Bell advocates 'shaping' Internet traffic

After facing allegations of Internet traffic shaping, Bell Canada Inc has presented further information to regulators to explain the reason behind its controversial practice of "throttling", a strategy required to reduce congestion on its network in the phone company’s view.

Mirko Bibic, Bell's chief of regulatory affairs tried to explain that "Peer-to-peer is by design a bandwidth-hogging application. "He also added that p2p protocols, which are used by file-sharing services such as BitTorrent, were also treated differently as they are only used by a rather small number of customers and don’t fall under the same time-compelling conditions as other applications.

This seems to be the first time the CRTC has been involved in a matter that concerns "network neutrality" (which basically advocates the idea that Internet Service Providers don’t have the right to hold back or control certain types of online files or applications).

When Bell made the decision to include in its the policy its wholesale clients back in March, the Canadian Association of Internet Providers passed the torch to CRTC (representing independent ISPs) which entered the debate:

"They have received complaints from end-user customers regarding greatly reduced Internet access speeds, unreliability of their Internet access services and threatened or actual cancellation of their service contracts."

A bit of a contrast here: on one hand Bell admits that the "most logical solution" to deal with network congestion is to create extra capacity, on the other hand, Bibic thinks this measure to be so too expensive since for most of the time it would not be in use.

According to its filings Bell has invested $3 billion in its high-speed Internet service since 2001 and for 2008 it intends to spend about $500 million.