MTS counsels Bell and Telus on easy way to avoid wholesale traffic shaping

Bell Canada, Bell Aliant and Telus Corp. could save themselves the headache and cost of having to manage the Internet traffic of their wholesale ISP customers if they adopted a pricing scheme that resembles MTS Allstream Inc.’s, the company tells the CRTC in a filing last week. According to the MTS submission, the two large ILECs bundle the access and transport portions of their network together in their wholesale aggregated ADSL (WAA) services, which forces them to have to manage the Internet traffic of their wholesale ISP customers. The Manitoba incumbent says that by treating the access and transport components separately, Bell and Telus would no longer be burdened with managing the traffic of their wholesale ISP customers. “This modification would have the effect of requiring each competing ISP to manage its own end-customers’ traffic, thereby addressing the concerns raised and practices undertaken by Bell to manage its network capacity,” MTS writes in a Part VII filed last week. “Moreover, this solution would not require any changes to the network itself and in fact would lead to a more streamlined and efficient provisioning process for WAA services.” MTS says that its wholesale ADSL tariffs as well as those of SaskTel separate the two components and offer an efficient and effective solution to the wholesale traffic shaping question. As well, MTS notes that because it has set up its tariff in this way, it sees no need to manage competitor wholesale traffic, can still recoup its costs and can continue to invest in next-generation networks. As an example, MTS says that Bell could modify its Gateway Access Services (GAS) tariff – one of the more popular services purchased by independent ISPs – to only include access (the network from the end-user customer to the central office (CO)). This would put the burden on the ISP buying capacity from Bell to deal with spikes in capacity requirements by planning ahead and paying for what it might need in the future. “Thus, to the extent that an ISP competitor wants to offer an unconstrained retail Internet service, including maximum speeds, the competitor would be required to forecast and pay for the equivalent amount of network resources from the serving CO to the AHSSPI that its end-users are responsible for generating,” says MTS. (The AHSSPI stands for aggregated high-speed service provider interface and is essentially the competitor point of presence.) The CRTC, says the Manitoba ILEC, should adopt its tariff structure for the larger incumbents, which would allow them to more efficiently provision aggregated ADSL bandwidth to their wholesale ISP customers. “Implementing this solution now would ensure that wholesale competitor customers of Bell, Bell Aliant and Telus immediately take on the task of managing the traffic of their own end-user customers,” states MTS. Bell Canada first started managing the Internet bandwidth used by its wholesale customers last year, saying at the time that a significant increase in peer-to-peer file sharing left the company no other choice. After a short battle at the CRTC initiated by the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, Bell won the right to continue shaping Internet traffic used by its wholesale customers.

MTS counsels Bell and Telus on easy way to avoid wholesale traffic shaping

News | April 14, 2009

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