[Update 2] We’ve known for a while now that major ISPs in Canada have been utilizing traffic shaping technology to throttle the transfer speeds of certain types of traffic. Rogers Hi-Speed and Bell Sympatico customers who use Bittorrent to transfer files know all too well. It’s for this reason that some consumers have been switching to smaller independent ISPs like TekSavvy. While it isn’t the main reason, I’d be lying if I told you it didn’t play a role in my decision to switch providers.
Well, if Bell is allowed to get away with it, looks like the honeymoon may be over. News broke yesterday in major news outlets, technology blogs and internet forums that Bell Canada has been traffic shaping the wholesale internet connections they provide to competing DSL ISPs who rely on Bell’s infrastructure to provide their service. That’s right, Bell is dictating their competitor’s terms of service. The worst part about it is Bell failed to notify any of their wholesale ISP customers that they were going to do it.
While some will say Bell has a right to manage their network to ensure all their customers enjoy good performance, it’s hard to see how this doesn’t run afoul of anti-competition laws. Bell sells a lot more than just internet service after all. They’re probably best knows as a telephone service provider, but are also the major satellite TV provider in Canada. When Bell started throttling traffic for their own Sympatico customers, it was already crossing the line since the services that were getting throttled, VoIP and P2P file-sharing are both upcoming competitors to traditional telephone and cable/satellite TV service.
By applying their traffic shaping to competing DSL provider’s wholesale lines however, Bell has stepped so far over that anti-competitive line that it’s not even a line anymore, it’s a tiny spec way off on the horizon. A deregulated DSL marketplace is supposed to promote healthy competition. One of the ways companies compete is by offering better service. But rather than compete fair and square, Bell is abusing their monopoly on the DSL backbone to force their competitors to reduce their quality of service to the same low level as Bell’s. So consumers are left with no choices if they want to deal with an ISP that doesn’t utilize traffic shaping, since the only other alternatives for most are the local Cable monopoly providers, most of which also throttle their customer’s connections.
If this is allowed to continue unchecked, how long before we see YouTube or iTunes downloads get speed throttled? With more and more of the world’s communication and media traveling over the internet, the internet monopolists will have more and more power to dictate how we use our internet connections. As a telecommunications and media competitor, Bell cannot be trusted to be impartial in choosing what protocols and services to apply traffic shaping to.
So what can we do about this? Get the word out. Stop doing business with Bell and let them know why. Write a letter to your local MP, the CTRC and the Competition Bureau of Canada, and let them know you think what Bell is doing is unacceptible, and that network neutrality is not only very important to you, but that you consider it essential to promoting open competition, innovation and free speech on the internet as well as Canada’s competitiveness in the global information economy.
Update 1 - 4/1/2008, 12:35 pm: There’s a petition up as well as related news articles at
neutrality.ca. If you support net neutrality, take a moment to
head on over and add your name to the growing list. They also have some
banner images in various sizes, perfect for promoting the cause and spreading the word to others via your forum signature, blog or in online comments:
Update 2 - 4/14/2008, 11:15 am: For those of you who would like to add your voice to the effort to get Bell to stop throttling their competitor’s internet traffic, a poster on DSLReports named “CanadianISP” has
posted simple and quick 4-step instructions that you can follow to notify the CRTC that you support CAIP’s (Canadian Association of Internet Providers) complaint against Bell’s throttling of third party ISP traffic. The whole process will take you at most 60 seconds of your time, so if you’re at all concerned with the direction Canadian internet access is going, I urge you to take the time to do it. To make it even easier, here are the instructions from the DSLReports topic:
If you would like to support CAIP in their efforts please file submissions with the Commission over the next week to show your support for the request for interim relief. These submissions don’t have to be very complicated.
All that you need to do is:
- Click on the following link:
http://support.crtc.gc.ca/crtcsubmissionmu/forms/Telecom.aspx?lang=e
- Select “Part VII / PN” from the list.
- Insert the CRTC file number (# 8622-C51-200805153) into the “Subject” Line.
- Insert the following suggested text into the “Description / Comments / Questions” box:
“I am writing to express my support for the application that CAIP has filed with the CRTC regarding Bell Canada’s throttling practices. I believe that these practices contravene Bell Canada’s duties as a common carrier and that the Commission should direct Bell to immediately cease and desist from throttling the traffic of independent ISPs.”
As someone once said, if you don’t do your part to try and stop this, then you forfeit your right to complain about it, ever.
March 26th, 2008
[Update 1] Well that couldn’t have gone any smoother. For those that have just tuned in, we switched Internet service providers this morning. I’m happy to report that the migration went smoothly and without issue. I’m actually quite pleasantly surprised that this is the case, since I haven’t had the best of luck in the past when it came to dealing with ISPs. They almost NEVER deliver what they promise. The fact that I was dealing with two ISPs in order to make it all happen borders on a miracle.
Bell was scheduled to suspend my Sympatico DSL service at midnight, so I decided I’d stay up and wait for it to happen so I could connect my new Thomson SpeedTouch 516 DSL modem up in preparation for my TekSavvy DSL service to be activated in the morning. So I figured I’d get some last minute email and websurfing in and then settled into playing Call of Duty 4 online on my PS3. In other words, what I do almost every night. My plan was to play until I lost connection, then install the new DSL modem, then go to bed and reconfigure my router to connect to Teksavvy in the morning. Midnight rolled by and I was still taking out tangos. One o’clock AM came and went and I was still defending democracy from terrorists. By around 2:15 am, I decided that my tour of duty might never end, and called it quits for the night, Sympatico Internet connection still operational. In the back of my mind, I worried that Bell’s delay in disconnecting me was going to delay the activation of the new TekSavvy connection.
