Add Sympatico to the growing list of ISP’s blocking P2P traffic.
In response to consumer complaints posted in the company’s official forum, Canadian ISP Bell Sympatico has admitted that it uses bandwidth throttling technologies to impose limitations on P2P and file-sharing services during peak hours. This revelation is further evidence that net neutrality is eroding.
In response to a user complaint, a Sympatico forum administrator wrote that they "Are now using a Internet Traffic Management to restrict accounts that are using a large portion of bandwidth during peak hours.” The forum administrator also provides a list of affected applications, which includes BitTorrent, Gnutella, Limewire, Kazaa, and other widely-used P2P applications. Readers of Broadband Reports had been suspicious for some time that the ISP was throttling traffic.
“Bell Sympatico has launched a solution to enhance the online customer experience and improve Internet performance for all our customers during peak periods of Internet usage with the introduction of Internet Traffic Management,” another response says. “There continues to be phenomenal growth of consumer Internet traffic throughout the world, and Bell is using Internet Traffic Management to ensure we deliver bandwidth fairly to our customers during peak Internet usage.”
The rhetoric issued by Sympatico in defense of bandwidth throttling resembles Comcast’s recent defense of similar practices. The ISPs claim that bandwidth throttling leads to a better Internet experience for customers. As numerous advocacy groups have pointed out in response to such claims, bandwidth throttling and other kinds of discriminatory content filtering fundamentally change the nature of the Internet to the detriment of consumers. Selectively blocking transmission of content hardly constitutes a valid means of improving the Internet experience.
The bandwidth throttling practices used by these companies are made more egregious by the secrecy surrounding the precise nature of what gets blocked and when. In the official Sympatico forum, the company representatives who admit that bandwidth throttling is occurring are declining to respond to questions about the extent of the throttling or the conditions that Sympatico uses to determine whose connectivity to degrade. Some ISPs, like Comcast, actively punish employees for disclosing such information to the public.
What’s so ironic in all of this however, is that they very people whom they expect to lure with super fast download and upload speeds are the ones most affected by P2P throttling. Last time I checked, one doesn’t need a 1MB/s connection to browse the web.
[via ArsTechnica]
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Lets go back to having publicly funded information infrastructures at least then all profit goes into upgrading the infrastructure. Didn’t hear no bitching when the phone companies were run by the government… Oh thats right because they were upgraded in a timely manner and gave you good service for a fair price. WOW! what a concept.
@ mountain rage
I agree. Private lines is BS!
Use telus(30GB limit their contract disables them to block any thing) or shaw(100 GB limit but i think they can block some stuff..)
and this is west coast so if u like in PEI it won’t work because no one lives there u loner.
Common don’t be cruel theres like the 3 workers that maintain the Anne of Green Gables house in PEI.
I don’t see how ISPs can’t be sewed for this? The way they block the packets is impersonating you sending disconnect packets to your peers. Secondly.. they need to pass laws that allow competition amongst isps. Comcast moves in only alternative is DSL. No other cable companies… since they are all the same “type of service”. Maybe verizon FIOS? I have heard both good and bad. Maybe Internet2 (massive WAN everywhere with very high speed)… will come out one of these days. I am getting really tired of bs like… oh those are the speeds you get but if you use them we will rape you. Besides who needs 8mbps with powerboost to browse websites? Nobody. If I want to upload any legit file I have onto BT I can’t because comcrap’s upload cap.