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All posts tagged "throttling"


Friday, January 6, 2012

Bell gets Cheaper and More Expensive

Posted by Hooch Tan in "Digital Home News" @ 01:00 PM

https://secure.dslreports.com/shown...ers-Caps-117669

"Users in our Bell Canada forums note that the Canadian incumbent telco has lowered the monthly rate of several of their tiers, but they've countered that by lowering customer usage caps as well. A look at the Bell website reveals that the company lowered usage limits on all their tiers, in addition to raising the overage cap penalty limit (at $1 per gigabyte) an additional $20, to $80 per month in maxiumum usage penalties."

Bell Canada recently made the news that it would no longer apply throttling to its customers later this year. Well, the other shoe has dropped and it seems that with this change comes some pricing changes. The ISP has dropped prices, but also lowered limits on its packages. Go over your data cap and get slapped with a fine. I cannot say this is not wholly unexpected. I would think this is a rather transparent attempt to draw more money from its customers as the Internet replaces other services. The part that makes me wonder is while connection speeds are going up, it is suspicious that the data limits are not increasing appropriately, and are even shrinking. Personally, I would rather have a larger data cap with the same speed, than some of the faster speeds offered. What about you?


Saturday, December 24, 2011

Bell Canada Readies To Welcome Speedy Customers

Posted by Hooch Tan in "Digital Home News" @ 02:00 PM

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...article2277313/

"In a joint letter to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, dated Monday, regulatory officials at Bell Canada and Bell Aliant indicate the companies will stop implementing the controversial traffic shaping practice in March."

It looks like Christmas has come to customers of Bell who look for unbridled speed. For many years now, Bell Canada (among other ISPs in Canada) has throttled the speed of its customers who use P2P technologies during certain times of the day. Simply put, if you use something that uses P2P (with certain exceptions) at 8:00pm in the evening, expect your connection speed to slow to a crawl. Bell reasoned that P2P was disruptive to their networks and added congestion that affected its other customers. That will soon no longer be the case! Upgrades to their network could definitely be part of the reason for the change of heart, but it is also quite possibly that they realize that money can be made from data hungry customers. While the throttle will disappear, their data caps will not be, and act as a ceiling on what you can do each month. If you want to stream one more movie, or read one more webpage, it will cost you.


Thursday, November 18, 2010

Checking On Your Internet Connection Capabilities

Posted by Hooch Tan in "Digital Home News" @ 04:00 PM

http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transp...snost.php#tests

"Glasnost tests work by measuring and comparing the performance of different application flows between your host and our measurement servers. The tests can detect traffic shaping in both upstream and downstream directions separately. The tests can also detect whether application flows are shaped based on their port numbers or their packets' payload."

Hooray! It looks like I have a truly unfettered Internet connection! Actually, I am satisfied to see that result as the method in which I have my Internet should guarantee an untouched pipe to the Interwebs. Most consumer Internet connections in Canada do suffer from rate limiting at certain times of the day. ISPs do it to help manage the huge increase in the demand for bandwidth on their networks, though some claim that certain rate limiting also allows them to position some of their other services, such as Video on Demand, more attractive. The Glasnost tests look like they can be quite thorough for telling you just what you are getting, but it is unlikely that if your Internet connection is restricted in any form, that you will be able to do anything about it.


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