(5 votes, average: 8.2 out of 10)
Loading ...Canada’s next great prime-time television experience — throttled by Bell
Yesterday morning I read another note about legacy phone and cable companies throttling competing P2P traffic that mentioned the fact that CBC made the show Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister as a DRM-free file via BitTorrent. I decided to download the torrent files (Yes, both encoded versions — I also wanted to become a seed), and later in the evening I pointed my Neuros OSD to the high quality version and watched it with Rina (my wife).
It was a great show, and Rina (a high-school teacher) spoke about how the kids at school should see it as a form of motivation speech — of just how well a young person can debate the issues.
This is a show that I have to admit I would not have watched except for the fact that CBC decided to do the DRM-free bittorrent experiment. We didn’t watch the show live or set the OSD to record it. I might not even have noticed the show was created except for the distribution experiement.
I was further excited about the possibilities that this could suggest for the future. If I could get more programming in this format, I would easily toss my legacy cable subscription. The problem is that networks have been frightened of distributing content via efficient P2P mechanisms, and even more frightened of allowing us to make our own hardware and software choices (IE: if the file was infected by DRM I could not have watched the show). There are many CBC shows that we love to watch.
The fact I would so easily give up traditional broadcasting services is also well understood by the incumbent broadcast undertakings (In my part of Ontario that is Bell, Rogers and StarChoice), and why there is a conflict of interest when these same companies (Bell and Rogers) have a duopoly on the last-mile connections to our home on top of which we get Internet services. CBC is reporting how Bell is trrottling connectivity not just of its own customers, but of competitive wholesale providers as well. I am a customer of Teksavvy and Storm Internet, and have never considered Bell or Rogers directly given their conflict of interest will always lead to policy problems. I am of the firm belief that the congestion that they are trying to “solve” through throttling was in fact manufactured by these providers in order to justify throttling (IE: the cause and effect are backwards from what Bell and Rogers claim). The technology used for the “last mile” connections are quite slow, and the only legitimate congestion should be on this slow connection, not the extremely cheap fiber lines used to interconnect the rest of North America. While I can understand congestion on the underground cables to other countries, this is not the congestion that Bell and Rogers are alleging exist (are manufacturing) within their own internal networks.
I was surprised that there were no advertisements in the file from CBC. The closest thing to advertisements was a mention of the sponsors of the show: Fulbright, Magna, Dominion institute, and Compas. The envelope with the final winner was brought out by Belinda Stronach, executive vice-chair of Magna international. Frank Stronach, Belinda’s father and chairman of Magna, was the creator of the program. Mr. Stronach had a section of the show where he spoke as well.
The show ended with the text “This DRM-free bittorrent is brought to you by CBC cbc.ca/nextprimeminister”.
I’m looking forward to the next DRM-free bittorrent of high quality shows like this one. I don’t mind paying for them, and I don’t mind there being advertisements in them, but I won’t watch (for free or otherwise) if they are infected with DRM.
Update: Read Guinevere Orvis on the inside story on how CBC gave the go-ahead, and my comment on CBC’s Spark show BLOG about format issues.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Probably the 232nd person to point this out, but just in case..
“kinds at school” should be “kids at school”.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
For a better understanding of what “throttling” is supposed to fix, please read the attached link.
cheers,
Matt.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=1078
March 27th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Bell (and other ISP that do the same thing) need to be fined in the other of billion of dollars so that the message is clear: ISP have no legal right of any kind to CONTROL what i do with the bandwidth i paid for. Bell is now a official criminal company that nobody should ever do business with.
How much money the RIAA/MPAA/CRIA (all criminal cartels and yet still operating in the open) have paid Bell (and rogers and so many other) to order such a massive ultra anti-consumer mesure.
March 27th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Reid,
Thank you, that is fixed.
Matt B,
My answer to your link is in the form of two past articles on this site: “The engineering of a political problem”, which directly referenced that article, and “An ideal future communications infrastructure, how do we get there, and what is stopping us!”.
Throttling wholesale connections is actually an entirely different issue than TCP congestion control, and exist at an entirely different layer of the protocol stack. Oversubscribing of the wholesale connections is something that should be dealt with by legislation, as there is no legitimate technical reason to have congestion at that level. It really is a matter of Bell manufacturing a crisis which it then comes in with their own anti-competitive solutions to fix. Ultimately I suspect the only way to fix the problem is to revoke the last-mile duopoly from the legacy phone and cable companies, which is what I argue in “An ideal future communications infrastructure, how do we get there, and what is stopping us!”.
Mectron M,
Please don’t be distracted by the traditional content industry. The phone and cable companies have their own special interests in transforming the Internet’s end-to-end design into the “dumb terminals, smart network” design which they previously offered. The traditional content industry has as much to fear from this excessive control by intermediaries as the rest of us do.
Read the past article “Trying to understand parliamentarians’ misunderstanding of core new technology issues” for more thoughts on that.
