Surprise! Cogeco, Barrett Xplore And Telus Say Bandwidth Management Rules Not Needed

Cogeco, Barrett Xplore, and Telus made an appearance in front of the CRTC Bandwidth Management hearings yesterday and to the shock of nobody, they both argued that rules that govern how Bandwidth Management is employed are not needed:

Yves Mayrand, Cogeco’s vice-president of business affairs, told the commission the company had “no choice” but to use that type of network management, as their cable infrastructure has limited bandwidth for traffic uploaded by its users and some applications are designed to “hoard capacity.” The throttling applies to both Cogeco’s own retail customers and customers of other ISPs that buy network access wholesale from Cogeco.

It really sounds to me that Cogeco has capacity issues that they can’t or won’t deal with and they cover that up by throttling their wholesale and retail customers. After all, it’s likely cheaper to limit what your customers can do rather than spend money to expand your network. Telus for one has expanded their network and worked for them. But according to Telus, that’s not really the case:

David Neale, a senior vice-president who deals with the company’s technology strategy, said asking ISPs to deal with capacity issues solely by building more infrastructure as some people have advocated is not realistic, even though it has largely worked for Telus so far.

It’s interesting that Telus says one thing, but does something completely different. Then applies spin doctoring when people point out the hypocrisy.

When it comes to telling customers about what Bandwidth Management techniques are used, here’s what this trio had to say:

Telus and Barrett Xplore executives agreed that there should be some disclosure of ISPs’ traffic management practices, but details aren’t necessary, as customers are not really interested. Nevertheless, Cogeco said it plans to provide some more details to its retail customers in the future.

That’s a load of bull. The fact that these hearings exist are indicative of the fact that customers ARE interested.

Monday is the final day of the hearings. Bell, Rogers, Shaw, and Quebecor are all slated to lie testify to the CRTC.  It should be interesting to see what they have to say. As always, you can get the live audio feed here and an archive of the previous hearing days can be found here.

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