Is Bell Canada trying to confuse throttling issues?
p2pnet news view | Freedom | P2P:- Is Bell Canada deliberately trying to confuse watchers of the bandwidth throttling, net neutrality, debate by comparing what it does on the retail side, Sympatico, with what it’s obliged to do by regulation on the wholesale side?
Bell on Friday sent its latest effort to justify its unjustifiable actions to the CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission).
The missive came in answer to the CAIP (Canadian Association of Internet Providers) April 3 demand that it “Cease & Desist” and to date, 25 individuals and organisations, including Google and Cisco, have found it necessary to also lodge their thoughts with the CRTC, by far the vast majority of them siding with CAIP.
But, “The obligations they have to wholesale customers (competitive ISPs) aren’t the same as those obligations they have to their Sympatico customers,” points out CAIP chairman and president Tom Copeland.
“It is the regulated wholesale function that needs to be addressed by the Commission, not how Bell treats its retail customers,” he told p2pnet.
“That’s a fight for another day.”
Bell is trying to lay the blame for a traffic throttling exercises on P2P users whose activities, it claims, are responsible for serious bandwidth congestion.
CAIP members, “counter that Bell is throttling P2P as way to avoid upgrading its network,” says the Montreal Gazette, also noting the ISP association also says Bell gives, “preferential treatment to its own services, like its new online video store“.
Deep Packet Inspection
In its new submission, Bell admits it’s using DPI, but says it’s only doing so to see the kind of data has been sent, not contents.
“DPI is short for Deep Packet Inspection, an almost harmless seeming term which in Canada is being forcefully thrust into public attention by the Bell Canada throttling scandal,” said p2pnet in May, going on »»»
DPI (and filtering), “enables advanced security functions as well as internet data mining, eavesdropping, censorship, etc,” says the Wikipedia >>>
Advocates of net neutrality fear that DPI technology will be used to privatize the Internet.
It’s also cited by CAIP … which, in its attempts to have Bell’s activities curtailed, said in a submission to Canadian regulators, “Bell is using DPI to sequester or ‘hijack’ certain data packets as they pass through the network, and hold these packets hostage until certain pre-conditions are met … ”
CIPPIC (Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic) says Bell hasn’t only, “failed to obtain the consent of its retail and wholesale internet customers in applying its deep-packet inspection technology,” it’s using it to, “find and limit the use of peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent, which it says are congesting its network”.
In his detailed critique of this latest example of Bell disingenuity, “DPI is not a network management solution,” states Jean-François Mezei, who sent his own comments to the CRTC shortly after the first Bell response to CAIP’s C&D demand.
Rather, DPI is a service management solution, “which defines what types of uses of internet are to be allowed and what parts are not allowed,” says Mezei, going on »»»
This is not an “engineering” decision, it is a management decision.
If congestion were a problem, Bell Canada would have delayed Sympatico 40% speed increases from 5 to 7mbps until the backbone was able to support it.
That would have been an engineering solution to manage the network.
The ADSL speed is the only variable that Bell can control under GAS tariffs. ISPs control how much AHSSPI capacity they purchase to support the type of uses their customers make at the speeds Bell as decided to supply on the ADSL loops.
Management at the application level is not network management, it is service management.
Click here for the p2pnet digest of stories so far.
Jon Newton - p2pnet
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