Blessed by the Potato

I’ve talked about the throttling issue before, and now it’s in the news again. This is just getting insane: while I think the internet providers have some right to restrict use on their networks, the combination of severe throttling and caps is getting out of hand. One or the other, and maybe open up the torrent restriction beyond <5 kB/s. It’s particularly galling that they’re doing this to the reseller ISPs who pay more for unfettered access, who can choose to sell high usage plans to those people who’ve been shafted by Bell/Rogers.

In fact, Rogers recently sent out a mailing announcing their long-planned charges for going over the monthly allotment (60 GB for “express”, $2/GB over; as much as $5/GB for going over on the ultra light plan). That alone should be plenty of control over the volume of traffic on the network. If they want to restrict torrents, then changing that allotment to a separate upload and download portion would also be a fix. Preferentially killing one protocol (at all times, not just peak times to boot) is really overkill. (And, as I’ve said before, if the throttling was to go down to say 1/10th the speed offered, people would never even know they were being throttled).

So, I hope the independent ISPs win their suit against Bell.

As you might expect, Michael Geist has a number of columns related to the issue up, and talks about it more sensibly than I can.