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Loading ...More Bell Canada misinformation and misdirection in attempt to justify questionably lawful throttling
In a Network World article by Dave Webb, Bell Canada’s chief of regulatory affairs Mirko Bibic attempts to justify the throttling of the last-mile connection to independent ISPs. As is typical, Bell Canada is abusing peoples confusion between issues around the last mile natural monopoly and Net Neutrality. I increasingly believe that 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.
I strongly agree with Network Neutrality. I am, however, one of those who believe that market forces within a competitive marketplace will be better able to ensure this neutrality than government regulation of TCP/IP based services. In order for this to be possible we need to have a competitive marketplace where those of us that recognize the need to hire ISPs that provide us services based on the End-to-end design principle are able to do so. We will then continue to educate other people about this need as well.
There are times when congestion exists on the Internet (sometimes legitimate, and sometimes not), and customers should be able to hire an ISP that best matches their own beliefs in how to handle this congestion. While I believe that the government should mandate disclosure of routing policies by ISPs, I believe that regulating “Net Neutrality” directly may backfire.
This is an entirely different question than the fact that existing regulation of the “last mile” monopoly must be enforced and strengthened. There will always be a “last mile” monopoly for telecommunications for the same reason there is for roads: it makes no more sense for every telecommunications provider to run separate wires into our homes than for every retailer to run separate roads to our homes.
Solving the Net Neutrality ISP issues through competition requires that a competitive marketplace exist, and that requires that those managing that “last mile” are not able to leverage that monopoly to wipe out competition.
Bell Canada as a company operates in many different markets, and offers a number of different services. In each of these markets they are regulated (or not) in different ways. With Bell ExpressVu they are a cable company, regulated as a “broadcast undertaking” just like StarChoice, and very similar to Rogers when acting as a cable company. They are also a wireless cell carrier, and a ILEC (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier) offering a variety of telecommunications services. They own Telesat Canada, and an interest in CTVglobemedia.
Bell Canada also offers Internet Service Provider (ISP), including through the Sympatico brand. In this case they are using the same “last mile” infrastructure as any other competing ISP, allowing customers to connect point-to-point to their routers. After that point it is an “Internet” service where they offer transit (connections between their Internet routers and those of other ISPs locally and beyond) and other competing Internet-related services (email storage/delivery, Website hosting, DNS, etc).
In most of these marketplaces they operate as a regular private sector company, regulated just like any other competitor in that same marketplace.
There is one of their services where they are different and that is in the provision of physical wiring to our homes. This is a service where Bell was given privileged “right of way” access by various levels of government to place cabling (copper, fiber, etc) below and above public and private land. Bell could never offer this service without government intervention, and the superior property right is the public and private property that the cables run below and above — not the cabling.
Bell was given a number of requirements in exchange for this privileged government intervention. Historically the most often discussed was rural access, where Bell was mandated to offer phone services to rural locations — even at what might otherwise have been a loss, except for the fact that they were given practically guaranteed profits in other markets by the government, as well as massive government subsidies over the years. More recently the condition discusses more often is competitive access to the facilities which the public sector made possible (through right of way and subsidies) to allow services built upon this last mile to be provided by a competitive private sector.
I will state what seems to be the core of the confusion: when it comes to this last mile wiring below and above our property, the service that Bell Canada manages can no more be considered privately “owned” by Bell than Canada Post can be considered private. While the ideal would have been if this specific service had been separated by Bell Canada and operated as a proper crown corporation, we can’t go back in time and fix this problem.
We do have a number of ways to move forward from here. Some suggest that adequate enforcement of competitive access is sufficient. While I might have been convinced in the past, the claims by Bell Canada that their throttling of competitive access circuits is somehow related to P2P Internet traffic suggests that this alone is not going to work.
The type of management that Bell is trying to justify is not legitimately considered Internet traffic at all. In fact they may be violating both the terms of the regulated service as well as federal privacy legislation to inspect the packets within these point-to-point communications to the level to even detect if they contain TCP/IP packets. There is also no legitimacy to their being congestion on these circuits, unless it is temporary due to damage within the network. The speed of the connection between the customer and the ISP (and Bell is *NOT* an ISP in this transaction) is part of the regulation.
Given Bell can’t be trusted to live up to their end of the bargain with governments, it may be time to take back these services from Bell and allow the remaining company to operate the way Bell seems to want to operate. The louder Bell tries to justify their questionably legal activity, the more we need to push to take from the table the option of bell violating their end of the bargain and getting away with it.
We can give Bell a simple choice.
One option would be for this last mile infrastructure to be spun off into a separate company that would then become a crown corporation. Bell can even be given a contract to manage the services of this company for a 10 year period, after which it would be open to competition or to employees of this new crown corporation. With a separate corporate structure, Bell Canada would clearly no longer be able to allege that they “own” this infrastructure, or claim they can manage it any way they see fit.
Another option would be to allow Bell to retain ownership of this infrastructure, as long as they paid a rental fee at a fair price for the right of way, as well as returning any government subsidies — including interest over the last 50 years. We would be fair and only backdate this for 50 years, even though they have received privileges for far longer. It would be clarified that the Crown Corporation would still be created, and while historical right-of-way would be grandfathered, it would be this new Crown Corporation that would own any new last-mile infrastructure.
