Bell confirms P2P traffic shaping (8)
Last week, an employee of Sympatico, one of Canada’s main ISPs, confirmed on their online support forums that Bell has been using “state-of-the-art” technology since September to limit P2P downloads to 30kbps, regardless of the plan you subscribed too. The employee mentions that this was introduced to maintain their QoS. BitTorrent, Gnutella, Limewire, Kazaa, eDonkey, eMule, WinMX are all recognised by their “solution” and throttled.
I am not sure if this is news for Montreal Tech Watch’s readers. In my neighborhood, which is well deserved (Internet via black fiber is avalaible for instance), I have concluded months ago that Bell is forging false TCP packets to reset the client connection and make P2P downloads sort of an adventure.
In the U.S., Comcast was just busted having the same business practices and may face a class action lawsuit.
While P2P may take up to 50% of the Internet traffic, it is also widely used for various usages, by independant video makers, for linux distributions; and is also used by new business applications like Skype, Lotus Notes or Tungle. It’s also naive to sell 5mbps plans and expect customers to just use email and some basic messenger chatting with that kind of connection.
via Ars Tecnica.
I think users should be warned about that. I’m a Bell subscriber and I didn’t know anything about such practice.
[...] Heri, as always, has sage words on this as well. Technorati Tags: blognation, blognation Canada, P2P, bandwidth throttling, Bell Canada, Bell [...]
This is very frustrating. I’m not a Bell customer and when I see this, I see that Bell is not able to adapt itself to new technologies and to user’s demand. This is just like the music industry and the Videotron “unlimited” issue. Crisis = opportunity and companies just don’t get that..!
Today’s “problem” is P2P and tomorrow’s problem will be something else. We have to live with the technology or other countries will surpass us quickly. China is already a very hot place for P2P technology (http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/10/chinese-p2p-tru.html) and cutting down is not the solution; it slowly brings us back to the stone age. What to do? Invest in better infrastructure, offer special “P2P enhanced” accounts which speed up P2P for a premium (BUT w/o degrading other services!), offer better caching services, etc.
P2P is here to stay and in fact, is growing so it makes no sense to restrict it in any way. P2P is not always illegitimate and even if it is, it’s not the ISP’s duty to play the police. It’s like if Ford were to restrict speed on cars carrying drugs. It’s just not their job. The ISP’s job is to offer the best service around. If not, people will switch ISP.
The sad part, however, is that a lot of people can’t afford to move to another ISP as they live in small towns where only Bell deserves them. Oh well, maybe someone, somewhere will get it some day…
I was not aware either.
The thing is Bell can get away with it, because Videotron also has had bad press, by capping total monthly download at 100gb. The problem is that instead of seeing technology and services advancing in Montréal, I am sometimes thinking we are taking a step back.
those are great points by the way, Denis, couldn’t write it better.
[...] Heri, as always, has sage words on this as well. Technorati Tags: blognation, blognation Canada, P2P, bandwidth throttling, Bell Canada, Bell [...]
I can only say that after 7 conversations with bell sympatico service techs I finally got one to admit that bell sypatico does in fact limit badwidth down to 50 kb/sec from the 8000 that I paid for. The previous 6 calls, after asking them point blank if they limit p2p trafic, stated no that they did not. This tells me that the emplyee’s are either ignorant of their own product or are instructed to lie to the knolegable public. Either way it is a disgrace and in my opinion is a company that will do well in Canada because we as Canadians do not have the guts to demand better..
you can make a plaint to the executive office at bell here is the phone number
the more plaints they get the more likely they will remove this crap
Sacha Rollin 1-866-701-004
executive.office@bell.ca
want to really complain, send emails to:
ellen.malcolmson@bell.ca
she is senior VP customer experience, she has a team of 20 people, she manages all 10,000 customer service people including outsourced contractors.
I also cc George Cope on all my complaints as well.
Leave a Reply