Support NeoGAF

[Dr.Acula]

Maybe not specifically relevant to non-Canadians, but what is really interesting here is the information on the policy and how much they chose to disclose.

http://teksavvy.com/en/why-teksavvy/policies/legal-stuff/internet-traffic-management-practices

TekSavvy is implementing a "Shared Internet Resources Policy." I'm going to highlight some interesting points and provide a little commentary.

Let's skip with the preamble and go right into their reasoning:

2. Why do you need a policy on shared Internet resources?

We have always had to decide how to manage our shared Internet resources. Until recently, though, we didn’t have a formal policy on how to do so. We did employ a range of measures, like time-of-day incentives and a focus on domestic interconnection. But the centerpiece of our unwritten policy was a very simple concept: provision all the upstream bandwidth we need to minimize congestion.

There were two problems with that policy.

First, it’s not sustainable. No matter how much bandwidth we provision, unusual network events like a new Netflix release or a major new download can and, in many cases, will congest it. Put simply, Internet traffic is growing very, very quickly; peak usage events are shooting past average levels by greater and greater degrees; and every user always has the ability to command extra resources by opening multiple parallel sessions. All of that has the potential to degrade end-users’ experiences significantly and increasingly, especially when those experiences involve real-time applications like voice-over-IP or streaming media.

Second, even were it possible to provision enough upstream bandwidth that no network event and no user behaviour could saturate it, it wouldn’t be sustainable, because that approach is expensive in a way that wastes resources. “Throw more bandwidth at it” is an easy policy to implement, but it forces every user to chip in for all of the bandwidth needed to handle the activity of any user.

That is especially hard to sustain when bandwidth is extremely costly. For some years now, TekSavvy has argued that the mandated bandwidth rates we pay to wholesale network access providers have been set far too high. Those wholesale rates are divided into two parts. One is the access part. The other is, in most cases, the size of our point of interconnection with the wholesale carrier, which determines how much capacity gets to the access part – and varies from $10.36 monthly per Mbps (Bell Canada), to $11.81 (Cogeco), to $14 (Rogers), to $20.31 (Videotron).

The CRTC has been working steadily to review both access rates and bandwidth rates at the point of interconnection. But it is a slow process. In the meantime, the cost of bandwidth remains high, usage continues to go up, and simply throwing more bandwidth at our shared resources isn’t sustainable without hiking prices significantly.

The SIR Policy is TekSavvy’s attempt to get smarter at how we do things when the network gets congested during the download day (8 a.m. to 2 a.m.) period.

First thing to note is that TekSavvy has a "zap the cap" programme:

"Zap the Cap" and get unlimited uploads and downloads.

With "Zap the Cap" your monthly download cap is vapourized in exchange for a reduction in your Internet speed from 25Mbpsis lowered to 9Mbpsbetween 20:00 and 00:00 (8 PM to midnight).

They also do not count any traffic between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m. toward your cap. I set up Steam to only download updates after 2 a.m. I've saved 50 gigs this month from that, which would have otherwise gone toward my 400 gig cap.

So those are a couple of things this ISP does in order to lower congestion.

What is very interesting to note in the quote above is them listing the wholesale price of bandwidth.

This is a glimpse into how "wholesale" internet providers are being charged now with the recent Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) ruling in July.

Canada's big telecom companies will be required to open their highest-speed internet cables to smaller competitors who want to offer broadband services to consumers, according to a CRTC ruling released today.

That means that big telecom and cable providers, who are already required to share their copper and coaxial cables with smaller competitors such as Primus, Distributel or TekSavvy, will now have to do the same with their fibre optic cables.

The smaller competitor companies currently own about 10 per cent of the Canadian home internet market, with the other 90 per cent controlled by big phone and cable companies.

The CRTC decision is a major loss for big companies like Bell, which argue that it would have no incentive to invest in laying new fibre optic cables if forced to allow rival companies to profit from them.

But the ruling also contains some solace for the big providers. The CRTC said it will allow the big telecoms to charge fees for sharing their cables in order to make a profit on their investments. The pricing model will be worked out with each company on the basis of actual cost, plus a markup of about 30 per cent.

I've been reading news articles on this, but it's real "inside baseball." In a nutshell, how the large TelCos charge the "wholesalers" for usage on their lines has changed.