Given these options I believe Bell will choose the first, given I doubt even Bell with their guaranteed profits over the years could afford to pay back the various handouts from the public purse they have received. At that point we would have a competitive marketplace between competing phone and Internet access companies able to operate on equal footing, each able to build out their own networks using the (mandatory disclosed) policies of their choice. Customers can then read the public reports of these management choices, and hire the phone and Internet access company of their choosing.
Note: As part of the other work I do I look for electronic versions of older government documents (Bills and summaries, statutes, etc). While the 1987 version of the Bell Canada Act is online, earlier versions are not. It would be interesting to have adequate online references for the history of Canadian telecommunications, given how quickly people forget and then believe the “we own it, and we can do what we want with it” rhetoric from the phone and cable companies.
P.S. I participated in IT360 last week, and will BLOG about that later in the week. It just seems like questions around throttling and Net Neutrality are extremely hot at the moment (See ITWorldCanada’s Net Neutrality Resource Centre).
Update: Mirko Bibic did an audio interview for CBC’s Spark, with an edited version appearing on the April 16′th show.
This article was referenced by SlashDot, and people wanting to read additional commentary can read there as well.
CRTC is publishing the various letters on this issue, including the “reply” from Bell, etc.
Related Posts
April 14th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
I don’t believe bell is throttling “the last mile”… that speed is set by the distance and capabilities of the Digital Subscriber Access Module (DSLAM). Bell is throttling deeper into their network, where the customer packets are travelling into the true Internet.
Spinning off the land line and DSLAM business to a third party (crown corporation or not) will not solve the issue. The same could be said for the last mile of coaxial cable from a cable TV operator.
In other articles, you will see that the ISP’s in question that are complaining of throttling are not using their own network… they are completely wholesale purchasing Bell’s Internet service and slapping their brand name sticker on it.
If the ISP’s were to use Bell’s last mile only, and provide their own routing systems and Broadband Remote Access Servers they would have full control over their Internet service (since the last mile is not subject to DPI packet shaping). They would also have to invest many many dollars in core equipment. Bell has a tariffed service for complete access to the last mile infrastructure without the use of Bell’s Internet service. this might be a the best option for these 3rd party wholesale Internet service providers. So the argument for spinning off the last mile to a separate corporation is defeated.
Core Internet routers and Internet transit services (between core Internet providers) cost millions and millions of dollars monthly. Increasing capacity to handle the ever growing traffic can cost millions and millions, while revenues for these services decrease, and I’m sure customers are not willing to handle service price increases to cover theses costs.
While I’m not wholly supportive of the concept of throttling Internet traffic by type (i.e. P2P file sharing), I can understand why the likes of Bell Canada and Rogers want to implement it as a cost saving measure.
April 14th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Troy, Bell is indeed throttling the last-mile and PVC (ATM) traffic. This is called the Gateway Access Service (GAS) and it bought by independent ISPs for approximately $21 per subscriber. These ISPs have their own Internet transit and do not rely on Bell’s IP network connection to the larger Internet.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Troy said: “Bell is throttling deeper into their network, where the customer packets are travelling into the true Internet.”
You would be guessing entirely incorrectly. While it is not physically the copper connection between the customer premises and the DSLAM, it is still “data” (not Internet) packets of a regulated point-to-point service between the customer and the ISP. Bell is *NOT* the ISP in this case, and these are not yet Internet packets until they hit the ISPs router.
In many cases these are “Ethernet” packets, with Bell routing them between the customer and the ISP who are running PPPoE between them. In other cases there is VLANs being used, but it is none of Bells business what the contents of any of these packets are, and whether they contain voice, raw data, or TCP/IP that will be transit over the Internet via the ISP.
I realize that the phone and cable companies are spreading a lot of FUD and misinformation. Those of us who know what a DSLAM is, and aren’t working for the monopolists (either directly or indirectly), have a big job in educating people about these issues.
As to your suggestion that spinning off the last mile services wouldn’t solve the problem — I obviously disagree. Then again, I don’t arbitrarily cut off that last-mile as being the copper loop that doesn’t connect to any other infrastructure any more than a municipality would have roads which connected to driveways but no other roads (including other privately, provincially and federally operated infrastructure roads).
My argument about spinning off isn’t defeated by your comment, only further demonstrated. We have existing regulation giving competitive access to these services, and this was working fairly well. Bell decided they were unwilling to live up to their end of the bargain and decided to throttle the regulated service and go to court to try to claim they shouldn’t be mandated to offer this service. I believe an appropriate response to Bell’s ongoing abuse is to relieve them of management of that service.
April 14th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Troy: ISPs cannot setup their own DSLAMS because Bell does not give access to the “remote CO” located closer to the customer. This means that if the customer is far enough from the main CO facilities they will get a degraded signal. A company I worked for tried this and in many cases we found that Bell’s standard ADSL outran our ADSL 2+ (max 24mbps) service.
Any ISP that tries it’s own DSLAM will learn that the hard way.
