Bell Canada: speed up, charges down?
p2pnet news view P2P | Freedom:- Bell Canada’s chief of regulatory affairs, Mirko ‘Mr5%‘ Bibic, claims Bell’s network can’t handle the load supposedly imposed by Bell customers who use P2P.
The company justifies its throttling actions based on this 5% who, it clains, cause serious congestion within its multi-million dollar network.
The 5% user base has an average speed of 3.5mbps.
The cure?
Triple the speed for users at less cost!
This rumour is making the rounds as posted by this Bell tech support rep on dslreports »»»
Starting in August, max [16-meg internet] is going to be 50 bucks with 100GB on a 2 year contract with 2 months free…
If Bell is pushing up the speed for this low price (the same price as their “upto” 7-meg internet), one has to say Bell’s network congestion is full of it.
Similar to what anon says in dslreports »»»
Bell makes the claim that their network can’t handle the current load and thats why they are throttling”.
If they can’t handle the current network load now how the f*ck are they going to handle an increase to 16-meg?
If the Bell network is as severely congested as it claims, and uses the assertion as justification for throttling its wholesale ISPs, why are they next month increasing speed for their own customers, also charging less?
Surely this will only add to the problem?
If the 5% who allegedly caused the throttling action now use an average speed of about 3.5-mbps, how the heck will it stand up to 5% using 16mbps?
Can someone please explain the logic here?
How does increasing speed more than three-fold at the same cost fix Bells severely congested network?
If the competition is throttled now at 30kB/s from 4-pm till 2:00 am, what will it be if Bell triples the speed for its own internet users?
To be able to service an average of 3.5mbps, Bell now throttles all its users, as well as the wholesale users’ 10-hours per day.
Will Bell throttle 24/7 and throttle more than just P2P to be able to service 16mbps?
It stands to reason that by tripling the speed one would have to do more network management!
When this rumour was pointed out to Rocky Gaudrault, co-owner and CEO of Teksavvy Solutions Inc (www.teksavvy.com), one of the wholesale ISP’s being throttled by force by bell Canada, he had this to say:
“It’s easy to promise something for whatever price if you don’t have to deliver on the demand….. 16Meg connections throttled 1/3 of the day (the part when you’re actually home and not sleeping)…. Sounds like a good profit centre proposition to me! ”
Considering Bell’s current and past nature, I personally would not take, nor recommend any one take, this 2-year contract offer.
As Bell is currently doing, and has done in the past, it can change its contracts on a whim to drop your allowable download bandwidth and also throttle longer and more applications at a whim.
Buyers beware; especially beware of 2-year contracts commitments.
Ottawa Gal – p2pnet
[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 
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July 17th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Tek Savvy sucks and should get their own network.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Tekk Belly you obviously have no idea what you are talking about.. Why should another company not have access to a phone system that was built with TAX PAYERS money?????
Idiot.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
According to Teksavvy and Acanac, Bell will now impose a cap on wholesalers as well.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20805831-Bells-upcoming-plans-for-Wholesalers
July 17th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Bell is a marketing company. It wants to be able to advertise speeds that rival cable, despite the antiquated nature of ADSL.
So they raise speeds of the ADSL sync, and widen the throttling. In the end, you will be able to acheieve those speeds only if you access the Bell.Ca or any Microsoft web sites, as well as buy movies from the Bell Video Store. The rest will be thottled.
This way, they can advertise any speed they want without having to worry about having a network capable of handling it.
The last Bell submission made it very clear that Bell had not invested in growing the aggregation capacity to match DSLAM capacity growth.
Perhaps the solution would be for the independant ISPs to go to the Teachers pension plan and offer to buy the ADSL infrastructure from Bell. This way, Teachers would get cash to pay down their huge debts, and independant ISPs wouldn’t be bothered by Bell’s silly tactics.
Looks to me like this is going to require governmenmt intervention to prevent Bell from doing what it wants.
Filing a tariff change request at the same time as the CRTC debates the throttling issue is smart on the part of Bell. When deciding on the throttling issue, the CRTC will have to consider implications should it rule in favour of Bell on the tariff change request. Forcing bell to disconnect the satanic boxes from the GAS/AHSSPI service for the throtling issue would be tantamount to ruling on the tariff change request without having begun to study that request.
I am glad I mentioned that usage based accounting can be done with any router and doesn’t need DPI equipment in my filing to the CRTC.
July 17th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Marketing 16mbit service, my butt. The average ADSL user is around 3.5 mbit. I’m lucky to be scratching 3.0. The Bell lines in my area were upgraded in the early 60’s, when they put the lines underground and got rid of party lines.
