Bell Opens Video Download Store, but Continues to Throttle BitTorrent

Bell, one of the Canadian ISPs known for its BitTorrent throttling practices, launched its very own video download store this week. So, efficient BitTorrent is throttled for being a bandwidth hog, but customers are still able to download movies at full speed – as long as they use Bell’s service, that is.

bell In their recently launched video download store Bell offers movies to own for $4.99, and rentals for $1.99.

At the same time however, customers of BitTorrent’s video store – a direct competitor to Bell’s store – and BitTorrent users in general see their traffic being throttled. Why? Bell says there is not enough bandwidth available.

The claim that there is not enough bandwidth to go round is suspicious to say the least, and Bell’s response to this data crisis is even more puzzling. Instead of investing money in their network capacity, they simply slow down the connections of their subscribers while ignoring the source of the problem.

To top it off, Bell decided to launch a competing video download service. So while they throttle customers using the efficient BitTorrent protocol because they supposedly generate too much traffic, Bell launches a bandwidth-hogging download store of their own. Not only does this seem unfair to their own customers, it also negatively affects other video services that base their business model on BitTorrent.

The throttling efforts by Bell and other ISPs actually hurt companies such as BitTorrent Inc and Vuze. These companies both offer products that depend on BitTorrent and they become pretty much worthless when BitTorrent traffic is throttled.

Since Bell now has its own video store, the ISP is actively degrading the service their BitTorrent based competitors offer. That is, Bell users will probably not choose a video download service based on BitTorrent because they can get only a few kilobits per second when the network is “busy”.

Instead of investing in more Internet gateway capacity and peering agreements, Bell instead chooses to launch a video store. Perhaps it’s time for Bell and other ISPs to think ahead – BitTorrent is not going away and there will only be more ‘bandwidth hogging’ services in the future.

Or maybe this just an anti-competitive move by Bell?

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Crandom

It seems to me that copyright is a good thing: http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSPAT25021620080522

“All exam papers have a copyright statement dealing with source material on the back page,” an OCR spokeswoman said. “This one in particular had more detail than is usual in a music paper.”

My win.
Anonymous

Is it just me or does Torrentfreak give pretty sensationalist articles in general. Not that I mind reading them but isn’t it the same thing as what the RIAA etc. do? Write emotional and one sided articles. Only Torrentfreak is agreeing with us.
JD2

Perhaps – but how do you want them to report this story? That bell is throttling users and opening a store of thier own which uses more bandwidth than what they claim 5% is using? How else do you report this story? It has a bad side and a good side – the good side is that Bell is getting ready to be slammed on the mat by many!!!
Anonymous

as a BEll customer I have noticed I am not being throttled anymore while friends of mine using so called “third-party re-sellers” like Teksavvy are. It seems Bell has changed its throttling policy to only affect its rivals and not its own customers
SteSteez

Wouldn’t this be deemed illegal if they are “damaging” a rival service?

sorry but I want to believe this article but right now I don’t, as if this was true bittorrent would be suing them for damages, as would customers for not providing a service they signed up for.
FreeTheScene

http://www.FreeTheScene.net
Twitter

Sue the bastards. Seriously sue their asses. http://fucktwitter.com
Crandom

@5 “Wouldn’t this be deemed illegal if they are “damaging” a rival service?”

What do you think M$ have been doing with IE7 and killing competition like Linux for years. It truly disgusts me that they can do such a thing.
fuzzypig

As the old adage goes….”Do as we say, not as we do!”. Fecking hipocrites!
Captain Scarlet

“customers are still able to download movies at full speed – as long as they use Bell’s service, that is.”

The ISP’s would love all their customers to exclusively use their [insert brandname]network when downloading or uploading to the ‘web’.

That way they can save bandwidth and guarantee d/l and u/l speeds whilst also making a profit from selling their customers services such as downloadable movies etc…

“Or maybe this just an anti-competitive move by Bell?”

