- Wednesday, 11 November 2009
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
Vietnam was the first TV war, this could be the first Internet war - Wall St Journal
Tele2 throttled P2P traffic
TELE2 HAS BEEN FINED €60,000 for throttling its P2P users without telling them.
After a year of investigating, Italy's AntiTrust watchdog found that users were signing up for ADSL with Tele2 because they were attracted by low prices.
However they found that if they tried to use P2P software their connection would drop to zero or end up extremely slow.
When it spoke to the press Tele2 denied that it was blocking P2P customers but was slowing down the network speed limit to make P2P impractical during certain times of the day.
What seems to have miffed the watchdog was that while the telco was making these statements to the media, they were not telling customers anything. It had not written what it was doing in a clear statement on its site or on a contract.
Antitrust lawyers called on telcos to make clearer contacts. According to the Repubblica newspaper other telcos are doing exactly the same sort of thing.
It also points out that €60,000 is small change to the company and if Tele2 had made it clear in its contracts then it would have been allowed to throttle to its heart's content. µ
L'Inq
Repubblica
Share this:
Share
It is far more likely that instead have been able to throttle to their hearts content if the clear terms were in there contracts, they would have no need to throttle at all since they would have very few contracts.
Now if they can do this for UPC in Amsterdam, they are real bastards... they are defenitly doing something to my P2P connection, can't get higher than 300kb/s on a single torrent while if i turn on encryption it goes up to 5mb/s... i'm on a 60Mbit connection...
"When it spoke to the press Tele2 denied that it was blocking P2P customers but was slowing down the network speed limit to make P2P impractical during certain times of the day."
They should investigate Virginmedia and BT's "traffic management policies". :D
Tele2 is also selling cable TV. That explains why the do not like P2P. I bet they also prohibit their customers from running services like a web server, either by terms or technical means.
The Tele2 execs probably celebrated the low fine with a 60,000EU bottle of wine.
There is only one way to fix the situation, and that is by breaking up all cable companies into true cable providers which run the cable, and by law completely separated companies which sell the services ontop of that.
It appears a lot of people don't understand that there is a huge divide, nay ravine, between broadband customers and their providers.
The ISP thinks it's OK to supply a service that they assume you will not use all the time. So they can oversubscribe it. (Hey just like getting a seat on a plane).
You the modern customer thinks it's OK to buy a service and then expect to use the service 24/7.
Whilst this gap-in-reality model worked 10 years ago when phone lines cost the customer per minute extra to the monthly ISP cost. It no longer works for 100% of an ISPs customers.
As time goes by the proportion of customers making full use of the service is creeping up and so the ISPs financial model is breaking.
The ISP may moan about this, it may put caps on its service as it tries to keep within its out-dated model. But ultimately it is broken.
The solution?
Easy. The ISP needs to charge their customers a modern realist price for the bandwidth the customer wants to use and the customer needs to get a dose of reality.
Yes, this means it will cost the customer more.