Also reseller ISP’s cannot just “slap their own sticker” on Bell’s service. They must pay for connections to Bell’s ADSL equipment, setup their own authentication, and then pay for the outgoing bandwidth as well. Bell charges based on line capacity from the ISP to Bell so you better believe the ISPs pay for whatever their customers use.
You have fallen for Bell’s misinformation campaign.
April 15th, 2008 at 2:01 am
I’ve read all of the comments and confess that I don’t understand most of the technical jargon, the way I see it is, the Internet is as fundamentally as important as the telephone or power company in how we live and work and compete, it should be for the people by the people, if they are not run by the government then should be heavy regulated by the government for the betterment of society with the simple principals of availability for everyone(the cheapest price), the best service(fiber optics ), and privacy assured.
I am just amazed that something that is so important as the Internet is not heavily regulated because the impact this has on our privacy (imagine the equivalence of phone tapping)and business(sending sensitive business and private customer information and being able to do high qulatity video Confercing and other important business transactions)and that more information is being transmitted then any phone call could ever do, is astounding that the CRTC has not regulate this to death
and the public has not staged a protest in the streets is even more amazing
Any company that is given this privilege to provide this wonderful technology and betrays the trust of people (packet inspection, not upgrading to new technologies so they justify outrages prices for faster tier services, major conflict of interest with voip and content material with Rogers and bell) should have it taken away from them. Also I read an article that nortel had equipment so that isp providers could cheaply upgrade their services to 10x or faster, but that they are not so far, why.
April 15th, 2008 at 4:34 am
If there was no traffic shaping to control level of P2P traffic from all the file sharing bandwidth (%80+ total internet traffic), you would still be complaining about some kind of low bandwidth, but it would be low bandwidth in everything you do on the internet including surf your email and chat over instant messaging. With traffic shaping in place, the internet actual runs faster for all of those other applications. Isn’t that the same net neutrality principle. Internet bandwidth is not unlimited, and ISPs constantly pay each others bills for bandwidth that is upcharged or backcharged between each others networks.
An analogy of this issue would be electricity. There is only so much capacity, so if California begins exceeding the capacity of the electric grid from BC shouldn’t BC either charge higher premiums for usage, or limit the amount of electricity that can flow during peak times to California. This additional power consumption from California puts extra cost on BC to generate more power, or purchase electricity from other states and provinces. This model is exactly the same in today’s Internet Service Providers.
April 15th, 2008 at 7:08 am
One key item in countering the Telco/Cableco FUD is to point out that the Telecommunications Act does not differentiate between analog and digital signals - whatever so-called ‘network management rights’ Bell claims in regard to DSL applies to ordinary phone calls as well.
In short, Bell is in fact claiming that they can wire-tap you at whim and cut off any ‘conversation’ they do not want to occur.
This ‘debate’ MUST be “framed” correctly as one of CENSORSHIP and PRIVACY.
April 15th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Troy: Are you a Bell employee perhaps?
I find it hard to believe that someone whose response is so *filled* with mis-information would actually take the time to write.
April 15th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Jacob:
The need or the lack thereof for throttling is not the issue here.
The problem is that Bell is forcing a business decision on their resellers and there is no justification for it since Resellers pay for the size of their link from the Reseller to Bell’s ADSL equipment and then they pay for a separate outgoing link to the internet. If either of these links become full than their customers feel the pain not Bell’s.
Let me make this point again. Since the Reseller pays based on how much bandwidth on both connections that they are using it costs the reseller if the customers use too much not Bell.
Bell actually gains if resellers mismanage their links because the reseller gets slow and loses customers.
April 15th, 2008 at 9:07 am
The real problem is that Bell has oversold “unlimited internet”, similar to overbooking at airlines. Only Bell has overbooked by 10000% and now they don’t want to build the infrastructure to fulfill their side of the contract. I pay for fixed 2 Gb up/download per month they have no business throttling anything I do when I’m within my limits. Throttling must be made illegal. “Unlimited internet” should no longer be sold. Fixed up/download limits must apply and Bell must build the infrastructure to ensure it has the capacity to fulfill its side of the contract.
April 15th, 2008 at 9:08 am
Jacob,
Have any source to backup 80% of traffic is P2P? Nobody was complaining about any service level issues related to speed or bandwidth that had anything to do with link saturation(the speed issues people were complaining about were and are still related to the reliability of the link between the modem and the DSLAM which this throttling won’t solve). The issue wasn’t there until Bell decided to make it up. My internet isn’t running any faster and you don’t need 5Mbps to read your email or chat on instant messaging protocols. Hell, even 56K will suffice for IM.
April 15th, 2008 at 9:44 am
For those of you having a hard time understanding the technical jargon in this article and its responses, here’s the low-down. Oversimplified, your Internet connection goes through 2 layers. First layer, starts at your house and then goes to your local neighbourhood central office. The second layer goes from the central office to the broad Internet. It’s the first layer (i.e. house to central office) that is publicly regulated, and required to be shared with other ISPs. At the first layer the data hasn’t gotten to the Internet yet; at the second layer, an ISP then sends it to the Internet through its own private Internet connections. At the second layer, the ISP can be Bell’s own Sympatico, or it could be anybody else. So when Bell starts throttling traffic at the first layer, it isn’t really trying to save the Internet, as it claims, it is trying to choke the publicly-funded network going to the home.
