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Canwest News Service
TORONTO – The national regulator for the Internet industry moved Wednesday to address how the country’s biggest service providers such as Bell Canada and Rogers Communications Inc. manage their networks, imposing, for the first time, conditions on their traffic-management practices.
In the ruling, which comes in the wake of extensive hearings this past summer, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) will allow major network carriers to “traffic shape,” or use tools that pare back broadband access for certain users to alleviate congestion on their networks, a practice others label as “throttling.”
The large Internet services providers (ISPs) must give retail customers 30 days notice before any new “traffic management practice” is introduced.
Wholesale users, which include smaller client providers that effectively rent network space from the big ISPs then resell it to customers, must be given 60 days notice.
The policy report also said providers must tell customers how the new practice will impact their service and that economic solutions, such as higher pricing for high-use clients, should be favoured over hands-on management of network traffic, which the commission said should only be used “as a last resort.”
While some critics said the CRTC didn’t go far enough, others were encouraged by the changes.
“The CRTC has created some significant conditions on what they see as appropriate ways ISPs may manage their networks,” said Michael Geist, professor of Internet law at the University of Ottawa.
He said that ISPs will have to engage in a level of disclosure they have been unaccustomed to until now. “If we were having this conversation 18 months ago, most ISPs were incredibly secretive about their practices, saying nothing about them.”
There are contentious issues still on the table.
“The decision at the same time guarantees that practices like throttling are going to continue,” Geist said. “There’s going to be a lot of criticism that they didn’t go further, particularly that ISPs don’t require (CRTC) approval for their traffic-management practices.”
Instead of outlining a list of acceptable methods, the CRTC will rely on complaints from retail and wholesale customers to determine what works and what does not.
“It’s going to take many more complaints to concretely address the issue,” Geist said.
Tom Copeland, chairman of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers (CAIP), has charged that cable and Internet giants such as Bell give preferential treatment to their own users at the expense of smaller ISPs, putting them at a considerable competitive disadvantage. On Wednesday, he said that while the organization is not completely satisfied, the new framework is a step toward a more level playing field.
“The CRTC has recognized that a carrier could implement traffic shaping on its retail traffic and its wholesale traffic that could have a disproportionate impact on the wholesale customer or the end users of the wholesale customer,” he said.
“That maybe doesn’t give us any comfort right now, but it does at least recognize that the carriers still have an extraordinary influence on the traffic that traverses their network towards us.”
Mirko Bibic, Bell’s chief officer of regulatory affairs, said the report “gives a general analytical framework that we can all use in the future to determine what we can or can’t do.”
As in other countries, the amount of data flowing across the networks of the Canada’s biggest Internet providers has soared in recent years. The growth has led to concerns that unchecked usage among users increasingly demanding more information, and content such as movies and music, is outstripping network capacity.
The commission also recommended that service providers invest in increasing capacity “as much as possible.”
The commission’s report comes a day before its equivalent body in the United States is scheduled to vote on whether to allow carriers such as Verizon and Comcast to shape data flows on their networks.
“That’s going to be the barometer,” said Geist. “There’s no question that what the FCC does is going to be used in Canada as a metric.”
Canwest News Service with files from Matt Hartley
