Bell Canada Redefines 'Satisfaction' and 'Fairness' – Effort to derail un-throttled competition continues…

In: broadbandreports.com|Site Feeds|VoIP

31 Mar 2008

Last week Bell Canada caused an international ruckus with their decision to throttle the traffic of their wholesale partners without telling them. Over the weekend, Bell Canada offered their official response (pdf) to complaining ISPs, telling them the decision to throttle wholesale traffic without giving independent ISPs any say in the matter is an issue of “satisfaction” and “fairness”:

We understand the difficulty this action has caused for you and your customers who are P2P users, but the majority of your end users will experience an increased level of satisfaction. We regret the fact that we did not advise you in advance of taking this action, but the action was necessary to allow for a more fair allocation of bandwidth for all Canadian internet users.

The decision is anti-competitive, given it prevents competitors from offering an un-throttled alternative to Bell’s throttled Sympatico service.

Meanwhile, for those confused as to how Bell Canada throttles the connections of competing wholesale providers, our users have crafted some useful network diagrams. Teksavvy network engineers have also posted traffic graphs showing just how the throttling is impacting their network traffic.

See continuing discussion in our Teksavvy, Bell Sympatico and Canadian broadband forums.
read comment(s)