April 15th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Jacob Chappelle said, “An analogy of this issue would be electricity”
You have the right idea, but merged two separate issues together. As discussed in a previous article, the government of Ontario split the old “Ontario Hydro” into two components: generation and distribution.
The capacity problems you discuss are entirely on the “generation” side, and the potential congestion on the Internet are on the “transit” side (IE: submarine cables, etc). ISPs providing transit services each have to decide policy to deal with potential congestion, and customers can then choose an ISP based on the policy that best matches their needs.
The false claim by Bell, echoed by a few people here that seem to have fallen for Bells misinformation, is that there is a problem on the “distribution” side (IE: connectivity within an urban center, on the connection between the customer premises and the ISP). This is simply false, and there is no legitimate congestion or capacity issues for the “distribution” part of the network. Any congestion within this network must be considered ‘damage’ whether it is congestion of voice or data traffic (Note: It is not “Internet” traffic until it reaches the ISP, at which point it is part of the Internet transit rather than “distribution” system).
I wish people would stop talking about P2P traffic over potentially congested transit networks, as these questions are *OFF TOPIC* for a discussion of the distribution network where this problem simply cannot legitimately exist.
April 15th, 2008 at 10:34 am
Yousuf,
In your attempt to simplify you ended up falling into Bell’s trap.
The “first layer” is all the way from the customer premise to the ISP equipment, not only to the neighborhood CO. ISPs are not allowed to put equipment within every neighborhood CO, and thus this generic point-to-point data service (Not an Internet service yet!) extends from the neighborhood CO to a few specific COs where CLECs (Competative Local Exchange Carriers, ie: competing phone companies) and ISPs can (and do) put their own equipment.
Whether the CLEC/ISP equipment goes into every CO or only to COs designated by the ILEC should not matter for capacity issues given congestion cannot legitimately exist within this layer of the network. Any congestion of this generic voice or data circuit needs to be treated as damage, and Bell mandated to fix their network. They can’t create a policy which manages this damage every day during specific hours.
It is throttling of traffic between these COs that Bell is guilty of, so we can’t simply gloss over the fact that there is data traffic between COs.
BTW: I made a few updates to my submission to the Industry Committee which includes references to this issue, and sent it in this morning. http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/4595 Submissions are due by this Friday.
April 15th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Dear Jacob,
Either you are one of Bell’s VPs or you cannot see the big picture. I subscribed to my high speed connection in order to be able to download/upload large files. If I would need to use just the e-mail service or to do some chit-chat on internet, I would have remained with my dial-up. The definition of high speed connection is in direct connection with the transfer of large files. So if you use the internet just for the purpose described in your comment, why DSL?! Believe me, you could save a lot of money sticking with dial-up and you wouldn’t be affected by these infamous ‘bandwith hogs’. It wouldn’t make any difference for you if you will receive your e-mail in 10 seconds instead of 2. And by the way, how many complains related to low speed or tarffic jam received Bell (Sympatico) BEFORE implementing DPI … compared with AFTER. Don’t you ring a BELL?
Best regards to everyone who understands the gravity of this situation
April 15th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
i have read *a lot* of commentary on this issue in many websites and this is the most sensible view of the situation!
in particular, i agree in principle if there was enough true competition then the issue would resolve itself, in a way such that ISP-A would offer heavy users $50/month with no throttling while ISP-B would offer non-P2P users $30/month. (in fact, u have to wonder, why don’t bell or rogers offer a higher price non-throttling option for their users? don’t they want our money?)
however, as the article says, the last mile is more like public roads and it only makes sense to have one such ’system’ for all, hence the suggestion for the last mile to be managed by a crown corp. the devil is in the details, of course, but i do hope if the last mile is managed by the crown corp and accessible by private ISPs to serve us, then there would be at least 5 to 10 private ISPs competing for our money. (at least that’s my hope.)
and then the crown corp can look into laying fibres for the future for the betterment of the society. i really think fibre is needed to power the future economy. look at some european and asian countries like japan and s korea. they have fibre to home for bandwidth 10 to 20 times ours and at similar monthly fees as ours. they are ready for their startups to try to be the next google/you tube/’what have u’ to write the next killer apps for the next phase of internet that goes beyond email/web. if we don’t have fibre here, then these startups simply won’t come from canada.
to those who agree with bell that throttling is needed because we are all sharing the limited resource, let me ask u: how come some european and asian countries can have 10 to 20 times our bandwdith with no throttling at similar monthly fees? before u believe bell, look at what’s going on around world.
