Small businesses and teleworkers could see high-speed Internet slowed to a crawl

Having the highest-quality Internet connection is a must in today's world of teleworking and home-based businesses. Many businesses and workers rely on their Internet service providers to provide them with the high-speed service they pay for, but are ISPs delivering what they promise?

As more and more Canadians begin using their high-speed Internet for applications that use a large amount of bandwidth, some ISPs are starting to pick and choose who gets full use of their high-speed access, while limiting or "de-prioritizing" others.

The battle so far has been fought over users' abilities to download and upload torrents.

Torrents work like this: A website will host a list of films, software or music and connect the individual who has the file on their computer with the person who wants to download it. Files for a feature-length film are very large, typically around 700 megabytes. These torrent sites have become so popular that they are causing massive amounts of bandwidth to be used. Several ISPs in Canada and around the world have claimed that roughly 10 per cent of users can take up to 90 per cent of bandwidth through peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing programs.

In Canada, Rogers and Shaw in Vancouver have responded by reducing the high speed of users downloading and uploading (or seeding) torrents. Rogers admitted to what it called "prioritizing" "real-time use" such as surfing and e-mail transfers ahead of large file transfers in a December 2005 article in the Globe and Mail.

"I think Rogers' position on this has been very clear," vice-president and general manager of Rogers high speed Internet, Tom Turner told OBJ. "To make sure we have optimized performance for our customers, time sensitive and immediate uses such as web surfing and e-mail are given priority. We don't traffic shape."

However, according to multiple definitions, including one by Cisco Systems, which designs traffic-shaping software, "The primary reasons to use traffic shaping are to control access to available bandwidth, to ensure that traffic conforms to specific policies, and to regulate the flow of traffic in order to avoid congestion."

Users have tried to get around traffic shaping, also known as "throttling" by encrypting their files so ISPs can't tell what they are downloading or uploading.

It was soon suspected by University of Ottawa technology law professor Michael Geist in his tech law blog (and subsequently printed in the Toronto Star), Azureus' wiki site (Azureus is a popular torrent-hosting program) and countless message boards that Rogers is one of the few ISPs to simply degrade all encrypted traffic, legal or not.

"Many people in the technical community have noticed that many of the services out there that engage in traffic shaping are rather blunt in their approach, which has led some to mistake legitimate traffic for torrent traffic," said Mr. Geist. He noted that BitTorrent itself is not illegal in Canada and many legitimate files being swapped are being caught in the mix.

From personal experience he cited the massive slowdown of e-mail transfers at the University of Ottawa. The U of O set up its own legitimate encrypted channel for e-mail and he speculated Rogers' packet-shaping technology assumed the encrypted traffic was a file-sharing program.

His concerns were answered in a letter in the Toronto Star in which Ken Engelhart, vice-president of regulatory affairs at Rogers, said the company does not degrade all encrypted traffic. Mr. Engelhard said in the case of the University of Ottawa e-mail channel, Rogers had "not been able to detect any performance issues."

Mr. Geist took that to mean that Rogers was not denying that it limits the amount of available bandwidth so these applications do not perform in an optimal way.

This is a big problem for small business owners and teleworkers, as Rogers doesn't make it known on its website that they use traffic shaping. Mr. Geist said a significant number of people came forward after reading his article on Rogers' practices to share similar experiences. "When using encrypted channels for Voice over IP or different kinds of services, they found them almost unusable with Rogers' high speed," he said.

The news of file transfer prioritizing came as a shock to Bob Fortier, president of the Canadian Teleworkers Association (CTA), but it was not the first time he had heard of ISPs making assumptions about what users are doing. When working from his Manotick home, his small local ISP blocked his newsletters to the 1,500 members of the CTA, claiming he was "spamming" his own members.

"If you work in a company as a teleworker and part of your role is to send documents to more than 25 people, you are basically forced to take an extra step (to) subscribe to a higher business account," Mr. Fortier said. The difference between a personal account versus a business account might be twice as much per month, something many small home-based businesses might not be able to afford. He found the news that Rogers prioritizes file transfers troubling.

"I can see many situations where you would have a legitimate worker sending large files. Say you work in IT and you need to send your backup files to different locations," said Mr. Fortier. "If you're working for a small organization, they may not have the resources that large organizations have so they may not pay for your equipment or Internet access."

"Whether for personal purposes or small business purposes or teleworking purposes, Canadians have a right to at least transparency in the services they are purchasing, specifically when these services are marketed as being high-speed and enabling all kinds of activities that it may not be able to meet," Mr. Geist said.

Ashwin Navin, president of the San Fransisco-based BitTorrent Inc., worked closely with BitTorrent's creator, Bram Cohen, to bring torrents into the mainstream. He works with several ISPs and major studios like Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century Fox to bring their products to users. According to Mr. Navin, the issue comes down to ISPs not wanting to pay to provide the service they promised to their users.

"It is cost, fundamentally. What ISPs have is a gym-membership business model which is they sell more subscriptions than they have capacity to provide. They would love it if people didn't use their broadband connection," he said. "File sharing, YouTube, all these applications are using up the pipes and that is in conflict with the gym-membership model."

The solution, he said is to have customers vote with their pocketbooks.

"The filtering initiatives are pretty short-sighted, in my opinion. I think what people want is more capacity for the applications they thought they were going to get for the price they paid," Mr. Navin said. "Unfortunately in Canada it is a pretty monopolistic environment and it would be great for someone like Bell Canada to step up and win all these users. There is definitely a need for competition."