H’mmm [scratches head]
Odin

JD2

I just think there is a huge slant on this site and they sometimes ignore or shade facts to serve their purposes. It is much like most other news sites where you have to cut through a bunch of crap to glean the few facts from the article.
I read this and arstechnica. I find this site has a lot of emotion and logical fallacies while ars is more of a factual reporting. Reading both tends to paint a good picture. But I think it is doing a disservice to readers who read only this because many times things are misrepresented.
Back on topic I do think that Bell is doing some very shady things and I am very happy that the Canadian government is calling them out with very pointed questions.
TD123

Here’s an idea to all your ISPs out there:

SHUT THE FUCK UP AND SPEND MORE TIME UPGRADING YOUR SERVERS.

Because i’m honestly not interested in your stupid hypocritical statements.

So do me a favour, and go jump off a bridge you dipshits.
Carl

They deserve to die, ***ing dumb move, that totally prove that bell doesn’t care about customer.
Ben

Torrentfreak has no obligation to appear impartial and they don’t attempt to hide it which is the important thing. Most of us are here because we agree with the “side” we have taken. I don’t think there is anything sensational about this article. The poster draws some conclusions from the presented facts and that’s all. Bell’s actions ARE damaging other services and it doesn’t matter if it appears to be indirect or not. It would be naive to say that Bell is not being anti-competative.
Zpoon

I’ve been using Bell for a long time now, and I’ve never noticed any ‘throttling’. I’ve always hit my max download speed of 250kb/s with torrents, which is also my maximum http download speed.

Quite interesting though. :p
Hank

As a “victim” of Bell’s throttling, I am happy that they opened this store because this is one more argument for the other DSL resellers for the CRTC
Anonymous

shape shifting ftw
Murphy’s

Conform, sheeps! Get with the program.
Mr.Afghanistan

LoL
Bittorrent is free, so who will go and buy movies LoL
specially no one will buy TV releases.

Downloading Free is better then pay 10 cent or 1$ :)

I personally myself will never buy from them and download, why not use mininova :)
randomguy88

Funny they have bandwidth for Video on demand but not enough for BT even tho there is countless legit uses for it such as using it as a PVR recorder for TV shows you miss well say WORKING.
Carl G.

19 Â.

But bittorent.com and Vuze are two paying service using the bitorrent technology !
Murphy’s

Are you paying? Next!
Anonymous

> “Torrentfreak has no obligation to appear impartial and they don’t attempt to hide it which is the important thing. Most of us are here because we agree with the “side” we have taken.”

People should also stop thinking TF is a news site or something. It’s a blog.
Murphy’s

You mean this is not the BBC?

:(
chuckmtl

Bell = Hypocrits
zarathustra

@ #2 – That’s why it’s called “TorrentFreak”, you dolt.

@ #8 – Yeah – & they were sued for it, too. Google “Microsoft IE Anti-trust” for more information…

@ #17 – ITYM ‘packet shaping’, n’est-ce pas?

@ #22 – Kiss my shitty ringpiece. No offence…

HTH,
HAND,
kthxbai.
Jonathan

This is so hypocritical of Bell! Here I am paying big bucks for high-speed from my ISP (whose not Bell) but because all these smaller 3rd party ISP’s signals are carried via Bell’s fiber optics systems, Bell feels it has the right to deliberately slow down my Internet speed! But now Bell is exclusively offering its customers “pay what you get Internet speed”, if you pay for 5 Mbs up and 800 Kbs down, you won’t be throttled! Yah well, I’m paying $40/month for that speed, I’m not with Bell thus Bell has absolutely no legal right to inhibit my Internet speed–period! This situation epitomizes what Bell is, a monopoly. Hey–look at me, I own all the telephone lines so I can do anything I want! Bell needs to be destroyed! That’s what happened in the U.S. with Ma Bell who owned all the telephone lines and was forced by law to broken up. The same thing needs to happen here in Canada, Bell can’t own all the telephone lines, their monopoly needs to be legally abolished!
batman

TorChat has file transfer now!

http://code.google.com/p/torchat/

TorChat is a peer to peer instant messenger with a completely decentralized design, built on top of Tor’s location hidden services, giving you extremely strong anonymity while being very easy to use without the need to install or configure anything.

