Somewhere between the debate of Bell throttling their users and politicians tabling network neutrality legislation are a host of smaller debates such as privacy and transparency. It seems that Bell suggesting that they are transparent to their users sparked some criticisms.
In Canada, there’s no shortage of controversy over Bells decision to throttle users. Recently, the CBC did an interview with a spokesperson Marko Bibic who says a number of interesting things. One of the interesting things was when Bibic was asked why they are rolling out a video distribution service despite saying they are at peak capacity. He responded with the following:
The Bell video service, the content that we will be distributing, isn’t using peer to peer. Peer to peer is by design a high-bandwidth use application. What we’re using here is content-distribution network technology and we think you’ll find others, as they enter this space, will likely use this technology as well.
Of course, there are numerous content distributors like Revision3 that use protocols such as BitTorrent to distribute content to save bandwidth among other things. This fact alone makes this statement confusing at best. There’s also technology like BitTorrent DNA which also helps address any bandwidth issues an Internet Service Provider may encounter.
While there was a number of comments that could easily generate varying levels of debate, there was one that caught the eye of CIPPIC (Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic) during an audio interview on CBC’s ‘Spark’.
Starting at about 26:10 of the uncut interview, Bibico says that Bell Canada was transparent about its throttling practices and notified customers through their website on what they are doing with respect to traffic shaping. We spoke with an intern for CIPPIC, Robert Hester about this. “they said they’d been clear with customers about shaping and there was an explanation on the website.” He explained. He then says, “I looked through their site, and could only find a small, vague blurb.”
He forwarded a correspondence to us which contains a link to their website which supposedly explains what Bell is up to:
In order to continue to ensure a consistently high level of service for all of our customers, Bell may be required to manage its network in such a way that no customer, service or application consumes excessive bandwidth which may impede the use and enjoyment of other customers.
This network management will allow Bell to deliver a consistent and reliable experience to all its customers who use real-time sensitive applications like browsing and instant messaging.
Other providers here in Canada have implemented similar types of measures.
It is important to note that all online applications will continue to be available to our valued customers.
Obviously, there is no mention about Deep Packet Inspection, nothing about what “throttling” is, what specifically are the “measures”, or even a hint about what is being slowed down in the first place.
“I have searched [the] website for the information that Mr. Bibic was referring to [during the Spark interview],” Hester commented, “but all I have been able to find is this link which does not describe the practice at all, or give the customer guidelines about what applications will be subject to network management.”
In response, Pierre Leclerc from Bell said that they are working to make more information available about network management practices for wholesale ISP and retail customers.
Another interesting comment during the Spark interview starts at around 7:53 where Bibic commented that 5% of the heaviest users consumer “a little over 50% of our total capacity”
Remember two months back when we covered the Bell submission to the CRTC which states the following:
“20. Last fall, before the Company began deployment of its Internet traffic management solution to ease network congestion during peak usage periods, 5% of users were generating 60% of total traffic on the network and 60% of that traffic was P2P traffic, including BitTorrent. During peak periods, that same 5% of users were utilizing 33% of available bandwidth. In other words, 95% of Bell subscribers were being negatively impacted by a very small minority of Internet users primarily using P2P file sharing applications.”
Original document (PDF)
So the question is, is this so-called “5%” using 33%, “a little over 50%” or 60% of Bell’s total capacity? At this point, the official statistic reported by Bell seems rather blurry. One hopes that Bell isn’t trying to mislead anyone on this particular number, especially not the CRTC.
It seems the effort to explain what is happening from Bell has only left as many questions answered as the number of new questions being raised at this point in time.
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- Bell Canada to Cap Competition to as Low as 2GB a Month Down Per User
- CIPPIC Requests Investigation Over Deep Packet Inspection
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