Bell throttling wholesale providers of DSL services has further opened up the conversations around Net Neutrality. Michael Geist has written about the mounting call for action on net neutrality from organizations such as the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) and Council of Canadians. I strongly applaud and join in this call.
The throttling of wholesale traffic by Bell Canada is, however, an
issue that is related but distinct. Its link to the net neutrality
debate needs to be understood, as well as the ways in which it is quite
different.
While the Internet is often drawn as a big cloud that we connect to,
it is sometimes useful to look inside the cloud. As a primer I would
recommend reading some specific pages on Wikipedia including: Internet, Packet Switching and the End-to-end principle.
What you will find is a series of routers which are connected to
each other via some sort of connection. In order to get from your
computer to some other computer elsewhere on the Internet your packets
will pass over a connection to a router which will decide which
connection to send your packet through. By hopping from router to
router over these connections, your packet eventually reaches its
destination.
Congestion happens when one of those network links or routers is not
able to keep up with the traffic attempting to be routed through it,
causing congestion as some packets are simply not able to be sent.
Sometimes this congestion is a legitimate technical limitation, such as
with the relatively high cost submarine communications cables.
Other times congestion is less legitimate, such as connectivity within
and between major urban centres on a single continent where high
capacity optical fiber is relatively cheap and largely underutilized.
The “last mile” link to customer premises
The connection between the customer premises (home or business) and
the first router of the chosen ISP should be thought of as special when
trying to analyze policy questions. This link is often called the “last mile”
connection. It is the ability of a customer to make their own choices
for this ISP in a free market which allows them to hire the ISP which
is making the business choices that best match their needs. It is also
this competition to meet the increasing demands of customers which
creates the incentives for innovation within this sector.
Some customers may want a dirt-cheap ISP which only acquires
adequate network capacity to connect with other parts of the Internet
to handle small loads from customers. In this case if a large number of
customers all try to utilize this smaller network link at the same
time, congestion will occur.
Customers may want to hire an ISP which acquires adequate network
capacity to handle a larger load. For connections between computers in
and between major urban centres within a continent, network capacity is
quite cheap so this level of congestion-free connectivity between these
points should be expected.
Competitive Access
For historical reasons, often the only communications connections
that are made to customer premises are in the form of telephone or
cable television connections. This has meant that the phone and cable
companies have a duopoly on that “last mile” connection. Given this
situation, various regulators have mandated that third party providers
be allowed competitive access to this infrastructure. In the case of
phone companies, this has included both competition for telephone
services as well as data services.
This would mean that ISPs that are competitors to Bell would be able
to offer services to customers where that “last mile” connection would
happen over Bell “owned” wires. The fact that Bell (or other local
phone companies in different parts of Canada) owns the wires should be
entirely hidden to the customer who would be hiring services from that
competing ISP.
For reasons I don’t understand, the CRTC continues to treat phone
and cable companies as different, even in an era of convergence where
many of these companies equally offer phone, broadcasting and data
(Internet, etc) services. While Canada’s phone companies are mandated
to offer competitive access, the cable companies thus far are not.
In my case I have two DSL connections at home. One is from a company called Storm Internet and the other is from the National Capital Freenet which is a reseller of the Internet connectivity services of TekSavvy Solutions Inc.
One of these DSL connections is shared on the physical pair of copper
wires with my Bell Canada supplied phone line, and the other is a DSL
on what is called a “dry loop” where on this pair of wires I get DSL
but I do not also have a voice phone line.
In these cases there is a physical pair or wires that connect between my home and a central office (CO).
In some cases the competing ISP has equipment in the CO, and in other
cases the phone company will route digital data from the CO to the ISP.
At this point this a point-to-point communications between the customer
and the ISP, and is not routed as “Internet traffic”. In many cases the
packets are organized as Ethernet as if it was one big LAN.
What Bell is doing with their “throttling”
While Bell is mandated to offer competitive access to competing
ISPs, they have under-built the capacity between the COs and the
competing ISPs such that there is congestion on there internal network.
If this congestion were affecting voice traffic, making voice
communication jittery, we would clearly recognize this as broken
infrastructure that Bell must fix in order for them to continue to
offer the minimum expected level of service. Somehow since this is data
traffic they thought they could get away with under-building their
network such that there would be congestion, and then implement their
own chosen “policy” to prioritize traffic.
We shouldn’t be focusing on what policy is the right policy, or
getting this issue confused with the related but different “Net
Neutrality” debate. We should be questioning why Bell has under-built
their network such that they cannot fulfill the legitimate basic
requirements of the competitive access mandate they have been given,
and we should be pushing the CRTC to enforce these basic requirements.
The important link between competitive access and the “Net Neutrality” debate
While I believe that market forces can solve many of the problems
discussed under the title of “Net Neutrality”, I recognize that in
order for this to happen we need a competitive free market to begin
with. Allowing the phone and cable companies to leverage their duopoly
on the “last mile” connection essentially means that no real
competition exists, and customers cannot “vote with their feet” to an
ISP which will configure their network to best meet their needs (IE:
for many of us that includes never over-subscribing connections within
or between major urban centres).
It turns out that to ultimately solve the “Net Neutrality” problem
we really need to solve the “last mile monopoly” problem. While Net
Neutrality legislation is one path, this presumes we retain the current
monopoly infrastructure and then strongly regulate the monopolies. I
truly believe that a better solution is to revoke the last mile
monopoly from the incumbent providers, solving this problem the way we
solved similar problems in electricity distribution and the
provisioning of other utilities (Read: An ideal future communications infrastructure, how do we get there, and what is stopping us!).