April 15th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
The comments on this site are the most informative out there. If Bell’s claims that 5% of users are using >85% of bandwidth are true (and where is the proof), why can’t Bell simply set a monthly bandwidth limit and charge for exceeding that? Parents of 14 year olds who have never paid for music wouldn’t be happy with a $300 monthly internet bill. However, Bell’s claims that this issue only targets inordinate users are ridiculous: I use a fraction of the 200 gb I get from Teksavvy, yet my torrent use is throttled as much as someone who downloads 400 gb a month. Finally, the Tory’s Industry minister is a total joke. He says that for now he will leave it between ISP and consumer, yet Bell — by forcing throttling onto smaller ISPs that customers could previously have switched to — has removed much of the ability to acquire alternative service. Oh well, Teksavvy is still $29.99 a month, so keep switching people!
April 15th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Bell and rogers claim that the network is clogged. Yes. But THEY introduced voip services that increased the usage. Do they throttle the QoS of their own voip services? no. therefore they are making me pay for the congestion they caused and then they try to sell back to me the same bandwith I already owned!
I think it’s time to break up the telecom monopoly in canada. the robber barrons cant be trusted with freedom on the internet. The real solution is to stop adding customers to a congested network, or add infrastructure. Also, a protocol change from TCP is needed from the internet standards body.
April 16th, 2008 at 8:03 am
Bell Telephone should have never been allowed to become an ISP. Or a television network. Or a newspaper empire. Or a satellite broadcaster. Or an investment company. Or a mobile provider. Or … too many fingers in too many pies for our own good and the good of Canada.
If they get away with this traffic molestation, am I the only one that sees what door this opens?
April 16th, 2008 at 8:29 am
About Bell http://thenonconformer.wordpress.com/
April 16th, 2008 at 8:33 am
and anyone who still thinks that Bell can be trusted with any contracts is really still dumb
April 16th, 2008 at 8:43 am
Bell has stepped over the line in all their practices and has grown power hungry. The best choice in this instance is to make the last mile that Bell currently controls an official public service run by an official crown corporation.
Beyond their questionable traffice shaping practices, I have just been informed that Bell will not be laying phone lines to my home due to a dispute with local builders and I may be stuck with Rogers home phone. I happen to know that this is illegal, but in Bells twisted reality they own that infrastructure and can do whatever they want about it. I’ve already contacted my local councilor to try and get the issue resolved, but just like hydro, phone service and whatever data that runs on them should be crown run and regulated, not regulated by one greedy corporation.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:10 am
i think bell is playing its best card in this issue: confusion and information flooding. And the gas ipss are playing right in it. In other words bell is waving a big red flag at the skweaky wheel to get away with the big picture.
first… everybody talks about P2P and bandwidth caps (transfer volume accounting). While thoses issues matter to cable operators, they DO NOT APPLY to DSL operators. anybody who owns a 20+ dslam and buys internet by the Gbps can tell you that theses figures are not even worth looking at in a residential context with 10,000+ subscribers and GigE uplinked dslams.
second, i think it’s important to look at this situation from all points of view:
-CRTC: they only understand 2 ideas: facilities and market forces. their original goal (10 or so years ago) was to force bell to open up resale service (gas) to enable the ISPs to build capital and invest in their own facilities. obviously that did not work! isps have NOT invested in any access networks and just keep reselling bell’s service. (not that the margins from $21/mth permit any capital buildup but this is an other issue) right now, they are flooded with information from the gas-ISPs (which they dont really care about) and dont have much time for the rest.
-BELL: 1) Limit the creation of the other networks (facilities) , 2) get thoses subscribers back while we finally finish out iptv in order to bundle 3) we just invested $1Billion in remote dslams and jiwi facilities… lets keep that for our own customer.
- GAS isps: last scream before death. If bell gets lucky and is allowed to throw them out, its certain death. Most of them dont have the capital to build a network.
- Facilities ISPs & CLECs: the GAS ISPs are screaming so loud that network ISPs are not getting any attention. Most of them were regional ILECs (cita/actq) that have just started to build in competitive markets (either CO colo or copper/fiber over-builders) Network ISPs are what the CRTC was trying to promote, but right now, they have 2 major issues:
1) The new procedures at Bell is to systematically refuse and delay all Right-Of-Way request (Bell even hired a new subcontractor to help complicate and delay things) and justifies it with the excuse that IPTV requires 4 empty conduits. (pretty much was as left) which is completely untrue.
2) there is no access or way to install any JIWI or REMOTE located dslams. which is where the game is played now. (like Gerhard said)
so if we look at the big picture and see what’s highly likely to happend:
CRTC: give a slap on the wrist to bell for throtling, and we’ll talk about the rest next year (one strike on bell is enough per session)
GAS ISPs: they are fine for couple more months, but when bell starts bundling tv and offering 15-20Mbps at the 30$ range with 30% discounts for multi-services… they will loose thoses subscribers.
Facilities ISPs.. no JIWI access and no right-of-way means no network and no competition.
Bell:
they can now focus on the real issue: competing with videotron/rogers
Canadian customers: we’re left with telus(ilec) + shaw(cable) in the west, and bell +(videotron/rogers) in the east. like always… with no
new player , which means that the competition will happen at the bundling and subsidizing level, but the montly price will stay HIGH.
