DancingSamurai.ca

Hearings are this week. Some articles by Michael Geist, and a great summary of the issues on CBC.

Update: Michael Geist with some info from Day 1 of the net neutrality hearings:

It was the consumer presentation that did the most to link network management to the law and it also highlighted reason for great concern. I think that the consumer groups rightly focused on who should bear the burden of demonstrating that DPI and other Internet traffic controls are consistent with current Canadian law. The groups argued that these are prima facie violations of Section 36 of the Telecommunications Act and that the onus therefore should fall on the carriers to show that there is a serious problem, the solution minimally impairs users’ rights, and is proportional to the harm.

Unfortunately, the questions that followed suggest that the CRTC Commissioners start these hearings having accepted the carriers’ claims that congestion is a problem and that inhibiting the use of deep packet inspection could result in increased consumer costs for Internet access. This suggests that there is a steep mountain to climb in these hearings, leading me to believe that the issue will ultimately be a political one with pressure on the Conservatives to join with the Liberals and NDP in supporting net neutrality.

Too bad, really. Congestion was never a problem for me, not on DSL, anyway. Now I my p2p crawls during peak times… maybe I should set up MLPPP… TekSavvy supports it, and apparently it bypasses throttling…

CAIP has submitted their response to Bell, and Wireless Nomad and l’Union des Consommateurs have written in support. Michael Geist has the scoop. Again, all these documents are available on the CRTC page for this complaint.

As per this forum post:

1) click on the following link: CRTC Submissions

2) Select “Part VII/PN” from the list

3) insert the CRTC file number (# 8622-C51-200805153) into the “Subject” Line and

4) insert the following suggested text into the “Description / Comments / Questions” box: “I am writing to express my support for the Application that CAIP has filed with the CRTC regarding Bell Canada’s throttling practices. I believe that these practices contravene Bell
Canada’s duties as a common carrier and that the Commission should direct Bell to immediately cease and desist from throttling the traffic of independent ISPs.”

The comments should appear on this CRTC page.
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I previously talked about Bell’s unilateral, competition-stifling move to throttle their wholesale DSL offerings. Bell has made a submission to the CRTC to refute CAIP’s application, but not before Primus (another independent ISP) put forward their letter supporting CAIP in their request for an immediate injunction. This was reported on Digital Copyright Canada (with a longer article on itWorldCanada) and by Michael Geist, with some insightful commentary.

Lawrence Lessig has also posted his address to the FCC regarding Network Neutrality, which provides timely (if a little US-centric) points as well.

[UPDATE]: p2pnet has a daily digest of Bell’s Throttling.

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A quick break from studying to comment (too briefly) on Bell Canada’s latest behaviour.

It seems Bell has decided to degrade the internet connections of not only it’s Sympatico users, but the users of independent ISPs, who lease the ‘last mile’ connection from Bell (and pay handsomely for those lines) as required by the CRTC tariffs. Bell is picking on peer-to-peer traffic specifically, although some report encrypted traffic (like VPN traffic used by many companies for employees to connect to workplace networks) is getting hit in the crossfire.

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I wrote last year about how I had switched my phone service to VoIP. I was using Callcentric to get phone numbers and a Grandstream HT-386 as an ATA.

Unfortunately, the call quality has been spotty at best – sometimes clearly linked to how much bandwidth I was using for other things, but other times not. We would occasionally have dropped calls. We plugged on because it was cheap, but over the last few months people who have been trying to call us have been getting fast busy signals. I opened a few tickets to Callcentric about it and they insisted that it wasn’t them, it was our providers (bell, rogers, etc.), who they had spoken with and the problem was solved.

Well, the problems persisted… so I looked into other options.

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In “Emily of the State”, Cynically Tested gives us initially hilarious video about the perils of government spying on citizens’ Internet use. I say ‘initially’, because upon further reflection, dread sets in…

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