Customers rally for Internet Neutrality (4)
Picture taken by Alistair Croll
A Net Neutrality Rally was organized yesterday midday in Ottawa, where customers of Internet provider Bell Canada and sympathizers gathered to protest traffic throttling by large ISPs.
The rally is a consequence of Bell Canada admitting that they were throttling P2P traffic, even if the traffic was in fact managed by third-party resellers. These companies, and customers alike, felt abused by Bell Canada. Their position is that ISPs should not monitor or throttle Internet traffic; or in other words, that it should be “neutral”.
The Net Neutrality movement was in fact started in the US when cable companies and other ISPs voiced that Internet companies like Google, and applications that consumes a lot of traffic, like Bittorrent, should pay a fee to ISPs for the heavy use of their telecom infrastructure. Companies like Google argued that it threatened everything on how we view the Internet.
Bell Canada’s case is exacerbated by the fact that they are the dominant telecom company in Canada, and also they advertise their Internet service as “unlimited” and “consistently fast”.
Furthermore, P2P is 100% legal in Canada; and that’s why p2p throttling looks like a complete arbritrary move. Come to think of it, it also doesn’t make sense to throttle plans when you offer plans with download speeds of 16mbps. Of course people are going to use it to view and download videos and bandwidth-intensive apps, otherwise they would have taken the slower plans.
That’s a shameless move they made. I’m going to call them and cancel my service soon; I mainly use the connection for Skype.
Watch that if they want to charge me “early cancellation fees”.
2 things happened that made me switch back to Videotron:
1. 16mbps was never reached, the highest speed I’ve seen was 5mbps after running multiple tests at different times of the day.
2. Starting at 4pm any P2P tools I normally use didn’t work properly anymore, including Skype as mentioned by Carl in the previous comment.
3 days of service cost me $100 in early cancellation fees.
They made this move so that they can get away with providing shitty service. Whats the point of reselling 5 mbits to a DSL provider if you will limit them to 0.4 Mbits? Same thing with thier own customers. Why charge for 16 Mbits and then throttle to 0.4 mbits on applications that need the speed?
I will join the inevitable class action that pop’s up. Their website is good evidence of false advertising. Better take sceenshots since the morons have not put any legal disclaimer to say 16 mbits does not apply to applications that need it!
MTW: Net neutrality in Canada http://tinyurl.com/5a5km6
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