CAIP wants Bell to lift veil of secrecy surrounding traffic throttling

The Canadian Association of Internet Providers (CAIP) is calling for greater transparency in exactly how Bell Canada Enterprises is throttling bandwidth to wholesale customers. Is the carrier only targeting music and movie downloads; are open-source peer-to-peer downloads affected; is Bell giving priority speeds to its own services? "From a service provider point of view, we know some traffic is being shaped to give internal priority, but this doesn't mean all traffic is shaped," says Alejandro Pares, research analyst for network equipment at research firm International Data Corp. (Canada) Ltd. (IDC) in Toronto. "For service providers offering IPTV and VoIP, that traffic has to be shaped in order to guarantee quality of service." Tom Copeland, chairman of CAIP, which is in an ongoing dispute with Bell over its alleged throttling of bandwidth to its wholesale customers, says the real problem is visibility. "We are seeing evidence - admittedly some of it is anecdotal - that a variety of types of traffic are being affected, not just torrents and P2P. We don't know enough about how Bell is implementing the policy to know what could potentially be causing these problems." CAIP may get some relief in this area. In its ongoing sparring match with Bell, CAIP submitted a complaint to the CRTC with regard to Bell's filtering of its wholesale Gateway Access Service (GAS). Although the CRTC initially denied CAIP's request for an interim ruling, it then sent a letter (May 15) ordering Bell to prove that its networks are congested. In effect, Bell will have to justify its actions with facts. This should be good news for CAIP. "As it is, we are getting a mixed story from our members," says Copeland. "Sometimes it seems the throttling is based on P2P, sometimes based on port number, though more up-to-date P2P software can change port numbers to get around that issue." In CAIP's submission to the CRTC, the organization made the point that GAS is content agnostic and can be used to provision a range of services, including VoIP, VPN, remote LAN access, and streaming audio and video. CAIP's concern was that, although Bell claims it is only going after P2P, its deep packet inspection technology (DPI) acts something like a dragnet, negatively affecting non-P2P services, including VoIP. This then turns Bell's argument on its head. In this scenario shaping doesn't occur to give priority to real-time applications; in fact, it may be negatively affecting them. CAIP has some evidence to support this, including member tests that, to quote from CAIP's submission, "indicate that once a connect has been flagged as a P2P user all traffic that is not white-listed is throttled." In one example, the user attempted a VoIP test, and then proceeded to download the open-source operating system Ubuntu using P2P. Result: VoIP transfer rates, which began at 4.5Mbps x 550kbps, dropped to 30Kbps x 30Kbps. If this member anecdote holds water, it will turn out that Bell's DPI technology uses a hammer to smash any evidence of P2P, and then demolishes all it finds there. When you look at the drop in transfer rates for VoIP, it's evident that the metaphor war favours CAIP. This isn't throttling, its strangulation. This leads to suspicion that Bell has an ulterior motive based on its desire to maintain, and gain, market share in the services it supplies directly to its customers. "We have been hearing that this might be an effort by Bell to reduce VoIP services, so that people are more inclined to use them," says Copeland. At the very least, Bell's use of DPI, if not targeting VoIP, suggests that users of P2P are being unduly punished. If other services are negatively affected it somehow serves the user right for using P2P. But this is an odd form of policing in which it is assumed that P2P - which has many legitimate uses, including the downloading of an Ubuntu OS - should result in guilt by association. And what happens when carriers themselves get into the VoIP space? We can be fairly certain the behaviour will suddenly change. "Rogers is offering a VoIP telephone line," says Pares, "and I'm sure they are giving priority to that voice traffic over data. They have to guarantee quality of service on that line. But if you have another line from another VoIP provider running connections from Rogers, I'm not sure they're giving priority to that traffic." They don't have to. All they have to do is not bother to white-list it. Then it gets taken out in the cross-fire as the provider hunts down evil-doers, as seems to be happening with Bell. "When you look at the types of services that Bell will be deploying," says Copeland, "such as IPTV, which will run on a parallel network and not be delivered by Sympatico ADSL, and you look at them throttling other types of content distribution, it makes you wonder whether there really is a congestion problem at Bell."

CAIP wants Bell to lift veil of secrecy surrounding traffic throttling

News | May 21, 2008

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