The IT Nerd

In its final filing with the CRTC, the Canadian Association Of Internet Providers (CAIP) has basically taken all of Bell Canada’s lame claims about throttling and ripped them apart. In a nutshell, here’s what CAIP wants:

1. A final order directing Bell Canada to cease and desist from using any technologies to “shape”, “throttle” and/or “choke” its wholesale ADSL services;

2. An order that Bell comply with the terms and conditions of its wholesale ADSL tariffs;

3. A declaration that Bell has acted unlawfully and in a manner that is contrary to tariffs approved by the Commission;

4. An order that Bell not deviate from the terms and conditions of its approved wholesale ADSL tariffs without prior Commission approval of any such changes;

5. A declaration that Bell has acted unlawfully and in a manner that is contrary to the requirement that a local exchange carrier that provides service to other local exchange carriers provide advance notice of network changes, pursuant to Local Competition, Telecom Decision CRTC 97-8 (Decision 97-8);

6. A declaration that Bell has granted to itself an undue and unreasonable preference and subjected independent ISPs to an undue and unreasonable disadvantage by shaping, throttling and choking its wholesale ADSL services in the manner described in this Application; and

7. A declaration that Bell has acted unlawfully and contrary to the prohibition against carrier interference with the content of messages carried over its telecommunications network contrary to section 36 of the Act and contrary to the Canadian telecommunications policy objectives set out in paragraphs 7(a) and (i) which, inter alia, seek to protect the privacy of persons.

The CRTC will render their verdict by September. All Canadian Internet users can do is wait and hope that the CRTC sees the truth. Perhaps to help them see the truth, they can try reading this article on the CBCnews.ca website as it distills the facts down to what you need to know.

P2PNet has the latest filing by Bell in response to the Canadian Association Of Internet Providers. I’ll leave it to you to read the full document, but there’s one quote that jumps out at me:

“It is called “Deep Packet Inspection” because it looks beyond the routing and transport headers, deeper into the application packet headers, to determine the type of application that is communicating, but not the content itself”

Too bad that that description is wrong.

Take a look at this description of deep packet inspection. here’s how it actually works:

“DPI devices have the ability to look at Layer 2 through Layer 7 of the OSI model. This includes headers and data protocol structures as well as the actual payload of the message. The DPI will identify and classify the traffic based on a signature database that includes information extracted from the data part of a packet, allowing finer control than classification based only on header information.”

The rest of this document is full of more half truths and fudging of the facts. There’s a huge discussion of this over at DSLReports.com where posters are just tearing this document apart. Take a look at the discussion and you’ll see what I mean.

There simply can be no way with the BS that Bell is trying to shovel in this document can be viewed as being valid by the CRTC. If Bell had any sort of honor, they’d just do the honorable thing and drop throttling now. Now I’m not naive enough to believe that they will do that. So it’s up to Canadian Internet users to crank up the pressure on their politicians and on the CRTC to make Bell fold up like a cheap suit. Or perhaps Google will come to the rescue of Internet users in Canada.