3. Okay, so who is affected when by the SIR Policy?

First, we will take steps to make sure that on the rare occasions where there is congestion, it least affects the most real-time protocols, like voice-over-IP and streaming media. Instead, less-real-time applications, like peer-to-peer file transfers, will be more likely to be affected. From what we have seen, even less-real-time applications will not be much affected. Few users—if any—should see any perceptible change in their experience, and more users will see a positive improvement in the use of real-time applications in congested circumstances. A little bit of management can go a very long way.

Second, even when congestion does occur, slightly affecting less-real-time applications, it is those who have used the most bandwidth that day whose use of those applications will be the first to be affected by these measures.

So they are now prioritising real-time services (skype, netflix) and will shape peer-to-peer (torrents, game downloads) down, based on usage. So the occasional 50 gig game download should be quick, while the power-user downloading blu-ray rips all the time should have their bandwidth throttled. What is important to note is that you can opt out of this traffic shaping for a 5.00 dollar monthly fee.

4. When will the SIR Policy be in effect?

We’re phasing it in gradually. In the first phase, which begins December 1, 2015, it applies to our highest-cost-bandwidth platforms: Rogers and Videotron. We will continue to notify end-users well in advance of the policy’s application to the platform over which they are provisioned, so that you always know how you are affected.

This seems like it's happening in conjunction with the CRTC ruling. Notice how it only effects some service providers at first. Clearly Rogers and Videotron are aggressive with the new pricing model. Which is interesting, because from the comments in news articles, Rogers spokespeople dislike the CRTC ruling, and TekSavvy lauded it. Maybe someone with a deeper technical understanding can chime in.

7. I’m not really feeling the traffic management piece of your SIR Policy. Can I opt out?

It depends on what package you’re on. Please know that our traffic management measures are as non-invasive and non-intrusive as we can possibly make them. However, users with capped packages can opt out of this traffic management in exchange for a $5 monthly fee, either by calling us at 1-877-779-1575 or, once implemented, through MyAccount (myaccount.teksavvy.com). Recall that one of the reasons we have implemented this formal SIR Policy is to get smarter about how we control shared costs, in order to be fair to our whole user base: hence the charge. For the same reason, users with unlimited packages will not have the ability to opt out of the SIR Policy.

This is really interesting. Unlimited users will be forced into the traffic shaping policy. Those with caps can opt out.

8. But then what happens to Zap the Cap?

We are phasing out the Zap the Cap option that has allowed many of our users to turn their capped plans into unlimited plans in exchange for accepting slower-at-peak speeds. Instead, we are dropping the price of some of our unlimited plans significantly. A smarter SIR Policy lets us do that.

They're also killing "zap the cap," which allowed people on capped plans to get "effectively unlimited" service by accepting a 2/3rds speed reduction during the last 4 hours of the day. Instead they will be dropping the cost of their unlimited plan.

9. I thought TekSavvy was all about net neutrality.

We are. Back in 2009, TekSavvy organized a rally on Parliament Hill in support of network neutrality. Our views haven’t changed. We’re simply an intermediary, and we have no business telling our users what to do or snooping on what you actually do. We haul bits to and from end-users, in as neutral a fashion as possible.

But that doesn’t mean we want to charge you higher prices than we need to, nor cause users of real-time applications to experience congestion when they don’t have to. Our SIR Policy formalizes our approach to optimizing those things. TekSavvy’s measures are applied only where necessary, and look only at classes of traffic. We don’t look at content, don’t look at where traffic is coming from, and don’t look at where it’s headed.

Now this is really interesting. It's a justification for net neutrality, arguing that they are simply prioritising "real-time" or streaming traffic over file downloads. It's a response to the rates at which they are charged for bandwidth on the telcos fiber, and an attempt to reduce bandwidth over their networks.

The rest of the post is on privacy, how this effects people running mail servers etc. and excerpts from the telcos on how their traffic management policies are imposed on wholesalers (which is interesting so I'll paste it here):

[M]ost of our end-users are provisioned over wholesale network access acquired from third-party carriers. And most third-party carriers have chosen to deliver that access at the Internet layer, which effectively makes our end-users subject to the same Internet Traffic Management Practices that those incumbents impose on their own retail end-users, as follows.

