Net neutrality has recently been a hot topic in the tech world, not so much in Canada, but very prominently in the United States. For a working definition of what Net Neutrality actually is, you may want to check out the Wikipedia entry.
Recently a bill to promote Net Neutrality was put forth into Congress in the United States. However, this bill was turned down. You may get a good idea of how and why it was turned down by listening to the mp3 file linked below. It was probably because of the wonderful working definition of Net Neutrality given by Senator Ted Stevens.
Click here to listen to Ted Stevens explaining Net Neutrality
I personally have not had any problems in Canada. Regardless of what Leo Laporte says, I have not heard of any issues in Canada with regards to VoIP and ISP competition. I am currently using Rogers High-Speed Extreme internet. This gives me 6mbps down and 800kbps up. There have been rumours that Rogers throttles BitTorrent traffic. I was not able to get a confirmation of this over the phone, considering all of the PR representatives at Rogers though that BitTorrent was used for ringtones. However, due to regulations in Canada, Rogers does not throttle bandwidth on port 1720 because this is the port commonly used by VoIP providers. I now use BitTorrent on port 1720. I am told I get 6mbps down, and I usually get about 5800kbps. This is very acceptable.
I am slightly worried that in the future Rogers may start throttling ports that VoIP providers use. This may come shortly after Rogers introduces their own VoIP service. As someone that is seriously considering purchasing a service such as Vonage VoIP in the future, this concerns me greatly. I am going to be watching this issue dilligenty. I know a couple of people that have Vonge with Rogers High-Speed Extreme and they have noticed some discrepencies with the quality. It is not all of the time, but it happens quite frequently. Considering the bandwidth Vonage requires compared with the bandwidth readily available from Rogers, this should not be an issue.
This issue is becoming more and more prominent every day.
2 comments ↓
Sorry that I have to comment anonymously. Rogers has devices from p-cube (now part of Cisco, http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2004/corp_082304.html) which are designed to throttle traffic. They are actively throttling peer-to-peer traffic, I am unaware if they are or plan on doing the same with VoIP and other services. Providers such as Telus have expressed interest in doing similar things, especially with respect to VoIP traffic since it eats into their PSTN services.
Another good site to check out for Rogers information is the Rogers Forum at BroadbandReports: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/rogers
The theory right now is that there’ll be a price increase on Extreme to 54.95/month, but the speed will go to 12Mbit down. I’m not sure if I’d go for it personally, since upload speed is my biggest factor these days. (I have offsite Internet/SSH accounts I enjoy using.)
While the forum has quite a few n00b/Miron characters, there’s usually some good information (that’s how I found out about the proposed caps coming in…)
Also, port 1755 is unthrottled; my dad’s PC uses that one and I use 1720 for BitTorrent.
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