"They're now openly acknowledging that they are rolling out a full
throttling process. They plan to have things fully throttled by April
7th. All BT and P2P traffic will be affected. They claim they are
allowed to do so according to their Terms and Services under the Fair
Usage Policy in the tariffed contracts."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080325-canadian-isps-furious-
about-bell-canadas-traffic-throttling.html
R.
regards,
Robert
---
Robert Guerra <rgu...@privaterra.ca>
Managing Director, Privaterra
Tel +1 416 893 0377
The Internet is not an unlimited free resource, and pretending that it is
allows the few to ruin it for the many. If you're not familiar with the
phrase "the tragedy of the commons", please look it up.
And if you're a heavy user and don't think you should have to pay any more
than a light user, please don't present selfishness as part of some noble
cause.
Rohan
This is some kind of joke, right? You are aware that every single internet
user is paying for services? To companies like Bell Canada whose revenue
was $4,500,000,000 (not a typo) in the last three months?
> And if you're a heavy user and don't think you should have to pay any
> more than a light user, please don't present selfishness as part of some
> noble cause.
Yes, it's utterly selfish and tragic that someone who has paid for a T1
connection should actually be able to upload and download at 1.544 Mbps.
Why, if they actually use the full capacity of the line, they're just a
bunch of thieves. In fact, any T1 client who uses it more than once a week
to drive to church on Sundays is just a low-down scoundrel, and if they
complain that the line doesn't actually deliver 1.544 Mbps, it's pure
selfishness.
Bell, on the other hand, who sold you that T1 line, shouldn't be held to
actually deliver what they sold. That's not how business works! They
should able to sell T1 lines to everyone without bothering to provision for
it, and just slow down the end-user as necessary to make sure that the 500
T1 lines they sold to clients don't exceed the capacity of the one T1 line
they use as an upstream connection. That's just good business practices,
nothing shady in there at all.
Rohan, I'd like to sell you a new car. It will have up to 4 wheels and up
to one engine and up to 4 seats inside. Also, I get to revise the deal any
time after you've purchased the car. I might revise it to have fewer seats
or engines or wheels, but the amount you paid for the car will not be
revised downwards. Don't complain if I revise it though; that's just
selfish. Keep making your monthly payments and STFU.
Not everyone in Canada is familiar with the product offerings in the rest of
the world regarding broadband. In most industrialized nations, you can get
a broadband connection ten times as fast as anything offered in Canada for
half the price, with no throttling. Canadians are paying monopoly prices
(high!) for monopoly levels of service (low!). You can either do something
about this situation or you can be like Rohan, "Thank you sir may I have
another beating?"
Michael Sims
If there is going to be an effective response to this, I think it is
important to start defining a few key positions and see if this
community wants to mobilize behind them. Let me propose two to start:
1. Traffic shaping based on type of data stream, the originator or the
destination breaks the common carrier principle and should be opposed
in all forms.
2. Last-mile providers should not be able to use their natural
monopoly to inhibit competition by 3rd party ISPs in any way.
Now, if these are two primary principles, the question is how are
these not broken while addressing very real physical network
limitations? How can those physical network limitations themselves be
overcome? What is the Quality of Service? Response time? Bandwidth?
Total download capacity/cap?
Rohan's point was that Internet services are not an unlimited free
resource. He's right. Pretending that economics doesn't apply adds
nothing to the discourse.
Jon is also absolutely correct, the big boys are overselling their
networks. That means that we've been living under an illusion that
our networks have more capacity than they actually do. This relates
directly to Rohan's "tragedy of the commons" problem.
Caps/overages are one way to deal with the pricing of a limited
resource. Are those prices fair? I don't know.
More importantly and more critically, where the hell is the investment
strategy by last mile providers to increase the infrastructure
capacity? Where is my fibre connection?
On a related matter, WaterfrontToronto's iWaterfront committee has
been proposing for some time that the new neighbourhoods in East
Bayfront and West Donlands would be "intelligent communities", with
ultra broadband fibre to the home on an open access network. Such a
development could be a model to other places in the city and beyond
and shift the dialogue to where I believe it should be: on investing
in the infrastructure of the digital future.
Thoughts?
Dude, you just became part of the story!!
Jason Laszlo on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=716869056
Send him your love!
On 29-Mar-08, at 1:49 PM, Will Pate wrote:
>
> LOLZ! Bell Canada's spokesman updated his Facebook status to say he's
> "realizing how little seperates most journalists from lemmings." Wow,
> please Digg this to show how arrogant these people are.
>
> http://digg.com/tech_news/Bell_Canada_rep_calls_journalist_lemmings_on_Facebook
>
And he can't spell either.
The scary thing is that he might be right, sort of. Reporters don't usually
have time to research things thoroughly and can therefore be hoodwinked by
slick spokespeople, just like ordinary members of the public can. However,
there is a potential solution: my impression has always been that
journalists are thrilled to have well organized alternate sources that they
can call on to get the other side of the story. Is there a way that a
somewhat diffuse organization like TorCamp could become such a source? Not
to present any kind of official position, but just to say things like "many
of our members are very concerned that ..."
Rohan
BLOG SWARM!
Technorati tags: bellthrottling, netneutrality, canada
Twitter hashtags: #bellthrottling #netneutrality
my post: http://remarkk.com/2008/03/29/bell-canada-hands-net-neutrality-advocates-a-gift/
We need to start thinking about a position that represents the diverse
interests of TorCampers and our friends across the country. We need
to engage partners in the startup, tech, academic, venture, media and
nonprofit worlds on a shared agenda and position. See my earlier
positions as a possible starting point.
Citizen Ziggy, Gabe Sawhney, Tom Purves and I were talking about the
possibly of organizing a Canadian equivalent of the Freedom to Connect
conference happening in Washington on Monday and Tuesday this week: http://freedom-to-connect.net/
. (Any TorCamp people going?)
We could even combine this with a BarCamp Canada and get our Montreal,
Ottawa, Waterloo, Vancouver and other BarCamp communities all together
at the same time. We haven't had a major BarCamp in far too long!
Who's in?
-- Deborah Hartmann Agile Process Improvement Coach Lead Editor for InfoQ.com/Agile deborah.hartmann.net 416.996.4337 "My advice is to do it by the book, get good at the practices, then do as you will. Many people want to skip to step three. How do they know? " -- Ron Jeffries