Bell Sympatico Bittorrent traffic shaping timeline

[madgunde]

I recently noticed that Bell seemed to be capping my Bittorrent bandwidth, something that Goomer had complained was happening to him for a few months now. He even came across this Globe & Mail article which reported on the practice of ISPs traffic shaping Bittorrent traffic. I decided to do some searchs on Broadbandreports.com's forums to see what info I could find about Sympatico's traffic shaping policies and came across this thread from a guy who tested his Bittorrent speeds on Sympatico over a period of several days and graphed the results:

Click to view full size.

I did a little experiment with a throttled Sympatico login, to plot a timeline of when the throttling occurs. I downloaded and seeded a torrent, with lots of downloaders so the upstream usage was quite steady.

I tested the upstream not downstream, I just didnt want to waste so much bandwidth over a 24hr period. But I think they get throttled equally. Here are the results.

Traffic shaping timeline (upstream)

2am-4pm - Unrestricted upstream 80KB/sec
4pm-6pm - Upstream starts to drop to around 60-65KB/sec
6pm-12am - Upstream gets throttled heavily around 35KB/sec
12am-1am - Upstream drops a bit more below 30KB/sec
1am-2am - Upstream goes back to about 60-65KB/sec
2am-4pm - Unrestricted upstream 80KB/sec

Keep in mind those are upload speeds, but I suspect a similar timeline is used for downloads. It's just after 8pm and I'm seeing my downloads seemingly capped at 30KB/s. My maximum download speed is about 510KB/s.

[Goomer]

So it looks like this is happening to everyone and not just me. The timelines totally coincide with what I have been experiencing, as the evenings are when I see the speed drop to 30k download.

Welcome to the new age, where the big players have got you by the cajones! I don't mind too too much, if I know the timelines, and know that the timelines for speed restrictions are not going to change in the future. This is like user fees....we'll charge people a few dollars for using a service like going to the doctor or visiting the library, or charge a toll to use a new highway. What stops them from jacking up the prices in the future? The same thing applies here. What's to stop Bell from increasing the restricted hours to 12 per day by next year, and 18 hours per day the following year? What about the speed cap? It is 30k right now. What's to stop them from dropping it to 20k next year, and 15k the year after that?

The same thing is happening in the US, and I know of one class action suit against a major ISP down there for the same thing. If the ISP loses that class action suit, then a new precedent is going to be in place, but unfortunately, this precedent will not apply to Canadian proceedings. I'm afraid our only option is to look for alternative ISP's that don't throttle their bandwidth! Or we start up our own class action suit!

Cheers

Goomer

[madgunde]

Yeah, this sucks. Imagine if you were told you could only make a certain number of phonecalls between certain hours, or that during certain months, you were only allowed to send a certain amount of mail. I guess such is the price of unlimited internet plans. But how long will it be before they start offering a premium plan that has no speed limits, but for which you have to pay extra? I could very well see them segmenting their network so that 'premium' subscribers could have all the bandwidth they need, but basic subscribers are given a smaller share of the pipe and so experience congestion or otherwise have their speed limited during peak hours.

We definitely need more competition in broadband. I'd like to see broadband over electric lines come to Canada, as well as municipal Wi-Fi and WiMax. The more choices and competition, the better!

[Goomer]

We already have municipal wi-fi in the downtown Toronto core, installed by Hydro One (formerly Ontario Hydro). It is fairly inexpensive, although the download speeds don't match DSL or cable. There are plenty of DSL competitors out there, but they use Bell Canada's pipes, so I don't know if they would face the same issue as Sympatico subscribers. Like I said before, welcome to the new world!

As I mentioned before, it's not the restricted downloading speeds during peak hours that bothers me, it's the "what's next" part of the equation that bothers me. If they're doing this now, what restrictions will be in place a year from now. Once you open Pandora's box, it's virtually impossible to close it again. Just ask the 407 drivers how their tolls have gone up over the last 5 years. Or ask the senior citizen taxpayer how their income tax rates have gone up over the last 50 years (income taxes were introduced to help fund the war efforts in WWI or was it WWII, as temporary measures that would be lifted once the war was over!).

Once this practice has become acceptable, there is no telling how they will enhance their restrictions in the future. And politically, downloaders are easy targets, because they are theoretically breaking the law by downloading movies/music/TV shows!

Cheers

Goomer

[madgunde]

We already have municipal wi-fi in the downtown Toronto core, installed by Hydro One (formerly Ontario Hydro). It is fairly inexpensive, although the download speeds don't match DSL or cable. There are plenty of DSL competitors out there, but they use Bell Canada's pipes, so I don't know if they would face the same issue as Sympatico subscribers. Like I said before, welcome to the new world!

I am aware of Hydro One's WiFi service, but it doesn't have sufficient coverage to be considered any real competition, since it only services a fairly small area of Toronto. It's a start, but what I had in mind was WiFi deployed in the majority of urban and suburban cities so it can offer some real competition to the big two ISPs. If anything, light users would be perfectly happy with WiFi service, leaving the faster services with more available bandwidth to provide to heavier users. So you'd see a two-pronged effect, competition helping to keep prices low and service quality/customer service higher, plus more pipes to spread around so there is less congestion and less of a need for ISPs to employ traffic shaping.

Of course, in a perfect world, every home would be connected to the internet via fibre-optic cable and speed/bandwidth wouldn't be an issue. Hey, a geek can dream, can't he?