TorChat just runs from an USB drive on any Windows PC. (It can run on Linux and Mac too, in fact it was developed on Linux with cross platform usability in mind from the very first moment on, but the installation on other platforms than Windows is a bit more complicated at the moment)

Tor location hidden services basically means:
Nobody will be able to find out where you are.
If they are already observing you and sniff your internet connection they will not be able to find out
what you send or receive (everything is end-to-end encrypted)
to whom you are sending or receiving from
where your contacts are located

Howto: Chat anonymously over the Tor Network with Torchat and Ubuntu!
http://www.ubuntu-unleashed.com/2008/03/howto-chat-anonymously-over-tor-network.html

*********************
But I still suggest a fork of the tor network for p2p trackers & file transfers, creating several networks
Quad

Overbooked network!! :(
steelcity

I am a Bell customer and they have been throttling their network for as long as I have been with them. Everyday without fail around 4:00pm EST my speeds will drop from over 400kbs to exactly 27 or 28kbps. Then I assume the actual “busy traffic” factor comes into play and they will drop even more bouncing around all evening but going no higher then 28. after midnight when they must release the throttle speeds climb back up again.

i am one of the rogue bell subscribers that still has unlimited bandwidth/mo. and if i change my package at all or go with another ISP i face a 60gb cap/mo or extra charges ensue. right now i average about 400gb and don’t care to pay over $100 for throttled internet. the bastards call all the time trying to sucker us into a new fancy this and that, but thankfully my g/f did a stint at the corporate office and warned me not to listen to them.

bell doesn’t care about their customers, they only want to sell you more services that you don’t need, they are forced to sell services to dying cancer patients if thats what it takes to hit their monthly quotas. miss one month, verbal warning, miss it two months bell drags you out of there gestapo style and for those who remain, you never even existed.

they don’t give a fuck about anything other then making more $ off of every last canadian citizen. they will fight voip to the bitter end and you can count on any move they make is ALWAYS to crush any and all competition.

i hate rogers even more but thats another story so i suck it up and just load up my downloads by night and during the day.

:-)
Pingback: Bell Continues to Throttle BitTorrent Traffic | Universe_JDJ's Blog
Hulk

OT:

Check out this new entry at wikileaks, documenting a new attempt on ThePirateBay, facilitated by the US administration and parts of the EU to circumvent the Swedish legislation:

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Proposed_US_ACTA_multi-lateral_intellectual_property_trade_agreement_(2007)
James

Guys.. For a while now people have been saying we need to take a stand against all this. Nows the time. There’s a Net Neutrality rally organized in Canada. I can’t stress how important this is. We have to fight for what we all want. I urge as many Canadians as possible to attend.

http://www.netneutralityrally.ca/

I hope this catches on around the world. Be there and be heard friends. Our internet is at stake here, seriously!
Anonymous

I have read recently that streaming videos (think YouTube) now represent roughly half the total bandwidth used on the Internet. Why target Bittorrent then?

I say it is because all of Bell’s customers look at streaming videos, including grandma and grandpa. It’s much easier to target a small segment of the population (people that use Bittorrent) and make them look like thieves.
BellSuxs

Current Bell Canada Enterprises management is incompetent and lame.

This is flying on the face of the damage they cause other independant ISPs (like Teksavvy, etc) by throttling their bandwidth (4PM to 2 AM, daily).

It should be noted that the videos being offered are also heavily wrapped in Microsoft based DRM – you won’t be able to play them as easily as torrent sourced ones. ;-)
Pingback: p2pvine.com
Slow down?

Yeah, Sympatico is apparently running low on bandwidth, which is why they’re running around calling people up offering them 7mbit service instead of 5mbit?? What they don’t tell you is this is metered to 60gb/month, rather than unlimited – meaning your connection goes faster, but you pay more.