Looks like those worries were unfounded since when I got up this morning at 7:00 am, I found my AirPort Extreme router’s connection light flashing amber, indicating a connection problem. I connected the SpeedTouch modem to the phone line and was happy to see the DSL and Internet status lights turn solid green. A few minutes later, I had my AirPort Extreme reconfigured with the TekSavvy settings and was connected to the Internet with our new static IP. A quick trip to my domain registrar’s self-serve website to reconfigure the artofgeek.com domain to point to our new IP and disable dynamic DNS and I was done. Then it was just a matter of waiting for the change to propagate to Internet DNS servers around the world and we were back in business. Total downtime was under 6 hours.
First impressions? My web surfing seems a bit faster, and my wife said the same thing when I asked her if she noticed a difference, but the difference isn’t immense from the limited amount of time I had to test it. There’s not much else to say at this point. It’s an internet connection, and it’s working. If you have any questions about our transition or the service, post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.
Update 1 - 3/18/2008, 9:41 am: For those interested in performance info, here’s my results from Speedtest.net on three seperate tests:
As you can see, the download speeds seem pretty consistent around 4,270kbps. The upload speeds vary more, but solidly between 500-600kbps. I only wish I had done these same tests with my Sympatico connection while I still had a chance. Keep in mind these speeds may vary depending on the time of day. I’m fairly impressed since right now is near peak hours for internet usage (between 9-10pm). I’ll run the tests again at different times of day to see if it stays consistently fast or not.
March 18th, 2008
[Update 1] We Canadians put up with a lot of abuse from our telecom/internet providers. As if high prices and poor customer service weren’t enough to endure, we’ve also put up with data transfer caps on supposedly “unlimited” internet connections and now our supposedly high-speed internet connections are only high speed for some types of data, but not others. To quote an early 90’s infomercial marketing slogan, stop the insanity!
Our government, via the CRTC, have been trying their best to inject some competition into the Canadian telecom market for a few years now, but phone number portability and competition in the DSL and home phone markets will only make a difference if customers actually start switching. It’s understandable that the majority of Canadians are reluctant to switch from one of the major providers to a relative newcomer, but really, what have you got to lose besides maybe a little inconvenience?
Up till now I was content to pay a premium for my Sympatico high-speed DSL internet service from Bell for the peace of mind of knowing I was dealing with a large incumbent that had the resources and experience to give me a reliable connection. I switched to Bell from Rogers when Rogers threatened to cancel my service because I was exceeding their monthly data transfer allowance. Bell’s Sympatico service had no such limits.
But recently, Bell Sympatico implemented traffic shaping to limit the speeds of P2P filesharing transfers during peak hours to a maximum of 30KB/s. I was resigned to live with that, provided it didn’t get any worse.
As someone who hosts their own webserver, I’ve always wanted a static IP address, but because I only run it as a hobby, I couldn’t justify the $100/month it would cost me to get a business internet account, which is usually the only way to get a static IP from Bell or Rogers. To make matters worse, business accounts are usually even more limited on data transfers than consumer accounts. So I’ve been resigned to using dynamic DNS solutions to keep my artofgeek.com domain name properly pointed to my server at home.
Last weekend, I was seeking advice about email server configuration on the ehmac.ca forums and user John Clay was kind enough to respond recommending I switch ISPs to one that doesn’t block mail traffic and offers a static IP. He then mentioned that TekSavvy, a local Ontario DSL ISP offers static IPs for just $4 extra per month.
That sounded too good to be true, but I was definitely intrigued. A quick visit to the TekSavvy Solutions website later, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could get the same speed of DSL service with unlimited bandwidth AND a static IP address for $4 LESS per month than what I was paying Bell. The icing on the cake was that TekSavvy does not shape traffic or block any ports AND, you can use any standard DSL modem to get your connection.
So let me sum up:
- Same speed as my existing Sympatico service.
- Unlimited bandwidth usage.
- Static IP address for hosting my server.
- No port blocking of any kind.
- No traffic shaping or speed limiting (hurray for Bittorrent!).
- Can supply your own modem.
- $4 less per month than what Bell is charging me.
That’s $43.95/month. Wow. Game over. I’m sold. So I called Bell today to cancel my service, followed by a call to TekSavvy to subscribe to their DSL High Speed Internet Unlimited residential service.
Now to be fair, you still have to buy a DSL modem, which TekSavvy charges $100 for, plus $10 for shipping. But here’s where TekSavvy’s open modem policy comes in. A 5 minute Google search, and I found speedtouch.ca that sells the exact same modem TekSavvy was going to sell me (the Thomson SpeedTouch 516) for $50 + $12 for shipping. Bell was charging me a perpetual $2/month to lease my modem, and you have no choice but to buy or lease their modem. So as long as my new DSL modem lasts more than 2.5 years, it’ll pay for itself, and I’ll save an additional $2 per month after that.
So that’s it. With just a bit of hesitation, I took the plunge. My service is scheduled to switch over from Sympatico to TekSavvy on March 18, 2008. There will be a bit of downtime during the switch, but hopefully not more than 6-12 hours. Afterwhich the Art Of Geek website should be even more reliable than it’s ever been. The most common cause for the site being inaccessible has been the dynamic IP changing every time my modem or router had to be rebooted. This will no longer be an issue. To top it all off, I will be free to run my own email server if I want to, and I can look forward to getting my bittorrent files downloaded in record time again. Needless to say, I’m really stoked about the switch.
So if you’re curious about how the switch goes, check back here after March 18. I’ll be sure to update the Art Of Geek blog on how it goes.
Update 1 - 2/21/2008, 1:10 pm: My
Thomson SpeedTouch 516 (link to pdf) DSL modem just arrived from speedtouch.ca. I’m all excited to get it set up, unfortunately, I have to wait another 26 days for my service to get cut over…
February 19th, 2008