I recently received an e-mail from my Internet Service Provider (ISP) asking its customers for help. Bell Canada is engaging in what many would consider bending the laws in order to allow itself to once again monopolise the telecommunication industry at the level of Internet service. It's come to the point where the only people who can have an effect on the government's decision is the people of Canada. This is a matter of that can be likened to net neutrality and has important implications for Canadians and citizens of other countries with widespread internet access. First, here's some background information (skip ahead if it's not news to you).

My ISP, TekSavvy Solutions Inc., is like many of available in Canada, a company that rents bandwidth from Bell Canada and then sells it to consumers. These ISPs have no choice, but to rent the bandwidth unless they decide to put up their own telephone lines because Bell Canada officially owns the network infrastructure. Unless these independent companies decide to set up their own networks, which needless would be an incredibly expensive and lengthy undertaking, which most of these smaller companies would not have the funds to do.

Bell acquired much of its subscribers through the fact that for a while it was given complete monopoly by the government for long distance calling. It is my understanding that this allowed Bell Canada to spread across Canada mostly unchallenged by competition. Needless to say, this put Bell in a pretty good position; a good position its been able to maintain even without its monopoly since most subscribers in Canada still subscribe with Bell Canada for telephone and internet related services.

Now on to more pressing matters. As I mentioned, my ISP has requested assistance from its subscribers. This assistance isn't in the form of donations or anything, but simply in the form of a comment sent to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The CRTC has ruled that Bell Canada is within its rights to use bandwidth throttling. Bandwidth throttling is the restriction of the transfer rate over a period of time. The company argues that it will reduce network congestion, but it is more likely that they're attempting to shape the competition. What proof do I have that this is the case? Bell Canada reduced the bandwidth allocation to "wholesale" companies such as my ISP and others at the same time that it began to provide faster connections to its own subscribers. If the bandwidth throttling were really aiming to reduce the network congestion, Bell would not have begun to intensify the congestion with its own subscribers.

Non-Bell Canada users are therefore unfairly being subjected to a lower peer to peer (P2P) data transmission capacity simply because they have not chosen Bell Canada. It seems that Bell Canada is attempting to regain monopoly. This is a dangerous situation because it is well known that Bell engages in attempting to reduce peer to peer (P2P) data transmissions such as Torrents and file sharing programs like Lime Wire. In other words, by allowing Bell to do this we would be giving them more power to infringe upon other things such as net neutrality.

For more information on the complaints submitted by affected companies to the CRTC, take a look at this pdf file.

In order to support the wholesalers in their attempt, you may use the following steps as submitted by Rocky Gaudrault, the Chief Executive Officer at TekSavvy Solutions Inc.