Bell And their Traffic Shaping

[arsenal]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...hrottling.html

Just how bad it is Bell Canada's P2P traffic filtering? Not bad at all, so long as you're happy having your 5Mbps DSL link operate at half the speed of a dial-up modem.

CAIP concludes, "It is fair to say that, in general, for up to 10 hours a day, every single day, customers using applications or accessing content that are targeted (either intentionally or collaterally) by Bell's traffic shaping measures are substantially restricted from enjoying the full benefit of the service for which they have contracted."

Not surprisingly, Bell Canada insists that its system is highly accurate, only throttles P2P, and that all complaints it has seen can be chalked up to other network problems. Its comments largely focus on the need for a DPI-based throttling solution, and the company claims that a full 700,000 users would experience congestion problems by next year if Bell did not roll out its solution.

It is rather amazing what companies can get away with these days, and still be in business.

[Azure]

Doesn't Bell route a lot of the backbone in Canada?

Are we all affected by this?

[Bobblehead]

Their analogy comparing it to roads may seem appropriate, but I'm not sure it really applies.

More and more business is being done via internet - we contract Bell to connect our branch offices across 5 provinces. More and more business is being conducted over the 'Net, data centres aren't necessarily located locally anymore. I'm wondering if "rush hour", as the Bell spokesman puts it, isn't going to become the norm instead of the exception. Similar to the way electricity usage occurs now.

I also believe I read that Bell was throttling any encrypted traffic. So if you encrypt your email.

[Azure]

Another question....I assume Bell is doing this because they lack the infrastructure to handle all the bandwidth.....so why don't they upgrade?

I think Verizon in the US is slowly moving everything over to fiber optic....and their customers don't get throttled. Whereas Comcast isn't....and they DO throttle their customers.

[fredr123]

A more apt analogy might be that of the greedy distillery. Bell's been watering down it's spirits to their most demanding customers in an effort to stretch their limited quantities for all their customers.

[BlackEleven]

Originally Posted by fredr123

A more apt analogy might be that of the greedy distillery. Bell's been watering down it's spirits to their most demanding customers in an effort to stretch their limited quantities for all their customers.

If all customers were paying the distillery a monthly fee for x amount of booze, that would be an accurate analogy.

It's the whole bait and switch part of this that really irks me. Bell never told any of their customers they would be throttled if they used bit torrent, they just implemented in secret and never admitted to it until they were exposed.

I'd use the analogy that its like paying for an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet and then after giving your money over, you're told you can have all the canned tuna you like, but only tiger prawn per person because those are too expensive and the restaurant would go out of business if everyone ate them.

[mykalberta]

Originally Posted by Azure

Another question....I assume Bell is doing this because they lack the infrastructure to handle all the bandwidth.....so why don't they upgrade?

I think Verizon in the US is slowly moving everything over to fiber optic....and their customers don't get throttled. Whereas Comcast isn't....and they DO throttle their customers.

I know and engineer with Verizon, dont expect FIOS to restrict them from shaping when the technology is ready and when they need it. Remember FIOS only deals with the last mile connection to your home, nothing to do with internal backbone BW.

At the moment shaping net work equipment isnt robust enough for alot of networks. Bell must be doing something else, possibly port manipulation or IP monitoring because normal shaping wouldnt account for the dramatic loss of speed (5Mbps to 264K).

One other thing. Has anyone tried to setup a new account with Bell and then tried to BT to see what the effects are? Its possible its not shaping at all but manually restricting flow of certain users. Wouldnt account for the 3rd party resellers but...

[Dan02]

http://start.shaw.ca/start/enCA/News...c=n112043A.xml

Bell actually won the throttling case which is completely suprising to me

[Bobblehead]

Originally Posted by Dan02

http://start.shaw.ca/start/enCA/News...c=n112043A.xml

Bell actually won the throttling case which is completely suprising to me

I'm disappointed, but if you read the way the complain was issued, it kind of makes sense. Bell throttled everybody, so it wasn't discriminatory and therefore not anti-competitive.

But I still fully expect other ISPs who had been holding off to start implimenting similar measures.

[MaxPower]

Originally Posted by Azure

Doesn't Bell route a lot of the backbone in Canada?

Are we all affected by this?

I got bone that Bell can route...

[burn_this_city]

Ive noticed over the last year that servers I used to ping at 50m/s or less in the US are now pinging over 100m/s... It really blows for playing FPS when your ping is so terrible.

[BlackEleven]

I dropped Bell because of this a couple months back. And I made sure they knew the reason they were losing a customer.

Unfortunately, the customer service rep I spoke to didn't know what throttling was, let alone that Bell was doing it. She offered to send a technician over to my house to check the connection....

[fredr123]

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3531/125/

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3530/125/

Couple of links from Michael Geist with his take and explanation of the decision.

[Barnes]

Bad bad bad bad bad bad.