Bell did not waste any time in responding to the Primus net neutrality submission as it has called on the CRTC to reject it. The next steps are fairly clear – CAIP has been given until Monday to respond to the Bell submission. With those submissions in hand, the CRTC will rule on whether an injunction is appropriate. If it declines the injunction request, it will then address the broader throttling issue. That could take months, though public pressure could convince the Commission to accellerate the process (which could include public hearings or submissions). If you want your voice heard, the Campaign for Democratic Media has made it easy to do so.
Update: Sources say the CRTC has delayed the CAIP response deadline until Thursday. Why is the CRTC not posting its letters to the parties that update a case generating widespread interest?
Update II: The CRTC has now posted its letter to CAIP and Bell.
Is BELL feeling threatened?
I read BELL’s response to PRIMUS. Is it just me or does it seem like BELL is feeing threatened by PRIMUS jumping into the fray?
Bell Seems threatened
It seems exactly like that.
Bell is not denying what Primus is saying, they just want Primus’ points blocked for consideration in a decision.
I worry that much of this debate revolves around whether traffic shaping is justified in the sense that it is preventing network congestion. Bell might succeed in persuading the CRTC that this is the case and then the strength of CAIP and Primus’s position will have been weakened having lost that particular debate. Meanwhile the central issue that Bell really must answer to is net neutrality. While Bell has the right to limit overall bandwidth use to maintain network performance, do they have the right to monitor what you use your bandwidth for, and to chose which online activities are acceptable and which will be throttled?
If it were network congestion
If it were network congestion, it would be variable to alleviate that congestion. After all, there is QoS, which would prioritize interactive traffic (voip, http) and fill the rest with bulk traffic (ftp-data, bittorrent…). But it is rather fixed to some arbitrary speed (I’ve seen 30 and 60 KB/s). It means that this is not congestion issue, but a cost-saving measure by Bell.
bell needs to answer some questions
At this point Bell should consider themselves lucky that 90% of their customers haven’t yet realised that they aren’t using a service they paid for to the fullest.