell: no phone, no mail, just the final bill for the amount of 0$.
Parent
It's not throttling... (Score:4, Funny)
Which is how they learned to spell Canada, by the way. C, eh! N, eh! D, eh!
/Dives behind desk before the RCMP polites me to death, because I've been waiting for a proper Canadian thread to use that joke and couldn't hold back anymore. With credit - I think - to Bob and Doug.
The problem is overselling (Score:4, Insightful)
The Censorship Tag (Score:4, Insightful)
You are soooo wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
1. Bell is throttling P2P traffic between 4:30PM and 2AM. This affects BitTorrent and all other forms of P2P
2. All other traffic is full speed
3. All P2P is capped at about 30kbps between said hours
In fact this is exactly what they do to their own Sympatico users but now applied to all 3rd party resellers.
Parent
Re:Just before everyone gets excited.... (Score:5, Informative)
All blacklisted (or non-whitelisted, we're not sure yet) traffic is throttled to 60KB/s from 4PM to 5PM, and from 30KB per second from 5PM until 2AM.
There are two problems with your load-balancing allegation:
1) Load balancing would imply that provisioning of available bandwidth would be balanced, rather than limited to very specific thresholds
2) Users reported that speeds were perfectly fine before throttling; the network was able to handle all load without throttling or balancing. In order for load balancing to make sense as an explanation, there would have to have been congestion.
Further problems are that when blacklisted traffic is detected (P2P, for example), the users' entire connection is throttled (killing off VoIP service even with QoS). If the user is using a whitelisted service (HTTP), no throttling is performed. This IS protocol-specific.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Just before everyone gets excited.... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
- $15 a month for economy service (~50 gigs limit)
- $30 a month for standard service (~200 gigs limit)
- $45 a month for premium service (~500 gigs limit)
- $100 a month for unlimited
That's a similar structure to how electricity, water, and phone utilities are priced for consumers (albeit with differing dollar amounts). And yes I think that's entirely fair. The more you download, the more you should pay, because you are hogging more bandwidth than I am.
And the internet utility can take the extra dollars and use them to buy new servers and lay additional cable to support their high-demand customers, rather than block access to P2P or Itunes.com.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
http://teksavvy.com/en/resdsl.asp?ID=7&mID=1 [teksavvy.com]
Though I don't know if the graduated pricing is shared with the wholesaler.
Parent
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].
Parent
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
TekSavvy charges $30/mth for 5mbit down 800kbit up DSL, with 200GB cap, $0.25 per GB over (averaged over two months), or $10 for 100GB. There is also an unmetered cogent-only service for $40/mth.
Pretty much everybody has caps/overage charges these days. Clearly the fact that ISPs are still throttling despite the incredibly low caps indicates that the throttling is about profit, not congestion.
Parent