Bell Canada – No Really, We Are Overloaded! 8% Congested in 2 Cases!

The network neutrality debate took an interesting turn today. As mandated by the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission), Bell Canada has publicly disclosed some figures to try and prove its case – figures that have some users laughing.

Bell Canada seems to have a hard sell – convince everyone that throttling wholesalers as well as their own customers was necessary. Selling the idea originally got tough when they throttled their wholesalers without initial notice. Selling the idea got even tougher when they said that they were at 33% capacity. The privacy commissioner was asked to investigate Bell over Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) techniques which didn’t help things on Bell’s side. Now Bell has disclosed some new figures that seems to be only adding more fuel to the fire.

The documents can be found on a thread at DSL reports – a thread that makes for some interesting reading no less. The documents show the following graph:

It’s interesting to note that Bell chose one of the most populated areas in Canada to try and prove that they are congested. what’s more interesting is how Bell tries to sell these statistics as proof that they need to throttle everyone who uses their networks:

One needs to be cautious about simply looking at absolute number of congested links over time. For example, as noted in Bell Canada(CRTC)15May08-2 CAIP Part VII, non-P2P traffic that is not being managed as part of the Company’s traffic management solution has been able to use up and flow more freely using the bandwidth previously occupied by P2P file sharing traffic during peak periods. Similarly, other non-P2P types of traffic such as video streaming are growing at a faster pace than in prior years. Furthermore, one must consider the impacts of seasonal fluctuations in traffic patterns generally. Finally, the number of congested links over the period in the table above is also affected by the rate of deployment of the Company’s traffic management solution.

Some suggest that Bell has admitted in these documents that their throttling practices are not relieving any possible congestion or bandwidth issues. Last year, an Ellacoya study found that there is more HTTP related traffic than p2p traffic online. The study alone makes Bell’s comment that video streaming is merely “growing” rather than, say, “competing with” P2P traffic.

So is it just conspiracy theory that Bell may have just cherry-picked Ontario and Quebec because it would show the highest amount of capacity? Not really if one were to read the supplementary document:

The map below illustrates the central offices with congested links demonstrating that while congestion occurs throughout the Bell Canada network, unsurprisingly it is more concentrated in the main population centres of Ottawa, Montréal and the Greater Toronto Area.

So clearly, they admit, at the very least, they used statistics for their most congested links to try and sell their idea that they have to employ Deep Packet Inspection techniques to save their network. Obviously, investing in these areas is a little easier because there isn’t as much of a geographical issue to take into consideration. Geography is often the biggest argument to explain why there isn’t as much competition in Canada in the Internet Service Providing industry compared to countries like Japan which is sometimes cited as being a country with faster internet connections.

It’s not currently clear how this will affect the outcome of the hearings at the CRTC.

Hat tip: Michael Geist

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