· Bell has indicated that its wholesale network access is not currently subject to any traffic management policies.

· Cogeco indicates that its wholesale network access is subject to deep packet inspection with the single purpose of managing peer-to-peer applications. Content analysis is restricted to traffic classification only for traffic management purposes on upstream traffic. No content records are maintained. No Internet traffic management measures are applied in the downstream direction.

· Rogers indicates that its retail network access is subject to what Rogers describes as “a variety of network management techniques. These techniques have evolved as the Internet has changed” to limit spam, viruses and other security threats. We believe that the same network management techniques are applied to Rogers’ wholesale network access.

· Shaw indicates that its network access is subject to Internet traffic management practices that reduce, to 80 Kbps per end-user, upstream bandwidth allotted to “P2P applications completing non-real-time file transfer activity” within serving area nodes experiencing “upstream congestion”. These management practices are “not applied to downstream data transfer, real-time interactive or time-sensitive Internet applications.”

· TELUS has indicated that its retail network access is subject to Internet traffic management in some areas where demand exceeds available network capacity. These include areas where TekSavvy has end-users, and we believe the same traffic management is applied to TELUS’s wholesale network access. When they identify congestion in these areas, TELUS will redistribute network capacity across all users by temporarily reducing the speed of the few heavy users. This is intended to provide better speeds to the majority of other customers.

· Videotron has indicated that its wholesale network access is, at speeds of 120 Mbps speeds or higher, subject to upload measures that Videotron has explained are to prevent users from congesting shared “upload channels” serving a few dozen modems. Every 15 minutes, a system checks the usage rate for each upload channel. If the usage rate has reached a threshold beyond which congestion is imminent, the system identifies the 120 Mbps and 200 Mbps modems on that channel that have uploaded a statistically significant amount of data. Uploading from these modems is then momentarily given lower priority. Depending on the severity and duration of the congestion, uploading speed may be slowed for these modems. When the amount of data uploaded by the modem is diminished or the transmission of data goes back to a rate that does not cause congestion, uploading will return to its usual priority.

 

[Walpurgis]

Interesting. It sounds like a good thing to me. I didn't know that a single damn Mbps was so expensive.

 

[Kinitari]

I can appreciate their position, and they were a great (the best) ISP, at least in my experiences. Unfortunately the condo I moved in is using Rogers Fiber Optic, so I couldn't bring my service over. As soon as I can, I'll probably switch back, thanks to this ruling.

 

[Stike]

...

 

[Faenix1]

Sort of wish the governments would put down some steep incentives to lay Fibre Optic virtually everywhere - and whatever else they have to do to get a crapload of bandwidth through.

2015 and living 5 mins out of town I'm stuck with wireless internet and satellite. That just seems wrong to me. I can see the cut off point for this crap from my damn driveway. :|
(Saying that, The wireless net has been a lot better than I expected. Though that's probably more cause I can literally see the tower across the fields.)

 

[Silver Arrows]

Sort of wish the governments would put down some steep incentives to lay Fibre Optic virtually everywhere - and whatever else they have to do to get a crapload of bandwidth through.

I doubt you'll see much movement on optic fiber internet until Google Fiber decides to come to town. Even then, I well imagine the CRTC is going to start up it's 'protect Canadian interests' propaganda machine the minute they do, like any other telecom company wanting to come into Canada and threatens the monopoly Bell, Rogers and Telus has.

 

[HideyoshiJP]

Interesting. It sounds like a good thing to me. I didn't know that a single damn Mbps was so expensive.

That's provider-to-provider pricing, not pricing for home users. The first is designed to handle full load all the time. The latter, not so much.

 

[bananafactory]

I doubt you'll see much movement on optic fiber internet until Google Fiber decides to come to town. Even then, I well imagine the CRTC is going to start up it's 'protect Canadian interests' propaganda machine the minute they do, like any other telecom company wanting to come into Canada and threatens the monopoly Bell, Rogers and Telus has.

Telus is making some progress there

https://about.telus.com/community/english/news_centre/news_releases/blog/2015/06/19/test

Edmonton, AB – TELUS is investing $1 billion in Edmonton to connect more than 90 per cent of homes and businesses directly to the company’s state-of-the-art fibre optic network over the next six years.

