O Canada! > Canadian > TekSavvy > Globe and mail request for people to speak to about issue

Globe and mail request for people to speak to about issue

Fatness, can you sticky this for a bit?

I think matt may have some preconceptions as to what is actually involved here. It's fine to try to find out about how people may have ran into difficulties with large bandwith but it is also missing the mark on the multiple aspects of what throtling actually means with ethical, legal, privacy and usefulless implications.

1) Ethical: Promoting it's own goals while degrading that of it's powerless competition (as in no other realistic choices)
2) legal: in moving away from common carrier status, not fulfilling contract agreements (appears to).
3) Pricacy: In inspecting data and making decisions based on the type/value of that data. Short road here from shaping data flow to shaping data values (censorship?), and
4) Usefullness: At the ISP user level in not being able to use what was aggreed to, to have degraded performance in all transactions due to the need to inspect all data.

and so on and so on.

I am a casual user, maybe 100gb once in a while, so I can concur -- I think a few people should enlighten matt and perhaps help him get the entire story?

Please don't spam him with sensless emails, lets keep it on topic -- we have someones attention and should not abuse it.

reply to mazhurg
Can you post a link to the group please. I know a person that got charged over $300 for over the limit on there *sympatico unlimited* plan, so when she cancelled the service she received a further $300 charge EACH for un-bundling her cell phones and home phone. I think her current unpaid balance is around $700+ she had to pay the land phone line part due to it being their business line but her cells are now turned off as well.
(the exact figures you will need to get from her)

reply to chrish
Yes please sticky.

I know some of you guys have done some really good tests showing what other protocols have been affected and to what extent. Please, if you can contact Matt through Facebook or I suppose directly through the Globe and Mail that would really help.

reply to a1_Andy
Dont reply for her but give her the link to contact him.
»www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9221549245

Micheal Geist also has the link in his latest blog

As requested on #teksavvy, here's a copy/paste of my message to the email above:

Hi Matt,

I obtained your email from a post on www.dslreports.com in the Canadian Broadband forum section. A poster there copied your request from facebook on there, and I thought I'd share my thoughts with you. You are writing about something that is quite valid in the eyes of many, and I neither agree or disagree with those speaking for or against caps on internet bandwidth consumption, however I'd like to suggest something more you can write about. I'd also like to thank you in advance for taking the time to hear what I have to say. I'll tell you right now, I'm not another person saying that file sharing and bittorrent is awesome and the whole thing about using it to download legitimate files. Here's a refreshing change: I have never even so much as installed a bittorrent or other filesharing client!

However, I'd like to take advantage of this to bring your attention to something that I feel will have far greater and far reaching consequences (please don't stop reading!), bandwidth throttling. This too should be discussed in another article.

To be fair, I hate peer-to-peer networks (P2P). I never even use them. So why am I so concerned? There are two reasons really. For one, the most direct at the moment, is this. Bell's "plan" to throttle P2P seems quite ambitious, as they also throttle ALL encrypted data, it would seem. This is the part I have an issue with. I never used any form of filesharing program or community, or whatever they call it, and yet I'm impacted. This is not just me. If someone needs to connect to a work network via a VPN, they will be slowed too. That is the case with me. Also, I use secured (SSL - secure socket layer - an encrypted technology) email access. This means that even my email will be affected! I use a wireless network around the house, I can't help but use encrypted data to ensure it's for my eyes only. There are so many more ways encrypted data has become mainstream. I maintain several UNIX machines remotely. I login to them remotely using another encrypted transmission protocol, which is widely accepted as the standard for such access: SSH. It is entirely unethical, much less practical and I'd say it should even become illegal (Google for proponents of making laws regarding net-neutrality).

As you can see, despite the spin by Bell that they are cutting down on this apparently awful file sharing which is bogging down the internet (they use ellacoya traffic shapers, interestingly, even THEY say filesharing is not the number one traffic usage: »www.ellacoya.com/news/pdf/2007/N···lert.pdf), they have decided for a great deal of Canadians how the internet will be used. How is this any better than what's been done in China and North Korea? Bell is going to go to great lengths to market this and give it a spin that it's a necessary evil, and that it's only affecting those "bad" users. I use the internet heavily, yes. I do not download much though, I use it for mainstream stuff like connecting to work to work on files from home, and to administer remote servers. I don't even come near these caps, yet I'm affected. Others will too. This isn't right, and we should not yet again be bullied into settling for what bell wants to push down to us because they haven't been able to manage their own network and growth forecasting adequately.

Very good and to the point -- I too have been noticing latency when using remote desktop so this is a very valid point

reply to LiQuiD
Giggidy, Giggidy...

Well stated, good sir!

reply to chrish
Looks like he got his article done

Much more informed this time around:
»www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/···ogy/home

reply to chrish
Just saw the new piece & it's pretty good but he seems to be buying into some of Bell/Rogers ideas - albeit unwittingly.

First off calling people "bandwidth hogs" is not an unbiased position; especially when he's talking of relatively small small caps. I don't think he's intentionally trying to shift the tone here, but it will have that effect.

More importantly, he doesn't seem to fully understand that Bell is not supplying the actual bandwidth being used by TSI & other isps. It would be best if Rocky could drop Matt Hartley a line and explain the 'last mile' concept. Things will look much different if his readers understood that TSI is not fighting for the right to distribute Bell's bandwidth, but is actually paying for bandwidth usage directly and is able to maintain a good working model - in spite of paying the first $20/month straight to Bell.

It would also be good to clarify that TSI customers pay extra for heavier bandwidth usage, either in the higher-priced "Unlimited" package, or by block with the "Premium". He should also understand that even with these extra charges, TSI offers more affordable rates than Bell (or Rogers).

Most of the (many) negative comments on the initial Globe story gripe that TSI is whining because Bell is clamping down in the way Bell's bandwidth is being abused by smaller companies & that TSI customers expect to get something (from Bell)for nothing. The perception seems to be very strong that all the bandwidth used by Teksavvy & their customers actually belongs to Bell.

While any one of us could try to explain this to Matt, Rocky is known to him & Rocky has the immediate credibility to make this case. (And he'll probably be a little more diplomatic than some of us, at this moment.;) ) The throttling story is not accurate as long is it leaves vague the impression that TSI is trying to unfairly distribute Bell's bandwidth.

reply to chrish
No one on bell or rogers uses large amounts of bandwidth. Tell the guy try china or korea where individuals use several terabytes a day.

reply to chrish
I have three Vonage voip phone lines on my TekSavvy DSL connection and I have noticed more frequent degradation with some of these voip lines during peak periods, even though none of us are BitTorrent users.

Members of this household are renters, and we use voip partially because we can move them around to any new Internet connection, without paying for telephone reinstallation expenses, and I only need one incoming telephone line from the telephone pole (DSL connection) to run three Vonage phone lines simultaneously, even using my existing house wiring.

The voip connections are very latency sensitive. There are certain situations where we are web surfing while using the phone lines, and there are no problems even during evenings (peak periods). However, lately, I am noticing a little more latency than usual.

The act of filtering BitTorrent connections are having an unintended side effect on us legitimate users. In theory, Bell's BitTorrent throttling SHOULD improve voip connectivity, but this is not the case here.

Even though I am not a BitTorrent user, I would join a Parliament Hill protest regarding Bell/Rogers/network neutrality, if one was organized here in my home city of Ottawa. If you to contact me for more information, you can email me at (spamfilter) at (marky.com).