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LiQuiD
BSD geek
Premium
join:2002-08-08
Anjou, QC
| reply to andyb
Re: Globe and mail request for people to speak to about issue
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. | |
chrish
join:2007-02-19
Ottawa, ON | Very good and to the point -- I too have been noticing latency when using remote desktop so this is a very valid point | |
shikotee
join:2007-01-11
Toronto, ON | reply to LiQuiD
Giggidy, Giggidy...
Well stated, good sir! | |
Mark Rejhon
join:2004-02-02
Ottawa, ON
 ·Magma Communications
| 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). | |
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