http://www.thestar.com/business/article/540321
I have to say here, even as an IT guy who considers himself fairly security- and performance-savvy, that this is BAD for the Internet and all of its users.
All this basically means is that Bell can keep overselling their backbone bandwidth capacity and whenever things get tight, they can single out a bunch of users and throttle their downloads. If I pay for a certain class of service, I expect to receive a certain class of service.
Now, thanks to the CRTC, one of the biggest back-end resellers in Canada can throttle my traffic (at work, anyways) if they so choose, without warning.
I don't know about some of you guys, but a lot of companies are moving to electronic distribution of installation media (Microsoft and McAfee come to mind immediately) and having this kind of ruling can sorely limit your access to software that you've legally paid for.
Downloading the latest Server 2008 images at 4+ GB each? Wait a while. The latest McAfee EPO server? Wait a while more. Do I care? Sure, cause even though I'm getting paid regardless, it's delaying the completion of each project. That doesn't make the bigwigs happy.
Hopefully this wasn't the final step to deal with this issue. If it was, it sets one hell of an ugly precedent as more types of traffic, users and consumption patterns will ultimately start triggering Bell's throttling tactics.
Is it affecting business DSL customers, or just home? I thought it was just home? Also, I thought it was only affecting torrent download ports, and not straight http/https/ftp ports?
Either way, if Bell's backbone was that stressed today with the file sharing going on, what will it be like with the next gen of VOIP, video, teleconferencing, etc.?
To me, they should have employed a more customer conscious QOS than straight up throttling, they wouldn't be in this mess.
I was not surprised by the ruling in the least because to my mind CAIP asked the wrong question.
IOW instead of asking that Bell no longer be allowed to throttle resellers DSL products to match their own throttled offerings. Which the CRTC said Bell could do, since everyone is being affected equally and there was no "preferrential treatment" granted anyone (every DSL provider gets whacked the same way)
What should have been asked is that Bell had in fact violated their signed agreements with the resellers like Teksavvy etc., though I'll bet my paralegal license that the contract that Bell has signed with the resellers allows them to "manage their network"
NefCanuck
This is just Bell's response to the growing bandwidth issues caused by their own last mile connections.
Unfortunately, no matter which way you slice it, all internet infrastructure is owned by one of 2 monopolies. The monopolies are obligated to share their services, and they have no inclination to allow their competitors to provide better service than they themselves can.
There's also other motivations in throttling bandwidth, such as directly attacking P2P users, but the last mile argument is a strong enough argument to stand on it's own.
So until door-to-door fibre or dedicated coax comes to every household, the throttling is needed.
In most cases, the average end user won't notice the difference. P2P users and tech geeks may, but for the majority, throttling isn't entirely a bad thing.
Now, of course, the monopolies won't have any motivation to upgrade their infrastructure -- maybe a good thing in tough economic times, but sucky for progression.
its not good for the economy at all, I'm just going to take what Adam said and expand on it a little more. The fact that people in the IT industry will now have to wait longer to download their files, it reduced productivity dramatically and increase costs for every company that has a IT department, which I think everyone company now has one. Now an increase in cost and reduction in productivity, you'll some of the higher up complaining and wonder why stuff isn't getting done. There probably is only two options here, to either renegotiate the contract so there is no throttling of bnadwidth or have a large lobby group of IT professionals march to Parliament and demand some change within the CRTC.
Here, at work, we have our on fiber network (managed by Bell :|) and I don't see it getting throttled. We have a provincial private network so this won't affect me at work.
At home, that is different. I don't have Sympatico as supplier but my supplier uses Bell's infrastructure so I might get throttled too.
Time will tell.
One thing I haven't read anywhere... Does this affect only home users, or business users as well? And, this only affects DSL, right?
reldridge,Nov 21 2008, 10:44 AM Wrote:One thing I haven't read anywhere... Does this affect only home users, or business users as well? And, this only affects DSL, right?
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it's mostly for home users and DSL -- dialup is unaffected.
Of course, if you have a business that uses just DSL, I would expect some throttling.
Right now, they're only throttling P2P traffic, so if your business requires heavy use of limewire or bittorent, chances are you won't be affected.
We have a 4Mbps burstable to 10+ synchronous fibre connection here at the office. It's all a matter of time, now that the precedent has been set.
I had a chat with my boss about this (our Manager of IT) just to make sure he was aware what was taking place.
We monitor our bandwidth usage as it stands anyways, so we're always aware of what we "should" be able to push/pull at any given point in time during the day.
well, if you paid for bandwidth for your business and they capped it against your contract, then you'd have something to complain about.
The throttling they're looking to do is mainly to ensure that everyone gets a fair share of bandwidth during peak loads in a limited system.
This is to ensure that if there's a sudden burst of swedish butter churning porn hitting bit torrent, that your VOIP call to your grandmother isn't being interrupted.
Eventually, they'll have to upgrade everyone's last mile connection or make available privately owned connections.. but until then, throttling of P2P isn't a terrible thing.
Bell only throttles me between something like 4pm and midnight. The rest of the day I get full speed on my torrents.
Rogers Suck, I know, i worked for them.