CBC is reporting that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC, just in case you thought it stood for Consumer Resenting Telecom Crooners) has ordered Bell Canada to publicly prove that its networks are congested and the traffic shaping measures it has taken against its own customers and resellers were necessary.
I quote from the previously linked CBC article, while I still can without getting sued for $20,000 under C-61:
“The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on Thursday told the company it has until June 23 to make public data that was marked confidential in a May 29 filing. Bell had said it needed to keep quiet the information, which details the level of internet traffic and possible congestion on its network, for competitive reasons.”
I have a question for Bell. Answer this for me if you can.
Who in the purple polka-dotted hell are you competing with?
Simple question, really. I mean, you physically control all of the landlines. If anyone offers a faster, cheaper, or better DSL service than you, you can just throttle them. But no, you’d never do that, would you? That might be anti-competitive. Then there’s the cable companies, who despite throttling you as well, are indeed faster and provide a higher level of customer service.
Okay? Second question.
Possible congestion?
As in, they have no real, hard evidence of congestion on the network? They implemented an extremely complicated (and no doubt expensive) solution which was guaranteed to anger their customers and other ISPs to whom they provide mandated reseller services on a hunch? If that were at all believable, then Bell would qualify as the world’s worst managed company. But we know that’s bullshit. There was a lot of thinking behind this.
So what’s going to happen? My guess is, Bell will release the information to comply with the ruling. It will just be too obscure and incomplete to be able to conclude anything from it. The CRTC will know, and the ISPs will protest. Bell will claim that the documents are valid until they have no more legs to stand on, at which point they will employ another stalling tactic. It seems like not only does Bell throttle internet access, they throttle investigations too. If only we weren’t investigating those downloaded music and movies so much, we might be able to devote our collective bandwidth to solving this problem.