The issue of net neutrality is quickly coming to a head here in Canada. It’s been long known that the largest cable internet provider Rogers has been throttling P2P activity, but since the announcement a couple of weeks ago that Bell would start throttling P2P on it’s 3rd party wholesale lines (which would affect DSL users not subscribed to Bell’s Sympatico service), there has been a lot of action.
What has been largely overlooked is that not only is Bell throttling P2P, but they are, if the evidence is accurate, throttling ALL traffic. Recently, Canadian DSL provider Teksavvy (which I use for my home service), posted before and after graphs of their traffic throughput, which suggests that all types of traffic have been scaled back by 2 thirds. I’m reprinting the graphs here, as this information seems to be getting lost in the shuffle…
before throttling and…
after throttling.
On Wednesday, Bell called on the CRTC to scrap the mandated wholesale of DSL, even though the CRTC stated that 3rd party companies should still be able to rent telecom lines. The issue of net neutrality was raised in the House of Commons by NDP MP Charlie Angus during question period, which prompted the following response from Industry Minister Jim Prentice:
“We have a well advanced Internet system in this country. It is not publicly regulated,” he said.
“At this point in time we will continue to leave the matter between consumers on the one hand and Internet service providers on the other”
After the disclosure by Ellacoya (which received millions in investment from Bell) that P2P is not the most bandwidth intense traffic (further evidenced by TekSavvy’s charts), Bell gains the advantage of controlling it’s own streaming media services over legal P2P traffic, or outside services accessed by both Sympatico and 3rd party customers.
This is a follow up to our previous article: Net Neutrality Perfect Storm, eh!
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