After being accused of shaping and throttling P2P traffic, Bell Canada has admitted to doing so, claiming that it is within its rights to do so.
The company admitted that it implemented “load balancing to manage Bandwidth demand,” and did so without telling customers or even the ISPs involved. The accusations thrown at Bell first occurred when Canadian ISP Teksavvy, an ISP popular among P2P users because traffic is guaranteed to not be throttled, noticed the “load balancing” and contacted Bell.
Last October Bell Canada’s own ISP, Sympatico, admitted to throttling P2P traffic on BitTorrent, Gnutella, Limewire, Kazaa, eDonkey, eMule, and WinMX which they claimed “use a large portion of bandwidth during peak hours.” The measures were supposedly only used during “peak hours” however.
What is more infuriating to customers is the fact that now traffic is affected for not only Sympatico users but customers of other ISPs that have connections through Bell. In response to what many customers have called “anti-competitive measures” being used by Bell a letter campaign is being formed with the Canadian Competition Bureau.
The group letter reads, “Bell Canada has overstepped its authority and are flexing their muscle (infrastructure control) to impose their will on independent competitors. I am a customer of an independent ISP who has purchased bandwidth and my provider is at the mercy of this underhanded tactic being employed by Bell Canada.”
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Result for: bandwidth demand
AT&T representative Michael Coe has said the company believes it is “inevitable” that heavy Internet users will eventually have to pay some sort of surcharge for the extra bandwidth demand placed on the network.
The ISP along with other providers have been seeing a huge surge in traffic for its DSL services, which can be attributed to a small group of users. Coe added that only 5 percent of customers are currently accounting for 46 percent of overall bandwidth used per month. These users may need to be charged extra.
Although DSL is switch-based unlike cable Internet access Coe says the highly disproportionate use is still affecting other users.
The new stance is similar to other ISPs, such as Rogers in Canada and Comcast in the States which has said it is considering using a 250GB softcap and charging overage fees for users who cross that bandwidth cap.
Critics complain however, that the caps would unfairly punish users who use tons of bandwidth legitimately to, for example, watch movies through Hulu or Netflix, download movies from iTunes or play online multiplayer gaming. The critics do have a point, not everyone is a BitTorrent user.
