p2pnet news | Freedom:- Symantec has come up with another reason to avoid Bell Canada, already in deep trouble with users for placing restrictions on what they can and can’t do with the services they’ve bought and paid for.

It’s called throttling and it’s so serious the Canadian Association of Internet Providers is demanding the CRTC order Bell Canada to “cease and desist,” with Jean-Francois Mezei of Vaxination Informatique now also filing a complaint with the CRTC.

On the Symnantec report, “Bell Canada’s Internet service carried the most viruses, spam, computer attacks and other so-called ‘malicious activity’ in the country in the last half of 2007,” the Toronto Star has the security company reporting.

It detected a, “whopping 711,912 new malicious code threats to the Internet in 2007, up dramatically from 125,243 in 2006,” says the story.

But, “Since Bell is Canada’s largest Internet provider, it’s not surprising that its users were either knowingly or unknowingly responsible for 17 per cent of what’s termed ‘malicious’ or ‘undesirable’ activity here, it quotes Dean Turner, Calgary-based director of Symantec’s global intelligence network, as saying.

However, “We flat-out refuse to accept these statistics as valid,” Bell Canada spokesperson Jason Laszlo declares in the Toronto Star item. “And if Symantec is not able to properly substantiate these claims, we will demand that they withdraw and amend their findings.”

Bell develops and implements, “more protective network measures than any other ISP in Canada, which leads to excellent results,” according to Laszlo.

But speaking of implementation, Bell users and ISP customers believe the company has implemented ‘malicious’ traffic shaping that’s definitely ‘undesirable’.

“Ok,” p2pnet posted recently, “Here’s the deal,” going on >>>

That’s Rocky Gaudrault, CEO of Canadian ISP of Teksavvy Solutions, as quoted in dslreports.

The subject? As p2pnet’s Ottawa Gal was the first to reveal last year, Bell-Sympatico is throttling wholesale Net services.

Teksavvy, however, doesn’t cap its bandwidth and Gaudrault goes on >>>

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. We’ll be looking into this shortly.

The meeting was with Sales and Product Management. They will be preparing a formal letter before end of week.

In the meantime, we (many other ISPs) are going to prepare as well. I guess the high road is the path taken in this case.

Spread the word one and all as this topic needs to reach every level possible. There’s now officially an issue and action must be taken by all if we’re to rectify things.

The word is indeed being spread to the extent the mainstream media are now running with the story.

Better late than never and the coverage has sparked a sharp reaction from Bell Canada spokesman Jason Laszlo, quoted in the Globe & Mail as saying the company has, “every right to limit the amount of bandwidth certain applications can consume on its networks and those it rents to third-party ISPs”.

“This isn’t a new policy,” he said. “Our agreements with wholesale ISP customers clearly include provisions regarding our rights to manage our networks appropriately to the benefit of all customers.”

Bell began implementing its third-party ISP traffic shaping policy on March 14 and plans to have the program implemented across its entire network by April 7, says the story, slugged, Bell irks ISPs with new throttling policy.

‘Irks’ hardly touches it.

“Based on Laszlo’s comment on the ability to do what they want to the network, this is the exact problem and where Bell doesn’t get it,” Gaudrault told Ottawa Gal.

Now, “Mezei’s complaints to the CRTC points out to some rather interesting factors in relation to Bells unannounced and full out throttle of their competition (the wholesalers) and to the mandated tariffs,” says Ottawa Gal, continuing >>>

In his submission he points to the general tariffs 5410 GAS, 5420 HSA, what the wholesale competition are sold as telecommunication service that links the ISP to their customers. Within those tariffs he states that the private packets sent to & from the wholesale ISP to their customers are being opened and discriminated against based upon their private contents.

Mr. Jean-Francois Mezei states, “Bell Canada must NOT be allowed to discriminate on the private data exchanged between a service provider and its customers”. “Bell Canada must remain a common carrier that blindly carries data between service providers to their customers”.