What’s worse, in most areas their 5mbit service doesn’t run 5mbit because of line quality issues, so upgrading to this 7mbit service gives you no speed up – only a big bandwidth charge at the end of the month.

First and foremost, don’t fall for the scam – you can’t get the unlimited 5mbit service back once you switch! I saw one bill go from $45/month to $75/month in bandwidth charges!

Secondly, just why are they ostensibly upgrading our speed when they’re running low on bandwidth?? If it was all about the bandwidth, they’d be slowing down our lines and keeping the download cap the same. Sounds more like they’re trying to squeeze us for more money, plain and simple.
Anonymous

fuck bell, thats all i have to say
P!nk Pr!nce

Hmmmm actually I don’t think this is a bad thing! Come on $4.99 = Â£2.50 is pretty dam cheap for a film (I know you can get it free but come on guys!)
I defiantly don’t condone throttling but at least they are riding the wave not trying to dam it……totally =-P
dandin1

Pretty much everything to be said about Bell has been said in all the comments here and on other sites. It’s time to protest and change things. May 27th, Parliament Hill. be there. http://www.netneutralityrally.ca/
Q Laz-olicious

I think it should be made clear that Bell isn’t an Internet Service Provider (ISP) as such, it’s actually just a carrier of ATM-protocol bulk-data packets. Bell’s hardware normally would never touch IP, as the primary function of its infrastructure only deals with the transportation of low-level ATM-encapsulated data, which by no means encapsulates only IP packets.

ATM -> IP -> TCP/UDP -> P2P

Bell are just the Telco controlling the hardware that interfaces subscribers with the actual Internet Service Providers. They don’t do Internet:

You -> Bell -> ISP -> Internet

ISP here could be, for instance, ‘Sympatico’ which is Bell’s own Internet Service Provider subsidiary company, or a ‘third-party’ ISP like Teksavvy, who purchase access to Bell’s telecom infrastructure… the so-called ‘last mile’ connection that brings together subscribers with distant ISPs.

You -> Bell -> Sympatico -> Internet
You -> Bell -> Teksavvy -> Internet

So what you’ve got here is Bell, as the man-in-the-middle CARRIER service, introducing deep-packet inspection (DPI) hardware into its network in order to break open ATM data streams to look deep inside the various layers for the identification of IP, sub-protocols TCP/UDP, for identification of peer-to-peer protocols. This is akin to a postal service, whose job is to simply transport packages from A to B, actually opening and examining the contents of each package specifically for the identification, and further classification, of its content. Once the company can identify the content, it can control the content, as it can enact whatever rules it likes on it.

This is much more than typical ISP traffic-shaping, much more.

…

IMO fans of peer-to-peer protocols, in particular BitTorrent, should be concerned at this point because, really, all that’s largely required to squeeze file-sharing out (significantly) at this moment in time is the implementation of DPI hardware into data networks such as Bell has done here. Now as it happens at the moment Bell are not playing that badly; they’re only limiting peer-to-peer traffic to >30KB/s during peak hours. They could, however, choose to really hammer file-sharing down via the implementation of a much-more strict policy if they want to.

Good luck getting around this if it happens (for the vast majority at least).
Christopher

“Wouldn’t this be deemed illegal if they are “damaging” a rival service?

Sorry but I want to believe this article but right now I don’t, as if this was true bittorrent would be suing them for damages, as would customers for not providing a service they signed up for.”

Haven’t you been reading the newspapers and blogs lately? Bittorrent HAS been going after these companies for this, in courts and in the lawmaking houses of different countries.
I can believe that Bell is doing this, a lot of OTHER companies are doing this as well and getting smacked for it in the United States and abroad.
Anonymous

although the throttling bit is a complete piece of crap, at least their offering a chance to get movies, 5 bucks for a movie isn’t bad, and if they get a good selection it might not be to bad a service.

and the world is run by hypocritical corporations.
Bubba Icecream

They do this because they discrmintatin aginst all of us gay downloaders.. We gay people must fiight them!
Pingback: » bell Continues to accelerator BitTorrent traffic yanns
Nigol

“Wouldn’t this be deemed illegal if they are “damaging” a rival service?”

