How Canadian ISPs throttle the Internet | Hacker News Reader

How Canadian ISPs throttle the Internet

arstechnica.com

23 pointsnreece25 comments

I moved from the UK to Canada and the one thing I've noticed is that Canada loves protecting its monopolies. I'm used to my cell phones being usable anywhere. Here's the list: France, Holland, Spain (and multiple Spanish islands), Turkey and the US. However, when I arrive in Canada I'm sent a nice message saying I can send and receive SMS messages, but I can't make calls. This is apparently considered nice as my phone connected to Rogers, from what I've heard they're the only company with deals to out of country companies.

Needless to say I'm happy that the Canadian government is considering legislation to open up the cellular market to outside owners.

However, when I go to buy a book I have a nice choice between Indigo, Chapters and Coles. Incidentally, they're owned by the same company. They're the only bookstore I've seen in my whole time here and they're one in the same. Amazon is restricted to hell in what it can do, it apparently can't own warehouses inside of Canada so they struck a deal with CanadaPost that allows them to use the entirety of one of their warehouses in (IIRC) Mississauga as their Canadian distribution center, and apparently Indigo/Chapters/Coles wanted Amazon kicked out of the country, their one and only competition.

The monopolies in the country are insane. All big companies are completely protected from outside competition and because of this they exploit it to hell. Bell Canada actually sent out modems to people who aren't their customers and then said if they don't return them they'll charge them $200. Not too long after they'd stopped doing that they started sending us Cancellation of Service notices demanding we pay a late ~$40 off the bill due (IIRC the first one was) July 11th by July 2nd. We were supposed to pay between July 11th and August 11th, they wanted a late payment for that month by July 2nd before they accept payment. After multiple months of that crap we're now switching to Cogeco, only because we've got a friend who works there. I'd like to go with Rogers as lots of people have said good things about their customer service, but no shit I can't get internet where I live! I'd have to go with their rural service and I live in a city.

Get teksavvy. If there's bell internet in your area, there is teksavvy. It might be the same bell lines, but they dont pull bullshit like that, give you a 200GB/month limit and have simple overage fees of .25/GB (or you can buy extra blocks of 100GB for $10 each)

Their rate is amazing. Their DL speed isn't the highest, but there's no purpose of 10 mbps if your bandwidth is only ~50 gig.

I don't play online games very often and when I do they're more likely to be a MMORPG where I can just do my own thing 99% of the time.

Edit: Sorry, forgot to say thank you! It's currently cheaper for us to be with cogeco due to their offer, so I'll see how it works out but I'm likely to be moving in a couple of years so I'll definitely sign up with those guys. Unlimited bandwidth for $40 makes me want to drool, and it looks like you could host your own server as they offer a fixed IP.

The problem is that bandwidth is a finite shared resource (much in the way that clean, potable water is). For most of us, there's more than we would ever want or need. We watch some online videos, download a few large files each month, and do use a fair bit, but not an excessive amount. Of course, there are always people that think they should have a golf course in their back yard.

I'm worried about usage caps and throttling as well, but I also know that at my university, about 50 people used up more than 50% of total network bandwidth. If the university didn't give priority to certain types of traffic (small HTTP, Skype, etc.) over other types (BitTorrent, Kazaa, etc.), the majority would have had a less enjoyable experience.

I think the solution should be something that both protects a shared resource while allowing people access and usage of the range of services one can use. I think it's reasonable to say that some services are higher priority than P2P filesharing and the routers than an ISP is going to have can easily handle creating differing priorities. That's an easy first step and it's still neutral to the source of the traffic (Google has argued that the problems with the ISP plans are that they want to offer high speed traffic from site A and slow from site B rather than differing on types of traffic). I also don't think it's unreasonable for excessive users to get friendly warnings that their usage is high along with help on lowering their usage. In terms of what is excessive usage: I'd say that 463GB is excessive in a month. Why 463GB? It's the capacity of a fully-loaded T1 connection costing hundreds of dollars. At that point, maybe you can't use a shared connection because you really need a dedicated T1. The users should be given several months to lower their usage, but there is a point at which cable connections are shared and you might need a dedicated connection. Rather than disconnect the user from service, the warnings could say that if the usage continues for several month, their bandwidth will be limited to 1Mbps (which would limit them to 316GB of transfer in a month) - essentially giving them a cheap T1.