This is a pretty black picture… here is a constructive comment: I strongly suggest that GAS-ISPs beg the CRTC to create a GAS like service at residential (
April 16th, 2008 at 9:17 am
(continued)
This is a pretty black picture… here is a constructive comment: I strongly suggest that GAS-ISPs beg the CRTC to create a GAS like service at residential (
April 16th, 2008 at 9:19 am
(sorry for the repost… had to remove unicode characters)
This is a pretty black picture… here is a constructive comment: I strongly suggest that GAS-ISPs beg the CRTC to create a GAS like service at residential (smaller than $30 wholesale) prices for Bell’s ADSL2+ platform (their optimax branded service) . Under the same excuse as Bell: IPTV. In fact, a wholesale 10-15Mbps gas service that supports multicast could enable ISPs to offer a tripple play bundle and give them a fighting chance. This will force bell to adopt a defensive position (this would be an end-of-the world scenario for them). And maybe allow jiwi access as an in-between agreement. With jiwi access, Networks ISPs will be able offer to wholesale that same GAS-ADSL2+ to GAS isps with no throtteling and again.. give them a fighting chance. (Bell copper, network isp wholesale, gas-isp chain is already starting to happen btw..)
just my 2 cents…
April 16th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Derek in comment 16 said, “i agree in principle if there was enough true competition then the issue would resolve itself.”
That’s closer to the crux issue. Bell Symaptico added throttling of their own paying customers, who then began shifting to independent ISPs which offered unfettered access.
To stop the drain of their customer base, Bell is now shifting the throttling from Sympatico into their core transmission business, in an attempt to remove this key competitive advantage of the independent ISPs.
Nasty, and true Bell behaviour to the core.
-ml
April 16th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
I think that the CBC P2P broadcast broke the camel’s back… this sort of content propagation is simply “downloading” the load onto the lower (”last mile”) tier of the net instead of using content provider’s own Internet connection bandwidth and servers.
The one thing the Government should do, however, is to ensure that users who exceed their monthly caps will be IMMEDIATELY notified, and if their usage goes beyond a certain pre-set level, it will be suspended. It is too easy for users to make mistakes unless there are checks in place. This has happened in several instances recently with cellular Internet connections involving roaming charges, with exhorbitant bills being run up by unwitting users.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Ha, ha, ha, the CBC’s use of P2P, I assure you, did NOT break anything. It couldn’t have been 0.000001% of Canadian torrent traffic even at its peak.
Also, traffic being offloaded from centralized servers to end-mile infrastructure is GOOD for the internet. All of Bell’s customers who downloaded a torrent of that CBC show sharing packets with eachother means that traffic is NOT hitting the internet or having to go out of Bells’ network, in other words, it’s cheaper for Bell, and keeps the bottleneck (Bell’s backbone links) from being full.
*IF* P2P was somehow breaking ISP infrastructure quantifiably, it means ISPs aren’t giving the people (the peers) the type of service that they desire and demand. This should mean that the free market would come to the rescue. However, Bell’s position causes an inability to compete since they claim ownership over their infrastructure and do not allow co-management or cost sharing with their competition with regards to the “TCP/IP utility company” part of their business. And they do not do it because they can’t keep up with the bandwidth requirements of P2P Internet traffic, they do it purely to maximize shareholder profits while ripping off every single customer they have via misleading, fraudulent descriptions of their service plans.
Unlimited means unlimited, not 100GB. 10Mbps means 10Mbps not 2-3Mbps with occasional bursting. As time goes on, massive upstream bandwith will be less of a requirement for Bell because server architecture is moving towards a decentralized, virtualized implementation, and ISPs can negotiate peering arrangements that allow them to evenly distribute international and regional bandwidth management.
But only if they stop being greedy lying bastards…
April 17th, 2008 at 9:22 am
martin said, “to enable the ISPs to build capital and invest in their own facilities. obviously that did not work!”
Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? If so, then this was an invalid thing for the CRTC to have wanted in the first place. It no more makes sense for every ISP to build their own facilities to connect to customer premises as it does for every retailer to run their own roads. I’m not even aware of changes in legislation being made to allow CLECs to build their own COs and get equal footing with the ILECs to right of way.
ISPs did build out the part of the network that they were reasonably expected to build out. That is the connections and equipment put into the COs they are allowed to put equipment in which then connects to the rest of the Internet.
Some of those connections may be fiber purchased (through unregulated market value prices) from Bell, Rogers, and other fiber providers, but that is still a build-out. Why bother running separate parallel connections when existing unused connections are being offered at a reasonable price? Is the fact that existing unused fiber (and we have a glut of fiber already put under our public and private property, not a lack of fiber) can be lit up extremely cheaply the basis of your allegation that CLECs and independent ISPs have not built out their own networks?
Is there a reason that you are unwilling to separate the last mile connection (which includes traffic between COs to where CLECS/ISPs can put their own equipment, not just the copper to the customer premises) which is a natural monopoly, and the transit/etc connections which can legitimately become a competitive free market? I know why Bell and other similar anti-competitive forces want to merge these two, but I don’t understand why anyone else would.
April 17th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Wait a second here….. Is no one else seeing a basic concept… I signed up for a 5 Meg Service 24/7- 5 MEGS! I’m paying for that pipe… How can I use more than that???? This is complete garbage! Bell markets the 5 Meg service to it’s customers knowing that it CAN’T sustain 5 MEGS 24/7 for all of it’s customers.