The TELUS fibre optic network is among the most advanced communications infrastructure available in the world today. When the service is launched in Edmonton later this year, local residents and businesses will be able to take advantage of Internet speeds of up to 150 megabits per second – a dramatically faster service made possible by a direct fibre optic network connection. In coming years, TELUS plans to offer families and businesses in Edmonton increasingly higher speeds over this gigabit-enabled network. Importantly, local healthcare providers, educators and technology companies will also be able to draw upon the network to completely reimagine how they deliver existing services and develop entirely new solutions.

 

[Silver Arrows]

Telus is making some progress there

https://about.telus.com/community/english/news_centre/news_releases/blog/2015/06/19/test

Generally, Telus is probably the least worst out of the big three, so I'm glad that they are deciding to do this. Though I imagine the minute Bell or especially Rogers decide to really ramp up putting it in, then the monopoly will begin like everything else in Canadian telecoms.

 

[grumble]

I doubt you'll see much movement on optic fiber internet until Google Fiber decides to come to town. Even then, I well imagine the CRTC is going to start up it's 'protect Canadian interests' propaganda machine the minute they do, like any other telecom company wanting to come into Canada and threatens the monopoly Bell, Rogers and Telus has.

The ISPs are all laying down fiber. You can buy gigabit finer speeds from bell right now in select areas.

This situation is a complex one. The telecom companies are investing a huge amount of capital in their networks, which they have to make a return on. This also comes with a lot of risk. If they gave super cheap access to wholesalers who are able due to low costs and regulatory loopholes to undercut the ISPs then they wouldn't make the return to justify the investment allocated or the risk.

What I think should happen is that the network and the sales force should be split and everyone gets access to the network. Then the network gets a cost of capital and return on equity and you're off to the races.

 

[Walpurgis]

I doubt you'll see much movement on optic fiber internet until Google Fiber decides to come to town. Even then, I well imagine the CRTC is going to start up it's 'protect Canadian interests' propaganda machine the minute they do, like any other telecom company wanting to come into Canada and threatens the monopoly Bell, Rogers and Telus has.

Does the CRTC do that? I know the telecoms did but that doesn't sound like the CRTC.

Telus is making some progress there

https://about.telus.com/community/english/news_centre/news_releases/blog/2015/06/19/test

6 years, $1 billion and that's it? That's the best they can do? Google does like 6-7 times that and offers very low prices.

 

[narcosis219]

Telus is making some progress there

https://about.telus.com/community/english/news_centre/news_releases/blog/2015/06/19/test

I doubt you'll see much movement on optic fiber internet until Google Fiber decides to come to town. Even then, I well imagine the CRTC is going to start up it's 'protect Canadian interests' propaganda machine the minute they do, like any other telecom company wanting to come into Canada and threatens the monopoly Bell, Rogers and Telus has.

Vancouver too:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/telus-upgrade-vancouver-1.3254403

Bell is doing the same stuff over out east

 

[Divvy]

The ISPs are all laying down fiber. You can buy gigabit finer speeds from bell right now in select areas.

This situation is a complex one. The telecom companies are investing a huge amount of capital in their networks, which they have to make a return on. This also comes with a lot of risk. If they gave super cheap access to wholesalers who are able due to low costs and regulatory loopholes to undercut the ISPs then they wouldn't make the return to justify the investment allocated or the risk.

What I think should happen is that the network and the sales force should be split and everyone gets access to the network. Then the network gets a cost of capital and return on equity and you're off to the races.

Government should lay down the fibre and sell usage of it to ISPs.

Then they'd actually have to compete on price and services, instead of nothing.

 

[pestul]

Bell Aliant is rolling out Gigabit Fibre out east. It seems like I'm getting free speed bumps every few months.

 

[MercuryLS]

I'm moving into a new town house soon. Should I sticj with tek savvy or is there some other companies I should be looking at? I'm moving to oakville if that matters at all.

 

[Silver Arrows]

Does the CRTC do that? I know the telecoms did but that doesn't sound like the CRTC.

.

I wouldn't be surprised if they did under Harper.

 

[orochi91]

I'm with Teksavvy, there pretty damn good.

