The IT Nerd

From the “this is bloody stupid” file, comes the news that Bell Canada (the de-facto top telco in Canada) is throttling people who get DSL based Internet service from wholesalers (in other words, not from Bell). On top of that, they didn’t tell the wholesalers up front that they were doing this. The most noise is coming from users of Teksavvy who are with that ISP specifically because they don’t throttle anything such as BitTorrent (on top of the fact that they have superior customer service as rated by DSLreports.com). You can check out the original post on DSLreports.com that started the fun. Now the story is being picked up by Canadian tech lawyer Michael Geist and it’s being mentioned in Slashdot. The owners of Teksavvy have a meeting of some sort with Bell today to get some answers.

My take on this is simple. Bell has the right to do whatever it wants on it’s own service (which is Sympatico BTW). But if a wholesaler is buying DSL service they in my opinion have shouldn’t be messing with it (and not without some sort of prior notice). The problem is that Bell is the only game in many parts of Canada for DSL, so they may just say to wholesalers to FOAD, and everyone loses in the end. Here’s hoping that there’s a different outcome.

UPDATE: So much for hoping for the best. According to this, Bell Canada has confirmed that throttling is going on, they’re in their rights to do so, and if you don’t like it you can FOAD. Much as I thought they would. 🙁

This entry was posted on March 25, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell, BitTorrent, Net Neutrality, Throttling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.