HELLO!!!
Another article said that 5% of Bells customers are using 33% of it’s bandwidth!!!!
WHAT!!!!!
Does that mean that Bell can only really sustain 15% of it’s clients before 100% utilization occurs????
I smell a bad deal somewhere!
April 17th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Hi John Kafity, Yes I do have sources to back up those claims.
P2P file sharing accounts for between %49 and %83 of total internet traffic depending on time of day in various regions.
http://www.ipoque.com/news_&_events/internet_studies/internet_study_2007
This is also not the only study to present such numbers. I invite everyone to also investigate this on their own. Get the facts before you post. I realize that this is a heated debate, however you have to also respect that I want to use my computer and my network share for more than just P2P file sharing, and I certainly don’t appreciate trying to send an email or make a VOIP call and have my connection drop or lag so bad it’s not possible. P2P traffic can make the internet nearly unusable at times again depending on the traffic level.
Thanks for the reference to being a Bell vp Constantin, but unfortunately I am not. I do have a degree in computing science though if you have questions regarding networking. Now, why not just use dial up connection you say?… This is still irrelevant since all bandwidth is shared on the internet. That’s the point, since it is ALL shared on the backbone, whether you have dialup, dsl, or cable, even a dialup connection would face congestion issues when capacity reaches its limit.
On another note, uploading and downloading copyrighted material is illegal in the US, however, in Canada downloading music is not illegal because we pay a levy on recordable media which goes to the music industry.
Also, if you use large volumes of bandwidth each month, your internet service provider does pay for the excess portion that you use, back charged by other communications networks. So how is it, that if person A uses 30 gigabytes and person B uses 30 gigabytes, there would be any difference in cost for an ISP. The answer is location. Where is this traffic coming from or going to. Someone used the telephone call as an example, well, if someone else uses your phone line to make long distance calls there is a fee no matter who used it, but why should you pay for it?
April 17th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Just for clarity sake, this traffic shaping equipment sits directly in the internet backbone, shaping traffic directly in the fiber. The best equipment available can “manage” over 80 Gbps direct fiber in/fiber out including a quick virus scan to make sure windows users are safe from themselves. All this puts less than a 300 ms delay on the ISP network. Not all types of traffic is delt with in the same manner so this 300 ms delay may not apply to traffic for online games for example, however what I mention is a maximum delay unnoticeable to a user even on a fiber line sustaining 1 million simultaneous phone calls.
April 18th, 2008 at 7:28 am
Jacob Chappelle:
Nothing you wrote explains why Bell needs to throttle traffic on other people’s networks.
There is no reason for Bell to force this on the reseller isps since those ISPs pay for every resource they use.
And that traffic shaping equipment CAN NOT be on the internet backbone since several ISPs who care complaining do not use Bell for their outgoing internet connection. It is on Bell’s back end network between the reseller ISPs and the DSL equipment.
April 18th, 2008 at 8:32 am
Rusell,
i think we are pretty much arguing on the same idea, ISPs who own dslams in the CO and buy copper pairs is what i was calling “network isp or facilities based ISPs”. for having walked in to most COs (in montreal at least), i only saw 2 players in the “colo rooms” out of 50 or so isps (and the 2 have installed in the last year) . which means that the others own about a router and a tunnel terminator at canix and buy PPPoE circuits from bell end-to-end (light service).
i completely agree that over-building the copper last mile makes no sense. but owning the dslam is the key difference between providing the service and reselling bell’s. The conduit problem that i was stating is for the competitive fiber providers to GET to the CO .(bell/videotron/rogers do no sell or rent fiber anymore in mtl) and bell keeps saying that the conduits to enter the COs are full.
April 18th, 2008 at 9:21 am
Martin,
You don’t see very many isps trying it because it’s a bad idea. I installed some of that equipment that you see in the Montreal area so I know first hand what the problem is.
Bell only rents out space in the colo rooms but does not allow access to the “remote CO” (equipment box on the side of the street somewhere) On Bell’s network if your a too far from the CO to get a good signal and your lucky to have one of these remotes in your path then they will hook you through the remote and provide a much nicer signal.
One of the problems we ran into was that at certain distances Bell’s standard ADSL equipment was outrunning our ADSL2+ equipment.
April 18th, 2008 at 10:07 am
martin,
We are not in full agreement, although we are far closer than I am to Jacob Chappelle who is claiming that the current debate has anything to do with shaping happening on the “Internet Backbone”. This is shaping being done by Bell when Bell is not the ISP. Conversations about what ISPs do to manage their networks is separate from this, except to say that it is Bell that is disallowing ISPs from managing their networks. Those who believe that ISPs should be allowed to manage their own networks to solve congestion should be fiercely opposed to what Bell is doing.
You appear to be arguing that someone is a reseller of Bell’s “Internet” service unless they have equipment in the local CO. On this I disagree.
