The IT Nerd

Today was the last day of the CRTC hearings into Bandwidth Management, and Bell must really be smoking some grade “A” crack. Because they made this statement to the CRTC:

Bell must slow the downloads of certain other internet providers’ customers to stop them from congesting its shared network and hurting Bell’s retail customers, the company argued Tuesday.

The only way Bell could allow those smaller ISPs — which buy network access wholesale from Bell — to manage their own internet traffic is if they used exactly the same method as Bell, as other methods would conflict, said Jonathan Daniels, the Montreal-based company’s vice-president of regulatory law.

“And if [they’re] going to do that, why don’t we just do it for them?” Daniels asked at a hearing before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in Ottawa.

Gee… That sounds like your retail business is hurting, so you decide to screw your wholesale customers to level the playing field. After all, why would you assume that your wholesale customers would want to throttle their customers? Did it ever occur to you that they may not want to do that? Of course not.

Oh yeah, Bell claims that they can’t tell the difference between their traffic and their wholesale customers traffic. But according to the article:

Bell’s testimony contrasted with that of MTS Allstream, which sells wholesale internet service similar to Bell’s in Manitoba. The company told the CRTC last week that it was able to distinguish between its wholesale and retail customers in Manitoba.

Hmmm… Sounds like Bell is at best playing fast and loose with the truth. However, Bell does have an option for ISPs who buy bandwidth from them if they don’t want to be screwed like a prison bitch throttled by Bell:

They could buy Bell’s high-speed access (HSA) wholesale service, which uses the same shared network and costs roughly twice as much, but is not subject to Bell’s traffic shaping. For example, Primus has purchased that service in some parts of Ontario.

Oh sure. Buy a service that prices most of these ISPs right out of the market. That’s a great plan… If you’re Bell.

So this closes these CRTC hearings. Hopefully the CRTC sees through the BS that was spread around by Bell, Rogers, Telus and other ISPs who throttle and restrict if not eliminate this practice.

This entry was posted on July 14, 2009 at 3:03 pm 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.