CGOs Response to Bells Decision to Drop Throttling

Bell announced yesterday that it will discontinue ALL its throttling practices on all consumer connections starting March 1st, 2012.  This means for all Bell customers, retail and wholesale.  The Canadian Gamers Organization (CGO) is pleased to see this move coming from Bell and what this means for Gamers. CGO has argued for a long time that ISP’s using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) management may not be in compliant with CRTC policy, due to known issues this technology has with misclassifying legit data as P2P filesharing traffic. 

Bell’s disclosure on the use of its throttling practises using DPI is extremely similar (if not verbatim in some areas) to that of Rogers, in which admits to known misclassification of data.  The misclassification of time sensitive data resulting in noticeable effects on such data, is against CRTC net neutrality policy.  Rogers is currently before the enforcement division at the CRTC due to open admittance of misclassification through their disclosures, and problems its customers have had with games being affected by the use of their DPI.  CGO will request a much broader look into the use of DPI and request changes to CRTC policy in the near future when we file our forthcoming Part 1 Application, which will ensure a balanced and a more fair approach to the use of both technical and economic Internet Traffic Management Programs.

Reports are coming out that peer to peer file sharing is down considerably, and not the main driving source of bandwidth consumption anymore.  CGO has also publicly proven that some DPI vendors are not compliant with CRTC regulations.  Rogers openly admitted to the CRTC through CGO’s complaint that the flaws Rogers is currently experiencing with DPI are not unique to Rogers networks.  Due to the extremely similar disclosures both Bell and Rogers have, we strongly believe Bell is currently not compliant with CRTC policy either, and experiencing the same problems as Rogers.

This recent move by Bell to drop throttling will most likely put the pressure on those ISPs, so will the forthcoming CRTC enforcement ruling against Rogers. CGO is still awaiting on communication from the CRTC as to what enforcement measures will be taken against Rogers for not being in line with CRTC policy.

While Bell is pushing forward with abounding the use of DPI for now, they still have the reserved right to implement it again at anytime.  It’s important that users take the time to ensure that the CRTC gets the message that ISPs should not be controlling the use of application or gaming traffic.  Users can sign CGO’s petition here.