50mb down @ 400gb per month for $67; did "Zap the Cap" a couple times when I went overboard a couple months with all the downloading and streaming lol

They've come a long way from the early years, where they would drop connections constantly.

Bell was charging me ~$85 - $99 per month for 25mb download speed and unlimited cap, so I saved quite a bit of money by switching to Teksavvy.

 

[TouchMyBox]

I wouldn't be surprised if they did under Harper.

But wasn't it Harper's government who is responsible for moving away from blocking foreign investment after they almost really screwed over wind mobile?

The rules as I understand it now are that any company can come in and build out a network, but they can't buy their way into owning greater than 10% market share, and they would be forced to grow past 10% naturally.

I'm with Teksavvy, there pretty damn good.

50mb down @ 400gb per month for $67; did "Zap the Cap" a couple times when I went overboard a couple months with all the downloading and streaming lol

They've come a long way from the early years, where they would drop connections constantly.

Bell was charging me ~$85 - $99 per month for 25mb download speed and unlimited cap, so I saved quite a bit of money by switching to Teksavvy.

Yeah, I've been super happy with them. It's just a bit stressful that every few years Rogers and Bell try to fuck them out of business and we have to wait on the CRTC to force robellus to stop being jerkwads.

It's also fun to see the guys who I'm assuming those "Regulatory Recovery Fees" (lolol) go to pay some pretty mega salaries to sweat when things aren't going their way when nobody is convinced that a gigabyte costs more than gold. I have to admire the balls on these companies to make consumers directly pay for the lobbying to ensure that their service is as shitty as possible.

 

[Stet]

TekSavvy is doing what they can. I don't blame them for the changes and at least they're open about it. Either way Canadian telecoms are a mess.

 

[IISANDERII]

Maybe not specifically relevant to non-Canadians, but what is really interesting here is the information on the policy and how much they chose to disclose.

http://teksavvy.com/en/why-teksavvy/policies/legal-stuff/internet-traffic-management-practices

TekSavvy is implementing a "Shared Internet Resources Policy." I'm going to highlight some interesting points and provide a little commentary.

Let's skip with the preamble and go right into their reasoning:



First thing to note is that TekSavvy has a "zap the cap" programme:



They also do not count any traffic between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m. toward your cap. I set up Steam to only download updates after 2 a.m. I've saved 50 gigs this month from that, which would have otherwise gone toward my 400 gig cap.

So those are a couple of things this ISP does in order to lower congestion.

What is very interesting to note in the quote above is them listing the wholesale price of bandwidth.

This is a glimpse into how "wholesale" internet providers are being charged now with the recent Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) ruling in July.



I've been reading news articles on this, but it's real "inside baseball." In a nutshell, how the large TelCos charge the "wholesalers" for usage on their lines has changed.



So they are now prioritising real-time services (skype, netflix) and will shape peer-to-peer (torrents, game downloads) down, based on usage. So the occasional 50 gig game download should be quick, while the power-user downloading blu-ray rips all the time should have their bandwidth throttled. What is important to note is that you can opt out of this traffic shaping for a 5.00 dollar monthly fee.



This seems like it's happening in conjunction with the CRTC ruling. Notice how it only effects some service providers at first. Clearly Rogers and Videotron are aggressive with the new pricing model. Which is interesting, because from the comments in news articles, Rogers spokespeople dislike the CRTC ruling, and TekSavvy lauded it. Maybe someone with a deeper technical understanding can chime in.



This is really interesting. Unlimited users will be forced into the traffic shaping policy. Those with caps can opt out.



They're also killing "zap the cap," which allowed people on capped plans to get "effectively unlimited" service by accepting a 2/3rds speed reduction during the last 4 hours of the day. Instead they will be dropping the cost of their unlimited plan.



Now this is really interesting. It's a justification for net neutrality, arguing that they are simply prioritising "real-time" or streaming traffic over file downloads. It's a response to the rates at which they are charged for bandwidth on the telcos fiber, and an attempt to reduce bandwidth over their networks.

The rest of the post is on privacy, how this effects people running mail servers etc. and excerpts from the telcos on how their traffic management policies are imposed on wholesalers (which is interesting so I'll paste it here):

Thanks for all this, I'm with teksavy and use zap cap. Will read it more in depth later.