The IT Nerd

I’ve had a few days to digest the traffic shaping info that they submitted to the CRTC this week. My thoughts are as follows:

• Over the two month period prior to their throttling, they had congestion on 2.6 and 5.2 per cent of their network links.
• They don’t explain if this congestion is sustained congestion or not. (My guess is not)

So what that means is that Bell’s own data shows that unrestricted peer to peer access only slows down just over 5% of their network at any given time. So…. Where’s the congestion that requires throttling?

There isn’t any.

I think what you are seeing here is this:

• Bell (just like every other ISP in the universe) oversells the bandwidth massively on the customer end and yet their backbones are not even close to being maxed out, so they just end up screwing over the consumer by throttling them.
• Bell throttles it’s own customers, but independent ISPs such as Teksavvy don’t. People leave for Teksavvy because of that (and the fact that it’s cheaper than Bell with better customer service typically). As a result, Bell throttles independent ISPs so that it levels the playing field.

Hopefully the CRTC sees through their BS as easily as everybody else does.

UPDATE: A real network engineer looks at the Bell document and declares it bogus.

This entry was posted on June 27, 2008 at 11:31 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell, Canada, CRTC, Net Neutrality. 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.