p2pnet - rss feed: Bell Canada Ontario class action
p2pnet news view P2P | Freedom:- Oh look,” says Ottawa Gal in an email.
“They are now going to include Ontario, but they haven’t updated their web site yet.”
‘They’ are Quebec’s Union des consommateurs (Consumers Union) and, “When Quebec ISP Videotron changed its contract bandwidth policies from unlimited to a 100-gig cap, Quebec users fought back by contacting the Union des consommateurs (Consumers Union) to get a class-action lawsuit going against the company for false advertising and breach of contract,” posted p2pnet’s Ottawa Gal in March.
Says Drake in a p2pnet Reader’s Write, “Ontario residents can now join the class action suit against Bell for throttling.”
Eligible is, “Any physical person residing in Quebec or Ontario who, on or since October 28, 2007 subscribed or was a subscriber to Bell Canada’s ADSL residential INTERNET service the said service having been marketed under one or other of the following names or brands,” says L’Association du Barreau Canadien, going on:
- Total Internet Essential,
- Total Internet Plus,
- Total Internet Performance,
- otal Internet Performance Plus,
- Total Internet Max,
- Sympatico High Speed,
- Sympatico High Speed Ultra,
- Sympatico Basic and Basic Lite Internet Service.”
Bell Sympatico P2P Black List
Bell Canada has been trying to steamroll custmers, users and smaller ISPs alike, into accepting traffic throttling and, thanks to the Net, is now finding it’s no longer dealing with uninformed, compliant users who’ll sit still for anything.
Bell is Canada’s largest ISP, with Comcast as its opposite number in the US, and in another interesting development, a highly pertinent observation by Jean-François Mezei, one of the first people to follow the lead of CAIP CAIP (Canadian Association of Internet Providers) by filing a submission with the CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission), has crossed the border.
In Bell Sympatico P2P Black List, Ottawa Gal was, last year, the first person to really zero in on Bell Canada’s depredations in Canada.
Robb Topolski, chief technology consultant at Free Press and Public Knowledge, did the same in America, with respect to Comcast.
“It’s a day late —- Bell asked for, and was granted, an extension —- and considerably more than a dollar short, p2pnet reported recently, talking about Bell Canada’s latest CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission) submission.
We went on, “Our post, the first on the subject and carrying the document in full, follows the efforts of Bell and other major ISPs here and across the border in the US to control what their users do with the accounts they’ve bought and paid for” and further down, “Bell admits it’s also in receipt of 25 comments”.
Among them, one from Jean-François Mezei who said in a Reader’s Write, “I went through Bell’s fantastic work of fiction … and commented on it.”
We ran his analysis, which appeared originally in dslreports, in which he concluded »»»
DPI is not a network management solution, it is a service management solution which defines what types of uses of internet are to be allowed and what parts are not allowed. 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.
Topolski thought this was particularly astute, sparking a perfect example of Net cross-pollination.
“He has a great point and I’ve thought it through and adopted it,” he told p2pnet.
So the next time Topolski testifies before one or other US congressional or senate committee, it may be they’ll have a chance to take Mezei’s views into consideration.
Government intervention?
Meanwhile, in a Reader’s Write to another p2pnet post, “Bell is a marketing company,” he says, adding »»»
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 government 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.
Definitely stay tuned.
Jon Newton - p2pnet
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July 22nd, 2008 at 5:15 pm
“So the next time Topolski testifies before one or other US congressional or senate committee, it may be they’ll have a chance to take Mezei’s views into consideration.”
Nice job JF! Keep up the comments they are good reads!
On another note, I hope bell gets an ass kicking in court
July 22nd, 2008 at 7:33 pm
100 Gb would be considered “over the top” in Australia, and would cost $150/mth. How much does Bell charge?
July 23rd, 2008 at 9:27 am
“100 Gb would be considered ‘over the top’…”
The point was, these accounts were advertised and sold as “Unlimited”.
When Bell arbitrarily changes that without proper renegotiation with each customer, they violate these contracts. It’s mind-boggling how much their customers have let them get away with this obvious crime for as long as they have before the uproar finally started.
Bell tried a couple of different ways to swindle me out of my original unlimited contract.
The most common method, of course, is by placing the “minor change” in their TOS, and sending some vague e-mail to customers “reminding” us to “keep ourselves informed” of such changes by going through their web pages and reading the new TOS. They do this often, and expect everyone to simply accept this as proper notice. It is NOT. You are not “obligated” to accept this and move on. I certainly didn’t.
Another way is to pull a “coup” on you when you phone them with a customer service issue. Here, they try to convince you that you’re “needs” fit a “different package”, which they will swiftly put you on right then and there should you accept. But they don’t make it clear that once they do that, you have effectively canceled your original contract, and none of its original terms can be expected.
The 2nd one didn’t work on me either, so they tried a final method - engineering the canceling of my account! Suddenly, there were all these problems with my payments “not being received”, and bogus entries in my account history were showing up that painted me as some career delinquent! They even started putting multiple payment requests through my bank, in order to deliberately invoke NSFs, and cause problems with other preauthorized creditors!! That was Bell’s worst mistake.
When all was said and done, they had to make amends, and that included:
- Formally apologizing to me
- Giving me proof that my account was “clean”
- Leaving my unlimited contract the way it was
- Refunding a shitload of bank charges
- Writing formal explanations to my affected creditors
- Giving me over a year of free internet service.
Do I really think that makes up for everything?…
Of course not. Bell is guilty of a few crimes here.
Do I want to stay with Bell?…
Of course not. If I had it my way this atrocity of a company would be dismantled back into its separate parts, and Sympatico and all other network components given back to the people who funded its creation - The Canadian Public!
Why am I still with them, then!?…
Because, at least for the time being, I have them.
They’re not in a position to screw with me without some radical changes to Canadian Law.