Thursday, November 08, 2007

Bad News Bears

Bell Sympatico openly admits to throttling P2P traffic at peak hours.

Two show nights left. More coming eventually.


This is nice to see: Amber MacArthur's parents launched bestofpei.com, which showcases and sells goods 100% crafted by Prince Edward Islanders. Everything from paintings to cabinets to toys and other stuff. I was impressed with the design of the site. It's well-spaced out, clean, and very intuitive. Throw it a bookmark if you think you might ever want to support some PEI artists.

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5 Comments:

At 9:09 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Throttling is maaad lame. Bit torrent is slow enough as it is in most cases. Another interesting thing I read about with comcast is that they have an 'unlimited' bandwidth option. But it isn't really unlimited at all. The top 1% or some other % of users that I don't know get cut-off for 'using too much bandwidth'. Yea, on an 'unlimited' connection. People that are also in the high percentile, maybe top 5-10% get warnings that they're using too much bandwidth, but don't get cut-off.

 
At 12:21 AM, Blogger Pete said...

What's incredibly annoying and stupid is that Concordia University throttles flash video and Bit torrent downloads while the internet is actually really fast. So a youtube video takes half an hour to load while an HD quicktime movie loads instantly. We are thinking about starting a petition against it.

 
At 12:40 AM, Blogger Dave said...

And you guys said the very suggestion of net neutrality was ludicrous.

*basks in the I-told-ya-so moment*

 
At 6:59 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I don't think net neutrality and bandwidth throttling are in the same boat. Net neutrality seems to me to be about web content, not specifically downloadable content like movies from bit torrent. Besides, I did say that the free market system would solve the problem as in, if bell is throttling your bandwidth, switch to cogeco, I'm sure at least one ISP would be happy to not throttle your bandwidth, and receive tons of customers in exchange. Since this isn't China, there are lots of ISPs, so the likelihood of throttling/neutrality becoming a real issue is slim.

 
At 9:01 AM, Blogger Dave said...

It is in the same boat - net neutrality encompasses all content made accessible by the internet.

But the free market point is a good one, and I haven't actually seen a good argument to counter it. However, although this is not China, Bell, Rogers and Cogeco are the main ISPs in Canada. Can you name any others? The oligopoly in place is a big part of the problem. Could a new neutral ISP get a lot of fans quickly? Yes, but how long will it take a telecom startup to achieve the standards people expect in terms of speed and reliability? I don't know.

Also, remember that the government only allows the major ISPs to operate in certain areas. In Guelph, I have the choice of using Rogers' and Bell's service. Nothing else exists. And in Hamilton, Rogers isn't available.

Pete: You should definitely start that petition. I would start by citing Tim Berners-Lee about the spirit of free networks, and go from there. It would also probably benefit your campaign if you offered some alternative solutions, because obviously Concordia has their own problems they're trying to quell. You could suggest implementing a system that gives equal treatment to individual groups of similar applications, instead of trying to impose universal neutral treatment to all applications.

 

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