[ NNSquad ] Re: Bell Canada proposal to cap wholesale customers

[Jeff Young <young@jsyoung.net>]

I spent years building backbones that offered wholesale services
to ISPs.  The rule of thumb:  if your network can't handle a full pipe
(that a wholesale customer typically gives you), get out of the
business - you were never in it seriously.

(corollary:  don't let marketing/sales sell an OC192 IP pipe on an
single OC192 backbone no matter what the customer offers to pay)

The notion that a wholesale provider could 'throttle' wholesale
customers for 'network management purposes' is ludicrous and
belies a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the service
by regulators (no surprise here).

Of course these episodes have a way of self correcting, but do
all wholesale ISP's in Canada have a choice?

jy


On Apr 15, 2009, at 8:26 AM, Russell Smiley wrote:

> Bell Canada has submitted a proposal to the CRTC to allow it to cap
> bandwidth usage of wholesale customers (mostly independent ISPs). The
> independent ISPs are concerned that this will essentially eliminate  
> the
> possibility of 'unlimited bandwidth' type offerings to their  
> customers.
>
> The submission from Bell Canada also comes at an interesting time when
> the CRTC has recently allowed it to throttle wholesale customers for
> 'network management' purposes. In addition there are CRTC public
> hearings scheduled in the next few months to investigate the general
> issues relating to network management and throttling.
>
> http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/04/14/bell-unlimited-download.ht
> ml?ref=rss
>
> Bell Canada has been struggling to be profitable over the last  
> decade or
> so - my guess is that this translates into a lack of investment in
> infrastructure upgrades. Now it seems that they are trying to find any
> means of avoiding spending the larger sums of money now required to
> bring their networks to a standard that will support current Internet
> usage patterns. There is also a clear anti-competitive aspect to the
> impacts on wholesale customers where throttling and capping force
> independent ISPs to limit their offerings to be similar to what Bell
> Canada Internet Service already offers to it's residential customers.