Bell Canada Throttling Wholesalers’ broadband
Can we say anti-competitive? Seems Canada doesn’t have it any better than the US where Canadian Broadband Issues are concerned. “Users of the Canadian family-run ISP Teksavvy (which we profiled last year) have started noticing that Bell Canada is throttling traffic before it reaches wholesale partners. According to Teksavvy CEO Rocky Gaudrault, Bell has implemented “load balancing” to “manage bandwidth demand” during peak congestion times — but apparently didn’t feel the need to inform partner ISPs or customers. The result is a bevy of annoyed customers and carriers across the great white north.”
Given that DSL Reports ranks Teksavvy as one of the top ISPs in Canada, it’s pretty much a given that Bell Canada might not want the competition. And apparently the Bell Canada bandwidth throttling is not limited to Teksavvy. It appears the throttling on wholesalers is related to bandwidth caps that Bell Canada places on their residential customers, but that the wholesalers don’t have. I can imagine that there has been a lot of business lost to those wholesalers, with no benefit to Bell Canada, since those customers still run over the same network on the last mile. This isn’t in defense of Bell Canada, in my opinion. If they’d built out their dsl networks, added more DSLAMs, not limited their own residential customers, and maybe given the kind of customer service the smaller ISPs provide, this wouldn’t be an issue. But as with any company that has to answer to stockholders, the networks seldom get built. They just get patched and throttled.
For those of you in Eastern Canada who feel you may have been throttled, there is a Google Map of Throttled TekSavvy customers here. What a great use of the google maps api! It clearly shows a pattern. I personally think the other smaller ISPs who have experienced throttling should add their own maps to this one. Maybe then when the Canadian Government is made aware of the problem they’ll pay attention. But if they receive dough from Bell Canada the way US politicians do from our Telecoms, I doubt it.
