The IT Nerd

Google’s Jacob Glick (Canada policy counsel for Google) made an appearance in front of the CRTC Bandwidth Management hearings yesterday. Glick who works for the company that preaches that its core value is to “do no evil” made it clear that it thinks that bandwidth management by ISPs is “evil”:

“Giving carriers the power to slow down applications at their own discretion will change user behaviours, distort innovation and undermine the competitive market in applications,” said Jacob Glick, Canada policy counsel for Google, at the second day of Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission hearings in Gatineau, Que.

Exactly! That’s why this sort of nonsense by ISPs has to be prohibited.

The other thing that came out of Tuesday’s session is this:

Toronto-based technology consultant Jason Roks said new applications that consume more bandwidth are constantly being developed, and that’s a long-term problem that throttling certain applications won’t solve.

He said the real issue is ISPs are overselling their networks. If they can’t afford to upgrade their networks to support that many customers at advertised speeds, they should let customers go, he argued.

No kidding. Here’s an example of the above. I was once a Rogers High Speed Internet customer. But over the years my connection speed got slower and slower. I called their tech support line and they tried to blame my computers for the issue. Sorry, no dice dudes. So when I called them on it, they finally admitted that there were too many people on my network loop and that they would have to segment the loop to get my speed back to where it should be. That was going to take six to nine months. When I told them that was completely unacceptable as I wasn’t getting the speed that they advertised, they gave me a 50% credit for “degraded service.” I took that credit and switched to a DSL provider within a week. They gave me exactly the speed that they promised which is why I went with that DSL provider.

The fact is, there are tons of consumers out there that aren’t getting the Internet service that they’ve paying for as I get calls from them for assistance all the time. They call me because they suspect that something is wrong and their ISP lies to them tells them that speed related issues are the fault of their computer or router. Thus they need to get someone to prove that their ISP is lying to them incorrect.

If you want more on this subject, CBC Marketplace did a story on this about a year ago that is worth looking at. Plus I’ve written about how you can see if you’re getting what you’re paying for in the past as well.

Remember if you want to hear what’s going on at these hearings, there’s a live audio feed available.

This entry was posted on July 8, 2009 at 8:58 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Canada, CRTC, 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.