Tim put a link to a story about Bell 'shaping' the download speeds for users on ISPs that lease Bell's DSL network access. While I'm not going to argue about Bell being evil (though compared to many other telecoms, they're downright saints in my book), I'm of mixed feelings about the throttling. Most of it happens during peak times and it's bittorrents that are affected for the most part. Now, there are some stories about stuff like the new CBC bittorrent service being really borked over Bell and Rogers and if that's happening in off-hour times, that's just wrong.
Most of the end-user experience won't be changed though. I kind of feel for the independant ISP who can't fulfill some of their promises to their customers but it's kind of like complaining that the fountain in the hotel lobby isn't working during the middle of a drought. Bell provides the water, so to speak, and if they need to stem the flow so that everyone can have optimal surfing/generic usage vs. several bittorrent users draining the available resource, I'm down with that.
And frankly, I'd rather deal with something like throttling, which is a little annoying some of the time than hard bandwidth caps, which are annoying ALL of the time.
I'm still surprised that independant ISPs are around these days as they seem to be going the way of the dodo... while this move won't make life easier for them, I'm sure that most of the people doing bittorrent and P2P sharing on the ISP linked in that article aren't sharing opensource/creative commons things, so they should stop their whining and be thankful that we haven't adopted the proposed Canadian DCMA that has been bandied about for a few months... yet.
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