As demanded by Canadian regulators, last week Bell Canada finally offered “proof” that their decision to throttle the bandwidth they provide wholesalers (without telling them) was necessary because their network was just so congested. As I noted at the time, the only problem was that the “proof” actually shows their network isn’t all that congested, something the majority of our forum regulars (some of whom work in the industry) can attest.

Ars Technica has a nice writeup suggesting that if the data shows anything, it shows that Bell Canada could easily and inexpensively upgrade the network to handle what modest DSLAM congestion exists:

If Bell’s upstream DSLAM links are too slow, the whole problem could be fixed quite cheaply by upgrading the networking board in the back of DSLAM to gigabit Ethernet. For a company already publicly pledging to spend $500 million in capital upgrades this year, such a fix would be pocket change.

Of course all indications are that this isn’t about congestion at all, but is an anti-competitive move aimed at killing off competing ISPs. If Bell throttles competing wholesalers, nobody can offer a superior, un-throttled competitor to Bell Canada’s Sympatico service — and throttling legit P2P competitors certainly helps Bell’s video store. It makes you wonder how many other claims of congestion armageddon could be laughed off in North America were we to see actual data instead of marketing department and lobbyist hyperbole.
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