March 28th, 2008 at 9:38 am
“Steve Tilley / General, Bell Canada to BitTorrent junkies: Slow down, tiger
Sniff, sniff. What’s that smell? Oh! It’s just poop hitting the fan. Hitting the fan and spraying hither and yon. Bell Canada is on the receiving end of mucho Intrawebs hatred this week, following the revelation that the company is capping the download speeds of not only its retail customers who use peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing like BitTorrent, but of independent Internet service providers who lease and resell network access from the corporate giant. ( Real actions speak louder than just mere words, send a copy of your complaint to Bell Service@sympatico.ca Assistance@sympatico.ca; executive.office@bell.ca; with a copy to the major news media, all of the MPs too))
As you’ve probably heard if you follow this sort of thing, Ontario-based ISP TekSavvy Solutions discovered that Bell has begun to throttle the download speeds of TekSavvy customers. It’s especially significant for TekSavvy because many of their folks signed up with the company expressly to avoid the P2P speed throttling practiced by most of the larger service providers.
It’s really crappy of Bell to do something like this to network wholesalers without giving them any sort of heads up. Hell, it’s crappy period. But is it a surprise? Not really. If Bell is deciding to shape retail user traffic, it’s no shock they’re pulling the same thing on their partners.
Bell says this is to balance the network traffic load, and that a small number of P2P users are taking up a disproportionate chunk of bandwidth. (Regular web surfing and downloading isn’t affected by the speed caps. Not yet at least.) Opponents say the network was holding up just fine, thanks, and this is a case of bandwidth greed among the small handful of huge companies that control Net access in Canada.
As much as I love to fight for the little guy, and as much I want unfettered, high-speed access no matter what I decide to do with it, I’m not wholly convinced that the Internet should be a completely open highway over which no one has any traffic control.
Net neutrality is obviously an issue when, say, an Internet service provider starts blocking access to a competitor’s website, or when a government blocks access to anything critical of the regime (s’up, China!) Access to information should be open and free, and the companies we pay for said access should not be filtering, censoring or shaping it.
Information wants to be free. Much like Tibet.
But just because a highway is in the public domain doesn’t mean a few guys in gas-guzzling semis should have the right to hog all the lanes and make it more difficult for the rest of us to get around. If a small but voracious minority of P2P users are degrading the online experience as a whole for the rest of us, as the big providers like Rogers and Bell claim, then why shouldn’t these companies exert control over traffic flow?
Or are these companies misrepresenting the truth about the impact P2P users have on the network, and trying to find ways to offset costs, hurt potential competitors and sell more expensive services?
Then there’s the whole argument about the primary use of P2P file sharing in the first place. Yeah, some of it’s legit – CBC released the finale of The Next Great Prime Minister via BitTorrent, and P2P is becoming a more accepted way for companies to distribute large files at little cost – but if you’re sucking down 100 GB of data per month with a P2P client, chances are it ain’t CBC reality shows or pictures of your Aunt Ruthie’s dog. Is it up to the Internet providers to make their service more accessible for people who’s main concern is (gasp) piracy?
Whatever the case, the options for P2P and BitTorrent users in Canada are fast dwindling. If anyone’s got a plan to turn this around, now’s the time to speak out. Just as soon as you’ve finished downloading all three seasons of Battlestar Galactica, of course.
comments
Comment from: Paul Gawlik
The limits for existing Rogers clients take effect April 3rd, which concerns me. When I signed up they had no limits now they are imposing them, but my monthly bill is staying the same. So in effect I now pay the same for less, (That is immoral and Unacceptable, false, misleading advertising, switch and bait application too)
Comment from: Roo Gaboo
Seems most are forgetting that the “Hogs” are paying for the service. The companies are ADVERTISING HIGH BANDWIDTH, are setting monthly limits on downloads, and no matter if you are a downloader or a web surfer, we are paying for the same contract! If Bell and Rogers can’t keep up with their advertised bandwidths they should fix thier networks.
Also, look at who is telling us that downloaders are affecting web surfing, not web surfers, but Bell…
Comment from: Andy Barratt
And it’s sneaky to point the finger at those dirty criminal high bandwith p2p users as the people that are hogging the net.
Reports suggest that:
After more than four years during which peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have overwhelmingly consumed
the largest percentage of bandwidth on the network, HTTP (Web) traffic has overtaken P2P and continues
to grow. Presently, as a result of streaming audio and video in Web downloads, HTTP is approximately
46% of all traffic on the network. P2P continues as a strong second place at 37% of total traffic.
Newsgroups (9%), non-HTTP video streaming (3%), gaming (2%) and VoIP (1%) are the next widely used
applications.
Breaking down application types within HTTP, the data reveals that traditional Web page downloads (i.e.
text and images) represent 45% of all Web traffic. Streaming video represents 36% and streaming audio
5% of all HTTP traffic. YouTube alone comprises approximately 20% of all HTTP traffic, or nearly 10% of
all traffic on the Internet. ”
“it was confirmed by Rocky Gaudrault, CEO of TekSavvy that Bell was “rolling out a full throttling process” and that all BT and P2P traffic on the TekSavvy network would be fully throttled by April 7th. Over the weekend, Digital Home readers said the throttling was occurring between 4pm and 2am. Mr. Gaudrault announcement yesterday means that by April 7th, all traffic will be throttled.
An upset Mr. Gaudrault, who stands to lose many of this customers, told the Globe and Mail that Bell is “screwing with our data, which is not their property” and would be seeking to gain network access elsewhere.”
September 26th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Whats keeping people from starting up their own ISP, with their own hubs… outside of Bell’s grasp?
Money? or policy?