It is an appropriately regulated data service from the customer modem all the way to the routers of the competing ISP. That must include data packets between COs, and even if there is simply a fiber to a location outside of any CO. It is wrong for Bell or any ILEC to inspect the packets within this generic data service to determine if they happen to be TCP/IP packets and to make any policy decisions about these TCP/IP packets at all. If there is congestion, then that should be treated as damage and repaired — not “managed” over a longer term.
It is only when a company is hiring Bell for *Internet* services that it is legitimate to inspect those packets as TCP/IP packets and to manage them as TCP/IP packets. We should not be forced to encrypt these packets such that they won’t see any TCP/IP headers at all, forcing them to treat as generic data packets what they should be regulated to only treat as data packets. We shouldn’t have to use technology to solve political/legal problems just because Bell is dishonestly claiming that this is a technical problem.
As to facility problems that Bell may be having that makes it physically harder for third parties to run fiber into the COs, this is a further justification for regulating and strongly enforcing the regulated service to make installing DSLAMs in COs unnecessary for competitors. Competitors should only have to install equipment in specific COs which have the capacity, and the ILEC should continue to be mandated through regulation to route traffic *unmanaged* between the COs.
April 18th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Gerhard Mack,
A few years ago I was partner in a small hosting company that was using LDDS circuits with SDSL modems on each end to connect to a few local ISPs as well as the local IX http://OttIX.net . We wanted the redundancy of having multiple connections.
The IX was forced to move out of the building that they were in, and even though one of the ISPs and the IX were physically closer, we never did get those lines working again. We never had proof, but Bell didn’t want to offer this service any more and it was claimed that they had loops of wire on the floor to make the distance longer and the quality lower. LDDS was intended to be used for security alarms and thus was only regulated to get 9600bps, not very useful when we were previously getting 4M on each of those circuits.
We debated about moving from our multiple LDDS to multiple ISPs to fiber, but could only afford a single fiber connection and thus wouldn’t have the redundancy. In the end my partner moved equipment into a rack at another colo facility and I got out of the business entirely.
Like many other people I know who were previously in the ISP business and left, I now just manage customers in third party colo facilities. It is harder and harder for a small business to make it with ILECs like Bell pushing people out of the business.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Russel,
The one thing I would never accuse Bell of is outright sabotage. Bell Co’s are usually pathologically neat and organized and they always follow the letter of the law.
It’s possible the wiring at your new location was older and it’s also possible that if you didn’t tell them exactly how you wanted it that it would have been routed strangely.
I have complaints with Bell management and the CRTC regs but very rarely with the employees on the ground.
April 21st, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Folks,
Just don’t forget that I’m paying for high-speed. I have a family to support, and I can’t afford (as so many others…) to pay the higher fees. I want to transfer large files and use the technology available. Let’s not support heftier fees for those who ‘use’ the Internet. You would be disouraging innovation and technology.
To conclude, Bell has tricked me out of lot’s of money in the past (errors on my bill and never fixing them…). They shouldn’t have the right to keep this up.
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:16 pm
P2Pnet has an article on how to complain to the CRTC. Remember to keep the complaints polite but firm.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/15695
May 3rd, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Lot of jargon, lot of issues and can’t believe that Ma Bell gets away with murder on many fronts. I don’t have your background in CLEC’s, ILEC’s, ISP’S, DSLAM’s etc., but I do have a Computer science degree from 34 years ago and a lot of front-line experience with older networks. The drift of the thread I am getting is that there may be traffic congestion but that is something that BEll needs to fix by means other than determining who gets to share the road (to extend the analogy). They have also effectively throttled (intentional) competition by taking de facto control over something they only have acess rights to - the so-called “last mile”. When someone or something is given rights they also collect a corresponding responsibility to maintain it in good order for the use of everyone/thing. So, on the one end they say they are protecting the backbone from overload in the interests of the public and on the other end they claim it is their “bat and Ball” and lay down the rules of the game. This is a classic case of saying the opposite to what is true because that has a better chance of being believed by an unthinking/low-demanding public than trying to rationalize the true situation. I think IBM invented the tactic.
I too have been on the receiving end of Bell’s FUD and obfuscation and have only just recently become wise to it because I had the chance to talk to some of their employees who were simply honest and open with me. Unfortnately they are in the minority and most are either left purposely ignorant or have been instructed to avoid certain issues. I mention this only to support some earlier comments. My issues with Bell are not directly related to “shaping”, only analogous to them in the sense they have been (1.) Deliberately playing with the ADSL switch’s rates, (2.) Charging me for services they cannot physically deliver (3.) Re-trenching themselves in earlier arguments already proved false (4.) Showing a complete disregard for my valuable time and frustration at not getting a resolution where I have bent over backwards to get one.
My microcosm is the macro. My concerns with Bells’ increasing number of monopolies began March 5, 2008. I am one of those poor suckers who has no alternative ISP, no alternative TV provider and no alternative Phone provider - my only area of choice is my cell provider.
I am afraid however that the current thread of discussion is too esoteric to engage the numbers of people you need to effectively battle Bell. All the people who could understand this discussion wouldn’t even outnumber their cleaning staff for a small facility. A more generally understood issue is required. If more people understood that they were getting fleeced by Bell and Bell was setting up to make that a more profitable endeavour by eliminating competition you might have their attention.