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Last week, Google and Measurement Lab introduced a new web application called Glasnost that allows users to test the extent to which their ISP throttles or blocks their BitTorrent traffic. According to the statistics currently available on their site, Canada is one of the worst throttlers in the world—Canada ranks fourth for blocked hosts and second for blocked ISPs. All of the major Canadian ISPs admit to traffic shaping, but whether it’s necessary is difficult to determine as none of the providers are willing to publicly release their data. Glasnost’s timing couldn’t be better—in addition to providing much needed transparency, the data should also assist CRTC in its current investigation of traffic management policies.
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Thanks for this! The testing site is busy right now, but I'll try again later
You can also use this link if the other servers are busy.
this is so frustrating.
the question is can something be done about ISPs throttling? i feel like it'd be a battle similar to getting banks to reduce ATM fees. the type of thing that pisses everyone off, but it would be very difficult to reform.
A more comparable example might be cellphone costs: what needs to happen (and what's currently missing) is a major competitor who doesn't throttle but who can charge about the same as or less than the big companies that exist right now, thus undercutting them and, by the beautiful magic of competition, hopefully forcing the bigger companies to follow suit. Right now, there's no real financial incentive whatsoever for any company to stop throttling if all the big competitors do it too.
...but the CRTC's help would be great and all too, as not getting huge fines is also something of an incentive.
The problem with internet service is that, since Bell owns the lines (unless you go for cable, of course), ISPs are limited by Bell's practices. So even if you go with a small anti-throttling ISP (like Teksavvy), they can't avoid the throttling. The infrastructure needed to get around that means we're not likely to see someone who can for a long time.
Teksavvy used to be that competitor. I picked TS because they don't throttle, and not 4 months later Bell started throttling them. I've complained to the CRTC on the grounds that it's anit-competitive, but the CRTC is useless.
That's the point though, if Bell throttles then every ISP using their infrastructure will throttle, whether they want to or not. A competitor needs its own network, and that's not going to happen unless technology reaches into a whole new generation of, for example, wireless provision that will be built from scratch. Hydro tried that.
I use Bell (dry loop) and the test came back 'negative' (no interference with torrents).
I asked one of Glasnost's technicians about your results, here is what he had to say:
"We compare the bandwidths of the BitTorrent and the non-BitTorrent flow we are sending. With respect to Bell Canada, as far as I know they will actually throttle both of our flows, thus they achieve similar bandwidths and our tool reports that there is no throttling. We are currently working on a more advanced test that will also be able to detect Bell Canada's way of throttling. Please stay tuned."
Glasnost is still a little buggy. Bell even admits to throttling BitTorrent traffic.