Sascha Meinrath on Bell's Attack on Independent ISPs

From Sascha's blog:

"Steven Mansour just pinged me about Bell Canada purposefully degrading traffic of independent internet service providers. This is a huge violation of network neutrality and exactly the kind of behavior by telco incumbents that must be made illegal. Michael Geist looks to have broken the story -- I'm sure it'll be coming out to the more mainstream media momentarily."


LINK

By throttling internet traffic, ISPs are getting in the way of business

From :
How Network Non-Neutrality Affects Real Businesses
Rich Baker 3/24/08

"In their attempt to limit BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer file sharing traffic, some ISPs have unwittingly caused collateral damage to other, unrelated businesses and their users. For example, some Web conferencing providers have seen their services slow to a crawl in some regions of the world because of poorly executed traffic management policies. Since ISPs often deny they use such practices, it can be exceedingly difficult to identify the nature of the problem in an attempt to restore normal service...

...Business and markets cannot thrive when ISPs secretly delay or discard a subset of their traffic. Networks need to be free of secret, arbitrary traffic management policies. Just because an ISP’s network suffers chronic congestion, that ISP cannot be allowed to selectively block arbitrary classes of traffic."

Rest of the article
here.

Canadian ISPs furious about Bell Canada's traffic throttling

Canadian ISPs furious about Bell Canada's traffic throttling
By Nate Anderson | Published: March 25, 2008 - 11:05PM CT

Mandatory DSL line-sharing is a common practice in other developed countries, and was in the US as well until an FCC decision ruled that DSL was an "information service" and not subject to the rules. Line-sharing is what enables much of the competition in other countries and allows small ISPs like Wireless Nomad to thrive in Canada and offer innovative services. But line-sharing has its drawbacks; chief among them, of course, is that without control of the line, an ISP is not ultimately in control of the service it is selling. Canadian DSL resellers learned that lesson the hard way this week as ISPs learned that Bell Canada now runs traffic-shaping hardware even on the lines it resells.

Readers at Broadband Reports noted the issue earlier this week as owners of small ISPs suddenly found that their customers were having traffic throttled, even though the ISPs were vehemently anti-throttling. The problem was compounded by the fact Bell Canada did not apparently tell the ISPs that it was about to make the change. The company has subsequently confirmed the throttling and says it should be fully in place by April 7.

LINK

Bell Secretly Throttling Wholesale Internet Services?

From Prof. Geist's Blog:

"Internet chat boards are buzzing with concerns that Bell has begun throttling Internet traffic for its wholesale services. In other words, third party ISPs that buy their connectivity from Bell ("resellers") are being left with irate customers who are suddenly subject to packet shaped services. Apparently Bell did not inform their wholesale partners that new network management practices were on the way, leading to a meeting on Tuesday morning to address the issue.

There are several interesting aspects to this development. First, the early online chat included responses from resellers such as Teksavvy indicating that they do not believe in throttling traffic, presumably unaware that Bell was limiting their service. Second, some posters have reported that the throttling has undermined their ability to download the CBC episode of Canada's Next Great Prime Minister, precisely the concern that many predicted when CBC announced its willingness to use BitTorrent for content distribution. Third, customers have been using Google Maps to chart locations that have experienced throttling, a nice use collaborative mapping technologies."


LINK

Town of Sebastopol, CA chickens out on WiFI

Meanwhile, in the other CA, bad science leads to bad policy...

Town of Sebastopol, CA rescinds resolution to provide public Wifi
POSTED BY MARK FRAUENFELDER, MARCH 24, 2008 9:41 AM

"Dale Dougherty, the founder of MAKE, wrote about the Sebastopol (the town in California where MAKE is published) City Council's recent decision to rescind its earlier resolution to provide public wireless access after it received an online petition with 235 "signatures" that read: "The convenience of this technology does not warrant the increase in radiation and the potential risks to the health of our community."
The effect of the resolution would have been to add a few wireless access points downtown. There are already several hundred in private homes and businesses in town. The same people who oppose public wifi still walk along streets and into buildings where they are invisibly bathing in wifi. Will this small group of people now demand that we outlaw wireless in public areas, just to accommodate their fears?
Now, I don't know that wireless (or electricity) is without harm. I can read the research that does exist and learn more -- if I have the time and reason to do so. However, I do not like the smell of fear, and when people justify actions based on their own fears, I become suspicious that the concern is unwarranted. If it wasn't wifi, it would be flouride. Something is needed to affix to their anxiety"


LINK

Canada needs common sense copyright reform

From itworldcanada.com:

Canada Needs Common Sense Copyright Reform
24 March 20008

"Government opponents have argued that if brought to the House of Commons and passed, the bill would essentially make it illegal to modify, improve, back up or make products that interact with any devices outfitted with a TPM.

So, if you thought all this hoopla around copyright only concerned music and movie downloaders, you might want to think again. The issue could have profound and far reaching affects on IT and the way you do your job.

You don’t believe us? Well just ask Google, Yahoo, Rogers, or Telus, which are just a few of the many businesses that formed the Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright coalition. The group sent its stance on a variety of key copyright issues to Industry Canada last month in the hopes of having their voices heard. Fortunately for those in the IT field, this influential coalition of companies has the right idea with their proposals."


LINK

Network Maintenance Thursday March 27, 2008 from 1200 AM

From our DSL wholesale provider:

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Network Maintenance

"Due to critical network maintenance, there will be a disruption in
service for Ontario and Quebec on Thursday March 27, 2008 from 1200 AM
EST until 0600 AM EST.

During this time, all services may experience intermittent loss of
connectivity throughout the maintenance window.

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your continued
patronage."

Verizon teaming up with P2P companies, Yale, to make file-sharing faster

From BoingBoing:

"Verizon is working with Yale researchers and a consortium of P2P companies to produce systems that make P2P file-sharing faster by redesigning the software to prefer peers in the same city, drastically reducing the cost to ISPs of customers' P2P traffic."


LINK

Free WiFi at the Jeddah Airport, but Censored (no BoingBoing!)

Got some free WiFi internet access at the airport in Jeddah, but can't get onto BoingBoing because it's blocked by the Saudi censors. I guess the 'Boing is just too much fun... :-(

So here, there's lots of WiFi that is "free as in beer", but not "free as in speech"- the opposite sort of problem from the connection issues we have at home in Canada (unless you're using a Wireless Nomad access point!).