Mr. Jean-Francois Mezei then questions the huge amount of data that can be “mined” by looking into all the packets users send and receives. Mr. Mezei calls on the CRTC to have these throttling (packet inspection) devices removed and to audit Bell Canada to ensure, “that any of the data collected so far has been destroyed and never made available to any Sympatico employees”.

In the 3rd part of the submission, the serious allegation of anti-competitiveness is raised, and also the crippling of the wholesale competition who have embraced changes to internet technology. Another call is made to the CRTC to investigate Bell Canada since, “There could be a serious conflict of interest if it could be shown that Bell Canada used its monopoly status on the ADSL service to impose the same Sympatico crippling restrictions to all service providers in order to prevent an exodus of customers from Sympatico”.

In closing Mr. Mezei states:

“It would be wrong for the Canadian government, through the CRTC, to support the actions Bell Canada has taken to cripple such new applications which have already become extremely popular and essentially replaced older protocols such as FTP to transfer files”. “Our country should have, as policy, to foster adoption of new technologies and applications instead of fighting them”.

“In conclusion, Bell Canada has implemented a system which punishes customers and competitive service providers who have paid for the bandwidth they want to use”. “There are serious privacy implications with how this system is implemented and definite overstepping of boundaries by Bell Canada which must remain a neutral common carrier and not become an ISP dictating to service providers what applications their customers can and cannot use”.

I ‘m left to wonder what the Privacy Commissioner of Canada would think if she were made aware that Bell Canada is opening her packets, inspecting them, and then Bell deciding what to do with her packets, based on its contents. Would Privacy Commissioner of Canada want to know if any data or statistics on her private packets are being maintained?

These are serious allegations raised in terms of privacy. What data is being kept on us users as our internet packets are being opened & inspected by Bell-Canada?

If you’re as concerned as I am, you can contact Bell’s privacy dept in writing here:

The Office of the Bell Privacy Ombudsman
110 O’Connor Street
7th Floor
Ottawa, Ontario
K1P 1H1

If you wish to file a complaint with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, you should first contact the party in question (Bell), and Bell has 30-days in which to reply. If you have no reply or if the reply in inadequate to you, then follow up with a letter to the Privacy Commissioner (include the Bell reply and your original letter to them): http://www.privcom.gc.ca/contactus/index_e.asp

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
112 Kent Street
Place de Ville
Tower B, 3rd Floor
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 1H3

I can’t help but be reminded of these two pieces:

Big Brother Sympatico http://www.p2pnet.net/story/9205

Emily of the State http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcP3V9bgUoI

In an Email between Mr. Jean-Francois Mezei and me, he stated:

“I had not done any BitTorrent before this issue. I installed bitTorrent, and I can say that bell does not respect the 16:30 to 02:00 throttling schedule. Last night, it remained in effect until 08:00. And to download 6 gig, it is now going to take me something like 10 days unless the throttling keeps to schedule. Ironic that it forces us to do large data transfers during business hours.”

It should be noted that Bell’s letter to the wholesale ISPs (the competition) stated the throttle would be in effect from 4:30 p.m.-2:00 a.m. Ref:

However, there have been many reported complaints that Bell is not respecting these times.

Stay tuned, and also see Bell Canada - ringing in the spins.

[Ottawa Gal is a long-time p2pnet reader and comment poster who’d rather remain anonymous. She says she works in the University, likes her cat, reality TV, and Doctor McDreamy. Her favourite web sites are the Michael Geist blog and p2pnet.net. “Privacy on the net is also important to me,” she says. “I need a tinfoil hat ;)” She’s also the mother of, “two darling little girls who tore down my ceiling fan thinking it would be fun to hang from it.” So she advises parents to, “never have an armchair around from which little ones can reach fans”. (No one was hurt ) ]

Slashdot it!

cease and desist - Stop throttling users, ISPs tell Bell: CRTC doc, April 4, 2008
Toronto Star - Bell Internet has most ‘malicious activity’: Symantec, April 9, 2008
Here’s the deal - Bell-Not-So-Sympatico: throttling P2P, March 26th, 2008

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 10:07 am and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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