It's never fun talking about limitations, but the world is made up of them. Rather than fight the limitations, we could actually use them to create better technologies. For example, most dedicated hosting providers give you unmetered bandwidth within their data center. ISPs could likewise give you unmetered bandwidth within the scope of the central office you're connected to (and faster than your general internet connection). We could then build P2P tools that would leverage such a system giving us faster downloads while using less resources. Creative thinking and an understanding of the resources at hand will help us to create better things. Ignoring resources and passing blame around just won't get us anywhere.

"The problem is that bandwidth is a finite shared resource (much in the way that clean, potable water is). For most of us, there's more than we would ever want or need."

Hm, the problem I think is that ISPs are over-selling their bandwidth and refusing to upgrade their lines. Even when they're allowed to have a monopoly.

ALSO! There is another problem! The ISPs are being extremely secretive about how they're throttling, the article says,

"And speaking of transparency, most of the important information in the filings was provided on a "confidential" basis and is not currently available to anyone but CRTC staff. This includes link utilization thresholds, detailed traffic growth numbers, and (most) vendors of the DPI gear involved in the throttling."

ISPs are over-selling their bandwidth and refusing to upgrade their lines.

Given that some customers have effectively infinite bandwidth demand, upgrading the network just allows them to download more without paying more. I think there's a diminishing marginal utility at work here.

The ISPs are being extremely secretive about how they're throttling

Yes, this is a problem. If ISPs adopted fair and incentive-compatible bandwidth management policies there would be no way to game the system and thus no need to keep the details secret. Unfortunately, most of the bandwdith management products on the market are crap or ISPs configure them wrong.

"They just need to upgrade their lines those greedy bastards!"

It sounds nice, but it doesn't solve things in the long run. Yes, ISPs should upgrade their lines and I think the government should sit on them a bit given their oligopoly or monopoly status.

So, let's say that you want to download a TB each month. Let's say that the majority of people want to download 10-50GB per month. If the ISP has no limits or tiered pricing, all of those small users subsidize your large usage since the ISP would need to get multiple T1 connections to cover your personal bandwidth usage. So, most people cost the ISP $13/mo and you cost the ISP $543 (fake numbers, but proportional calculation). Shouldn't the people using less get to pay less? Should we likewise subsidize people who want bigger homes or fancier cars?

"But they already charge less for lower speeds!" Yeah, I might not download much in terms of quantity (with my connection being idle most of the time), but I want to be able to burst to 15Mbps whenever I am actually using it. That's the wonder of a shared resource like broadband. We don't all use a lot at the same time so we can get a lot when we need it.

Would you object to usage charges in the way that electricity is metered out? Say, a connection fee of $10/mo plus $0.30/GB? That seems reasonable. It accounts for ISP costs and users that use more, pay more.

Would you support an all you can use electric plan or an all you can drive gasoline plan? Should the electric company just add more generators to accommodate me on a $40/mo plan that gives me unlimited electric as I make my house an igloo in the summer?

Yes, broadband companies should increase their capacity and we should be sitting on them to do that, but they currently have little incentive to do that since they don't get more money from more usage. Maybe do like wireless companies have for voice: usage charges at the lower levels coupled with an unlimited plan for $100 for users that know they'll need it.

It's just not so simple as yelling at ISPs.

> Say, a connection fee of $10/mo plus $0.30/GB? That seems reasonable

Do you realize this is three times the current cost of storage ? Metering could work if there was some actual competition. But if there was competition, we probably wouldn't be too worried about what methods specific ISPs were using.

The cities and towns (by virtue of owning the right-of-ways and not wanting ten copies of fiber) should mandate that companies laying wires provide only bulk access in terms of committed/burstable bit rate, which the actual ISPs would then use to provide consumer internet access.

First, electric companies have no competition in most places.

Second, $0.30/GB of transfer is a pretty reasonable amount. If you have a dedicated server you can get down to around $0.10/GB, but even Amazon charges $0.17/GB and that isn't expensive. And your home isn't a data center.

Storage and bandwidth have nothing to do with each other.

Electric rates are highly regulated. Also, note that electricity is split up exactly the way I described - transmission (local delivery) and generation (internet transit) are billed separately, with competition happening at the generation level.

Storage and bandwidth are related in that they show the tradeoff between local storage and streaming. 3x the price of storage doesn't feel right to me. If that's the actual cost, I certainly can't disagree. But with the price of bandwidth continually dropping, I don't think regulation or other arbitrary pricing will reflect anything like the true cost, and will be more akin to mobile text messaging prices.

