Service providers slow down traffic as Internet heads for broken (or not)… 

North American telcos and cable network operators – AT&T, Bell Canada, Comcast, Rogers Communications and Time Warner among them – are, willingly or not, getting to open up about the prospects and practices of slowing down or ‘throttling’ the Internet traffic of their own customers or other ISPs.

In the context of a lengthening dispute involving formal complaints and on-going legal action by those affected, Bell Canada has now been required by Canadian regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), to disclose information about the network congestion that the telcos cites as a reason for throttling.

South of the Canadian border, it’s reported that Comcast has sent letters to its broadband customers in two US cities notifying them that an experiment in managing traffic is underway. “At the busiest times of the day on our network (which could occur at any time), those very few disproportionately heavy users, who are doing things like conducting numerous or continuous large file transfers, may experience slightly longer response times for some online activities, until the period of network congestion ends,” the Comcast missive warned.

The network owners’ rationale for throttling is that it’s necessary to achieve appropriate traffic management in an increasingly bandwidth-ravenous online world, and some operators emphasise they are not discriminating against particular end-users or sites being visited, just applying the brakes to very high volume users at peak times.

In any event, stories are now circulating (apparently sparked by a report in ‘The Register’) that Google is planning to test a tool that will enable end-users to discover if their Internet connection is being throttled.

Meanwhile, the results of a survey carried out by solutions vendor Tellabs and the IDC research house indicate, inter alia, that telecommunications professionals are split down the middle on whether increasing bandwidth demands are likely to ‘break’ the Internet. The just published results show half of respondents saying bandwidth demands will eventually break the Internet, with the other half saying they won't. Of the 51% who see trouble ahead, one out of four think it could happen within two years.

Gulp!
John Williamson