Almost four years afterBell Canadastarted throttling traffic of its Sympatico Internet customers, the telecom carrier has promised to stop the controversial practice in March, 2011.
Owned by BCE Inc., Bell said in a letter Monday to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) that while the slowing of certain peer-to-peer traffic was necessary in 2008 to ensure all customers were getting adaquate speeds, upgrades to network capacity means it's not longer important.
The capacity-related rate scheduleties wholesale rates to the amount of capacity customers use. In theory, those who use more pay more.
So ends -- for the time being at least -- a controversial act by Bell. It caused an uproarwhen it askedCRTC to allow throttling of traffic not only to its own customers but also to subscribers of independent Internet service providers who buy wholesale connectivity from it.
Throttling is called by the CRTC an economic "Internet traffic management practice" (sometimes called traffic shaping) which
it allowed in 2009 under certain conditions. ISPs have always felt that Bell [TSX:BCE] had no right to impose traffic management on them, or that itis necessary. But Bell said it needed throttling as an economic disincentive to subscribers who could abuse their ability to download unlimited amounts of videos, games and other large data files.
Bellhopes capacity-based billing will mean ISPs set rates that will be the disincentive to abuse.