Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Bell strikes secretly
ars technica reported, yesterday, that Bell Canada has come clean and announced that it has implemented traffic throttling technology across its DSL service and expects to complete the rollout by early April (Canadian ISPs furious about Bell Canada’s traffic throttling). And in the same way that it’s not much of a shock that Bell has made this unpopular move, it’s no shock that they did this secretly, leaving downstream ISPs to face the music of unhappy customers.
March 26th, 2008 at 9:39 am
And thus the slowing of my publishing on Vuze commences! Isn’t there a Net Neutrality Bill in Canada yet?
March 26th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Net neutrallity, in Canada Bill? I don’t think so. You see, and you may not know this, but the telcos like Bell Telus, and Rogers to name three need to be able to control the use of bandwidth. Partially to stop the evil doers download illegal files and to insure control so that in time they can start to charge more to customers who download a lot and to start charging the sites (Google, yahoo, youtub markblevis.com) who get way too much traffic. How do you expect the Telco to pay for the upgrades if the can’t start charging a premium to both customers and those greedy site like Google and bobgoyetche.com.
Bill, it’s the capitalist way my friend, what are you a socialist?
March 27th, 2008 at 5:56 am
This may explain why the torrent download I did of Ubuntu 7.10 was slower than I had expected…
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:01 pm
I’ve been following this story now living in the States. What I’m really interested in is the CBC’s use of BitTorrent to allow their audience to access their programs.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9897923-7.html
Part of the CBC’s mandate is: to be made available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means and as resources become available for the purpose… (http://www.cbc.radio-canada.ca/about/mandate.shtml)
So this means that Bell will in effect be hindering the CBC’s ability to provide to Canadians. Since the CBC is federally funded (by our tax dollars), it means that Bell is going to have some serious explaining to do.
Interesting times ahead.
Cheers,
Dave