| Bell Throttles Third-Party ISP Traffic By moving to throttle P2P and BT traffic, Bell is really missing a larger issue. The business model they are espousing, as evidenced by their current behaviour, makes no allowances for the fact that P2P networks ARE the future of the internet.
Content delivery and so many other things are going to depend on it.
It looks to me like TekSavvy et al. might actually have a case. I suspect Bell has no means of hiving off third-party traffic so it's not affected by the throttling. So the throttle is being applied in blanket fashion, consequences be damned.
Bell's arguments about the evils of file-sharing and clogged networks seem a little weak to me. They saw this coming and they chose not to upgrade their networks. So they are now expecting everyone else to pay for their failure to plan.
If we had full fibre-optic lines and terabit servers like they do in parts of Sweden (and elsewhere), the issue of bandwidth bottlenecks (if it's real at all) would be a non-issue.
If you ask me, Bell is no better than the cell phone companies like Telus, Rogers, etc. who sell crippled, overpriced phones and charge usurious rates even for basic service.
It's funny to see how deregulation of communications has actually played out. It was supposed to bring consumers greater choice and cheaper service. Instead all it has brought is higher prices, non-negotiable 'bundles' of services and a duopoly (basically a monopoly shared by Rogers and Bell).
Maybe the answer is independent, decentralized wireless networking. Intel has brought out a WiFi router with a range of sixty (yes, I said 'sixty') miles. It's intended for use in Third World countries, but it seems to me that it offers the potential to create an internet which operates separately from the existing greedhead, erm *corporate* networks.
Wouldn't that just piss them off royally? |
