Torontoist: Got Bell's Number

Ben

Mon, 26 May 2008 14:48:13 -0500

Are there any other ISPs to go with that dont have this issue?

TokyoTuds

Sat, 24 May 2008 21:45:03 -0500

Does this mean I will get throttled when buying movies through iTunes on my Mac? Sounds like an added "benefit" for Bell to try an compete against a superior service for those actually paying for their content. Why can't Bell made their service Mac-compatible? Apple uses the most open standards there are, and consumers are moving to Mac in droves. Bell fails to service its constituency once again. Cheers, Tuds

spacejack

Fri, 23 May 2008 18:57:29 -0500

So they throttled all encrypted traffic then. Well, that is evil. I guess they can sort of get away with it since people probably won't notice much of a slowdown for shopping apps.

Ryan L

Fri, 23 May 2008 18:41:19 -0500

Indeed. While they used to throttle bittorrent ports, now they essentially monitor the transfer of information. Anything sent via bitorrent will be picked up and throttled. At first the simple solution was encrypting your bittorrents. It was a simple option in most torrent programs. Rogers quickly just throttled any encrypted traffic to combat this loophole. Rogers has been doing this for a while now. Bell only recently. I've gotten the impression however, because the two systems are quite different, they've both had to go about it in different ways. Initially Rogers had to address the throttling on a neighbourhood by neighbourhood basis, as they require a physical modification done to their switching stations. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but seeing as at my new apartment I get pretty good speeds, I think it is still true. Bell on the other hand was able to apply it system wide without any physical changes made to their infrastructure. Literally surprising people overnight with the throttling. Sadly, your best bet for the time being is to go with Rogers (Or a company that buys bandwidth from Rogers) and hope you live in an area not yet affected by the throttling. Maybe the government will do something about it before it gets to your area.

David Topping

Fri, 23 May 2008 18:14:19 -0500

Um. Call me crazy, but (with a little technical know-how and the right torrent program) you can change your Bittorrent port to whatever you want under Bell, Rogers, and any other ISP. Doing so makes no significant difference in whether you get throttled or not. Changing ports is not a solution to the problem at all.

spacejack

Fri, 23 May 2008 18:06:29 -0500

Eh. The sooner ISPs all get on board throttling current bittorrent ports, the sooner bittorrent software will switch to using port 443.

tyrannosaurus_rek

Fri, 23 May 2008 15:45:01 -0500

If I thought it was possible for the CRTC to side with consumers against a comm. company I'd say Bell just sealed their own fate. IIRC, Bell's own numbers show that 100% of customers are only using 55% of the total bandwidth Bell's system can handle. (Read it on Slashdot last weekend.)