This is typical of Bell. For Example, with Bell Mobility, you can’t use your own MP3 for your ringtones, you have to buy theirs. Or you can’t use Google Maps or other Maps program that support GPS location in you phone, the GPS is inaccessible by the program. Unless you pay 5$/month for theirs, when you could have for free something much better.

And right now we the customer don’t have any alternative for an ISP. The best there was were 3rd party ISP, like tekksavy. But right now they aren’t worth it. And Cable?? They are even worse than Bell (WOW 20Gb per month download, yes your the fastest but also more expensive).

Well we Canadian will just go back to dial-up instead, or go back to the Dark Age instead. Maybe a new Smoke Signal IP Protocol will do the trick?

Just a trick, Bell doesn’t throttle Usenet traffic!!! Yet…
Techman

@steelcity…I am in the exact situation as you are. I also feel the same way about Rogers! One thing that no one has mentioned is that even though Bell is selling movies on line, you can only watch them in Bell’s own proprietary player. You can not watch them in the viewer of your choice nor can you burn them to watch them on your stand alone player. Like most people I have a day job, and as such I no longer have access to the ‘high speed Internet’ that I am paying Sympatico for, as my speed is being throttled during the evening. I am also one of the few remaining ‘rogues’ with unlimited bandwidth and if I switch to another provider I will lose this benefit. Hopefully the powers that be will step in and declare Bell’s current throttling practices both unethical and illegal. Then it will open the way for a class action suit against them for, at the very least, breach of contract. I am not receiving the service I am paying for and it’s time something is done about it.

It’s amazing that when Microsoft tries to add features to their O/S, everyone and their cousin gets in line to sue them. But when large ISPs cut services that we are paying for no one does a damn thing about it.
starcarpet

Bell isn’t throttling it’s own customers as hard as the third party sellers because they want to keep us from fleeing to them once our contracts are up. Bell was a monopoly in this country for decades, are we really surprised that they continue to behave as though they sill are.
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Jerome

I am a user of a third party ISP (radioactif.com) and my speed is limited at 30k/s every day (approx. between 18h and 1h). But at least I have no transfer limit.

Radioactif also provides unlimited cable internet but it’s twice as expensive (the same-priced package of the cable company has a 100GB limit). They told me that Videotron does not throttle bittorrent yet.

I might switch soon.
rEaLiTy

Fuck bell.

Their throttling has already convinced me to move forever to a different ISP when I'm done university.

Bell -> keep this up, and you'll REALLY push away our generation. Our payed bandwidth is OUR turf. If you can't provide it, YOU are shit.
Piss off bell

I can say how this is an issue with bell. What is worse that I have not really torrented at all. I torrernt the odd DRM crack when a legit game I bought does not work do to the copy protection but even then we are talking a small file.

I was offered this xbox ellite deal which against my better judgment I went for. I asked them all the particulars and I was actually lied too. I asked about a cap t hey told me that they don't cap for that bundle. They also told me the 360 ellite was supposed to be repaired from them.

Trying to get the console fixxed they sent me this terms of service thing that mentions they don't service the console and then I found out that the little buggers capped me. I even had a chat transcript showing how over live chat they told me there was no cap they held me to there stupid contract even though I was downright lied too.

Then the other day even though I never changed surfing habits seen a overage charge for 40 frigging dollars when there is no way I even used 60GB. If I went over it shows how lame and unreasonable there cap is.

They also black listed me one month saying I had P2P traffic when I have a legit game that uses P2P for online it has nothing to do with downloading music for free. But they still called me a dirty filthy pirate just the same.

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Bell Opens Video Download Store, but Continues to Throttle BitTorrent

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