I recall seeing usage metering based on something like $40/mo for 200GB, and then $0.50/GB thereafter. With an apparent fixed cost of -$60, it seems their goal is to punish heavy users, rather than selling them what they want for a fair price.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_queuing

AFAIK, transit costs $5-10/Mbps/month (probably closer to the high end in Canada), so 463GB/month would cost the ISP $15/month. Given the cost of maintaining the last mile, 463GB/month is probably a generous allowance.

The CRTC loves monopolies, plain and simple. Companies just take advantage of that.

Monopolies make sense when building up infrastructure. But after a certain period of time, the company blessed by the government as a monopoly should be dismantled or broken into smaller competing companies. Otherwise the companies, as you said, take advantage.

I agree. I think they have a problem with that "after a certain period of time" - perhaps because of lobbyists.

Like the military coups in Latin America that said they'd only be in power "for a certain period of time" until democracy is restored.

Kind of unfair to the company which invested the resources into building the infrastructure, isn't it? I agree monopolies cause problems, but I personally would be upset if I invested tremendous resources into something and then was told that I must give access to all these others who profit from my investment.

In this case however the building and maintenance of the infrastructure was and is heavily subsidized by Canadian taxpayers. As well the monopolies are not the sole private contributers.

Well, although Bell was broken up into many "smaller" pieces, those pieces appear to be simply re-merging, and re-congealing back together again, slowly but surely.

I suppose the initial break-up however is good, and would stimulate a more competitive environment, and allow new start-ups to join the game.

But eventually those pieces are simply drawn back together again... It's like when you break a magnet into many pieces -- they reattract back together.

Well technically they are oligopolies, but I completely agree. Our politicos are either sheep or paid shills for the telcos and cablecos.

Oh, and let's not forget the fact that we have the highest mobile data rates in the world (or very close to it)

Not quite related to the article but...

"Christopher Parsons, a grad student at the University of Victoria (the Fightin' Vikes!), has done yeoman's work by combing through the numerous (and lengthy) ISP submissions to CRTC and compiling them into a set of tables (PDF)"

Shouldn't someone in the CRTC already have done that? It's nice that it's a transparent process and the data is available (as it must be) but couldn't they have made it easier to go through it all?

That's not how Canada works.

Apparently most of the ISPs want usage-based pricing. That is a little scary, given that it's currently difficult for average users to control what they're downloading (e.g. you hit a page caked with Flash, you've now paid extra for crap you didn't want).

On the other hand, maybe this would spark a revolution. It might encourage both sites and users to do things they should have done anyway. For example, making sites optimize their byte size, since they'll either lose customers or have visitors harping at them for "wasting" their download money. And, average users may start to criticize what is being uploaded on their behalf by programs, etc.

That's what it was like with dial-up modems and monthly fees based on the hours you wanted, you regulated your own use, websites had to be small otherwise you didn't get any traffic. I think I was paying $30 for 30 hours in 1994, the $60 plan was roughly 80 hours or 100 hours, a better deal.

I remember being thrilled with download speeds of 3Kbps and at 4Kbps it was smokin'! Now I download torrents and most of the time (router ports config correct) I get torrents coming down at 4Kbps but the average is probably 40Kbps...with a 15Mbps connection!

A metered system will cause massive changes, probably not at first since human nature will still make people want to do what they did before but then they realize their money is going fast which will cause them to cut back.

Heh from an Australian point of view this is all amusing - we've been paying for a usage allowance for data since broadband came in. Pretty much just shaped to 64k speeds (dialup essentially) for the rest of the month once you go over a limit. Some dodgier outfits (most notably Telstra, the national telecommunications company) will charge users an exhorbitant excess fee for excess data. This is why Australians will bitch when torrent sites post a fake file as an April fool's joke...

I don't know about Canadian ISPs, but most so-called bandwidth caps in the US -- such as the one Comcast implemented -- are designed to ensure future profits for the ISP as internet usage increases and more and more folks use online video services.

It will, of course, lead Comcast into "suggesting" they use their own for-pay video-download service in the future.

But no one will ever tell you about the $200 billion fraud cable companies perpetrated against taxpayers:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...

Given that, we should all have unlimited bandwidth and fiber to the door.

It's funny how people will flagellate themselves about how bandwidth is so expensive and those poor ISPs shouldn't even, you know, provide what they advertise, when I can sign up for a hosting company for $12 a month and get one TB (yep, terabyte) of data transfer.

The corporations have framed the debate. I am amazed how many people actually swallow it all, hook, line and sinker.

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