Massive Canadian ISP Bell Canada scored a big win today, as the country's telecoms regulator issued a long-awaited decision in which it concluded that Bell can continue to throttle P2P traffic at will. In a turn of events that would have seemed shocking a year ago, US regulators have now stepped in to stop P2P throttling while Canadian regulators have allowed it to continue. Have the two countries boarded different flights to the future? Possibly not; even as the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission decided the throttling could continue, it also announced an entirely new docket that will take a top-to-bottom look at traffic management and network neutrality.
More at the link above. While I understand their perspective on the issue if they're going to throttle bandwidth during peak times then they should go right on ahead and drop all download caps. Conversely, if there are bandwidth caps then P2P users are essentially self financing all upgrades to the network. In other words Bell has no excuse, the government is stupid for even listening to them in the first place and I really hope they get torn a new one when Net Neutrality goes into full review by the CRTC.
The funny thing is, you know what their congestion measurements look like?
Calisse de tabernak. If I could switch to another ISP I really would. Ok, so I shouldn't complain, right, since I'm technically downloading movies without purchasing them and I don't even download that much (maybe 1 or 2 movies a month, at most) and even then Bell seems to regularly find me in excesses of my allotted bandwidth. However Bell is rolling out a Video on Demand service over IP planned for 2009. Apparently the Canadian government has never clearly understood what happens when you juxtapose the terms "conflict" and "interest". This stinks and Bell is going to both act as traffic cop and car manufacturer.
5 comments:
meaning?
what, the last part?
meaning that they basically gave them the go ahead to force their clients to use their download services without permitting them to use viable alternatives (there are legitimate video distribution services that use bit-torrent)
At first, when I read this, I felt powerless to do anything about it. Then I remembered Howard Zinn: “Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people,
can transform the world.”
So, who wants to go take a dump in front of a Bell Store?
Dude, how 'bout Bell headquarters, where you actually strike the ones who deserve it?
I can't say I blame Bell. Thos dumb fuckers have been hemoraging money for a long time now. I blame the government for being idiotic.
All is not lost per se as the Canadian government will assess what they're going to do regarding network neutrality in the future... I hope at least one person in that committee has some kind of computer background or this will end up with comments worth of US Senator Ted Stevens.
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