When Bell instituted their throttling of Internet services back in March, it was almost universally-reviled. It wasn’t so much the throttling that was disliked but rather the secrecy with which it was done. Bell did not notify any of their customers of this change of service, nor did they change their advertisements to reflect this new “level” of service. Thankfully, the CRTC has ordered Bell to publicly disclose the full details of whether Internet traffic levels warranted throttling. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to include the full explanation of their throttling policies.

However, some new research has shed light on the true extent of Bell’s throttling. One report shows that throttling is in in full force from a time starting at 4:30 PM all the way to 2 AM on every day. This amounts to close to 40% of the day. Furthermore, during these times, if any user was detected to be using P2P (using Bell’s fairly liberal detection rules) a width swath of other protocols would also be limited to the current cap of 30 KB/s. This would include other encrypted protocols such as those behind SSH and VoIP. This is clearly an unacceptably wide-range of throttling and effectively reduces the bandwidth to less than 10% of what is normally available to the user. Instead of taking a blacklist approach, it appears that once a user is “flagged” as using P2P, all traffic that is not explicitly white-listed is throttled to a measly 30 KB/s. (Note that the article states “30 Kbps” but I believe this to be a misprint, as through my own experiences the limit is around 30 KB/s, not Kbps)

Bell’s actions don’t match with their reasoning. They claim that P2P needs to be throttled in order to preserve network quality. Even if this were true, it would be a blatant case of false advertising and more a symptom of their inability to upgrade their infrastructure despite their monopoly status. However Bell’s recent moves seem to indicate they do have faith in their network’s ability to handle bandwidth-intensive applications, as they recently launched their own video download site. Movies purchased at Bell’s own store curiously are downloaded at full speed.

Bell is treading a fine line here by throttling protocols such as those used for P2P and VoIP, considering that these protocols may be used by other businesses to deliver services that compete directly with Bell’s own. These sorts of actions may be anti-competitive, especially since they use Bell’s advantage as a near-monopoly to discourage users from utilizing competitor’s offerings. Bell’s own video download store only confirms their desire to bundle and push other services along with Internet access, and now they enjoy an unnatural advantage in delivering this content because of the unfair rules they have instituted. No one said business was fair, but free markets cannot thrive under monopolies either.

Why does Bell see it fit to throttle and slow down customer’s connections instead of investing in their own infrastructure to improve end-user quality? It’s simple enough: There is no incentive to do so. With their market-dominating position as one of the big ISPs in Canada, they don’t have to worry about losing customers because of poor service simple because there’s not many other places customers take their business to if they were to “vote with their dollar”.

Indeed, the situation is worsened because many local ISPs (who provide DSL) in turn get their connections from Bell. Bell has decided to not only throttle their own customers but also any traffic that goes through their network. This means customers who don’t even have a contract with Bell suffer from their actions. Again, only a monopoly would have the gall to pull off a move like this.

These actions reek of the days of dialup, a time that nobody wants to revisit again. With the latest moves of Bell and other big ISPs it appears that with their oligopoly, these corporations want to bring back the days where unlimited access did not exist. However, instead of getting billed per-hour, you’ll get billed per-MB/GB. This is a natural thing for telcos, who are used to getting away with charging ridiculous fees and other excesses. If things continue the way they are going, without intervention your Internet access bill will more resemble your cellphone/mobile bill. The high cost of mobile phone access has already hurt our country in terms of technological adoption; do we want the same to happen for Internet access?

Over the last week, many people became aware of Bell implementing throttling on their Internet services. Throttling, (or traffic shaping) aims to improve the overall Quality-of-Service (QoS) by delaying or limiting certain types of packets so that the network is not overloaded.

Traffic shaping itself is not insidious; in fact it’s a widely used method to maintain the stability of networks. However, the reasons that Bell and other providers have done this, as well as how they’ve carried it out, have created much controversy.

Bell says, you do

The way Bell has implemented their throttling has peeved off many users. Not only are they throttling their own Internet users, but they are also throttling their wholesale services, that is, the bandwidth that they sell to third-party ISPs who then resell that service to other users. This, in effect, extends Bell’s traffic-shaping policy to other ISPs and their users, all of whom did not agree to such contracts.

Furthermore, it appears they have not just throttled BitTorrent, but all encrypted packets as well. This is because BitTorrent is often used with protocol encryption and rather than have users circumvent their policies, Bell has chosen the shotgun approach of throttling everything that could bit BitTorrent. Clearly this blanket approach is effective, but it angers many people who regularly use VPN for work-related duties.

Furthermore, many people use BitTorrent for legit purposes. The CBC has chosen to use BitTorrent to distribute one of their shows; many open source projects use it to distribute their programs, such as Ubuntu Linux. Throttling the transfer rates here effectively reduces the level of service you expected when you signed up for Internet through Bell.

Chicken Little?

Providers have always said that throttling/traffic-shaping was necessary to ensure a certain QoS for all users. This has an element of truth to it - after all, bandwidth is a finite resource. However, what irks me is that ISPs clearly advertise a certain speed when it comes to their services. There’s often a “Basic” level of service, which is < 1 Mbps, and other, more pricey packages offering > 5 Mbps. If a provider cannot, or will not, provide such a level of service, they should not be advertising it as such.

There’s been some news lately (see this report from the CBC) about an impending “bandwidth crisis”. The journalists out there seem to have latched onto the idea that bandwidth is some sort of limited natural resource that needs to be dug out of the ground, and thus, we could run out of it. Other claim that soon the Internet will slow to a crawl and be so unusable that people will simply stop using it.

I call BS on all of this. These reports sound like nothing more than a reason for providers to justify throttling or their lack of planning for expansion of their infrastructure. After all, if bandwidth is so precious and we’re running out of it, wouldn’t it make sense to “ration” it?

As Internet providers who have a virtual monopoly on the market, these corporations should have the obligation to continually improve their networks, instead of throttling users and crying Chicken Little about the impending bandwidth doomsday. How come we don’t hear of such crises in countries such as Korea or Japan?

Harmful

The aim of an Internet provider should be to deliver the best quality of service to its users, just as any other service. However, the fact is that BitTorrent is the target of throttling precisely because it is so
efficient; for once, users were able to maximize the bandwidth promised to them, and providers found themselves unable to deliver on their promises. Throttling is thus a way for them to renege on their promise without having to change the speeds that are advertised.

In a way, all of this is similar to the story of how the QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to slow down typists so that old typewriters of the day wouldn’t jam.¹

We accept this level of service not because we are pleased with it, but instead because we have little to no other options. By limiting bandwidth and not investing in improving infrastructure as much as they should, Bell and other providers do not only their customers a great disservice, but also society as a whole. The fast and free flow of information is essential to improving people’s knowledge and acts as a catalyst for greater things.

1. I realize such claims may be apocryphal, but I’m just trying to make a point!