It took a while, but Bell who has caused no end of grief for itself, its DSL resellers, and customers of those DSL Resellers has now come up with an official response to the outcry caused by the throttling of things like BitTorrent. Check out this paragraph:
“Bell’s congestion and bandwidth management solutions apply to our entire DSL PPPoE (Point to Point Protocol over Ethernet) network, including both retail and wholesale services. To ensure optimal use of Internet network resources for all of our customers Bell has implemented Data Packet Inspection (DPI) on P2P file sharing and bit torrent applications. DPI identifies the packet mapping, but does not monitor, track, or access the data of your customers who are using P2P applications. Your customers can continue to use P2P services but they will not work as fast during peak periods. All other application functionality is not affected.”
This is dumb move given that the CBC for example is using BitTorrent to distribute shows like The Next Great Prime Minister. Not to mention that BitTorrent has lots of other legitimate uses (such as downloading LINUX software for example). To me it seems like Bell is trying to level the playing field between it’s Sympatico High Speed Internet offering that has throttled BitTorrent for some time and DSL resellers who don’t. After all, BitTorrent users are fleeing Bell (not to mention Rogers who does the same thing) to ISP’s like Teksavvy and Acanac because they don’t throttle anything (not to mention that their customer service is reportedly better than Bell which is not hard to believe from my experiences with Bell), which has to hurt Bell’s bottom line (even though Bell resells DSL service through these companies, they would make less money). Another possibility is that Bell is trying to cut out “rich media” (aka video, audio, etc) from sources other than CTVGlobeMedia (which Bell owns 20% of). It’s kind of an odd coincidence that they throttle BitTorrent within days of The Next Great Prime Minister being made available on BitTorrent. Perhaps I’ve watched one too many episodes of X-Files, but it’s an odd coincidence.
In either case, this is not good for Canadians who access the Internet. This needs to stop sooner rather than later, otherwise Canada in the long term will regret it.
Bell Canada Gets Hit By Another CRTC Complaint
Posted in Commentary with tags Bell, BitTorrent, Net Neutrality on April 8, 2008 by itnerdI am overjoyed that Bell is getting slapped with a second complaint about it’s traffic shaping practices. I found this link (Warning: PDF) on the CRTC website today where someone named Jean-Francois Mezei who has a website called Vaxination Informatique says:
“Bell Canada is has introduced Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technologies that inspect private data to discriminate on the performance of point to point circuits and thus limits full transparent access to the ADSL loops as mandated by the CRTC”
This comes one week after the CAIP filed a similar (Warning: PDF) complaint against Bell. This latest complaint is interesting as it seems to come from an individual rather than an ISP, which may get the CRTC’s attention. A few more of these and Bell will have a problem justifying its behavior to anybody.
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