Currently, the best you can get any sort of speed of this nature is if you’re within a mile of the CO or remote. Otherwise, you’re S.O.O.L. for any cable-style high speed.
Yup, 16 lane highway with a speed limit of 8kmph, AND speed bumps. That’s the Bell equivalent.
July 4th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Hi Ottawa Gal.
(Bell Canada: Surf’s UP):
Lets say you change all your 100M Local Lan cards to 1000M ones, well, inside your new Lan you will get better speed right?
ok-That is basically all that Bell is trying to do with 16 Max (non-technically speaking). Our “local” so-to-speak canadian network is now potentially faster. The real questionis geeez, why didn’t they just do that sooner ? and that way, there would be NO EXCUSE to “throttle” us.
But, when we hit the outside world its ALL only as good as the weakest link (dsl overhead, certain lower country BW models, the big network trunks, ……, … )right ok.
The BELL apparent “internal” congestion in theory, probably never was , AND, therefore is NON-EXISTENT -simply because of the above IP technologies which we’ve already had for years. BNR/Nortel ring a bell ?
Its just (this new)Bell tryin’ to nickel-n-dime us again a bit. (actually, make that A LOT).
In other words, if Bell, Rogers, … would have just kept upgrading and maintaining our Canadian “Lan” so-to-speak, then what “throttling” ?
“Balancing/throttling” everyones network usage is akin to this cause you can’t “GIVE” to one, without “TAKING” from another.
I know, “Here we go again…” :
But ask yourself why those 100 year old phone poles and lines, and Cable, have been up for the last 100 years or so, and why haven’t they ALL been upgraded to “Fibre” lines directly to every Canadian home by NOW,…ie., (FTTN), and you’ll have your answer.
BNR/Nortel Netwroks was ready to do it ALL at one point in time, and not to long ago, for us. -BUT greedy, or really stoooopid Ma Bell didn’t want to put that initial, and lets face it, HUGE $INVESTMENT-Technology for that kind of upgrade for Canada. But did we really have it -OH YESSSS !
…Ooops, now Nortel is gone -errr um hey how about ‘dem new wireless technology instead eh !??
And this is why other countries are finally surpassing us on QoS and better bang for their buck Internet-wise. Actually they are getting better at network back-bone technologies and doing it “without” throttling the heck out of their customers.
I mean its not like Bell/Rogers hasn’t been making Billions of dollars over the last several decades or so that they couldn’t have done all these upgrades FIRST. ?
Nope, its greed, too many cheifs not enough Indians, too many corrupt and greedy CEO’s and not enough technicians.
Its too many Canadian Lemmings’, and not enough Canadian Beavers. !
Basically, we can’t entrust our (CDN) corporations that raise prices/rates, …. first, but “upgrade” and “R&D” is LAST ?! -comon !
Our Internet, which is still publicly owned by all of us, is too important to entrust with the likes of that kind-of corporate management mentality.
(…and lets not even mention how useless and outdated our CRTC has been in all these regards)
We entrusted Bell Canada/Rogers,… to provide us with the best Internet technology, FTTN, ADSLv2,…SLAM, keep it comin’, and experience and we Canadians were willing to pay. Instead, we get “throttling” excuses from all of them.
But over the last few years they have miserably failed, instead, they have fallin’ back onto some kind of “Corporate-driven-profiteering” mechanisms with no one really at the wheel anymore seeing ahead !!!
We all paid them dearly and monthly so that we wouldn’t end up in this canadian-consumer debacle. THEY LIED !
You know, like oh here’s a little new technological-trinket called Fibre Max, even though, they have bloody-well had that developed technology “years” ago already. But umm oh ya, we gotta charge a little more of course first for it.
I think with enough awareness from all canadians, and with the likes of saveournet.ca, netneutrality.ca, … eventually Bell (and you too Rogers) may re-structure itself, but without R&D from the likes of BNR/Nortel Networks that Canada may not see again for awhile well I dunno ?
I got hopes for Canada (once again) being the Numero Uno for Innovative Networking mediums’ off any kind, and since we share alot with the world we’ll never be alone.
Don’t you listen to them, ’cause Bell/Rogers, …, could easily upgrade their hardware and forget the “throttling” strategy, which, as even they know now, is back-firing on them like a “blue angel flatulation”. GOOD!
Summarily, they don’t “NEED” to throttle us.
In any case, to say the least, “Throttling” is UN-Canadian
Rick.
Ottawa.
Canada.