The final comments on internet traffic management practices have been submitted and it will take some time to go through all of them. One of the pieces got me thinking.
The discussion during the oral hearings with Professor Odlyzko of University of Minnesota found its way into the TELUS submission:
TELUS found it significant that Professor Odlyzko, speaking on behalf of the Campaign for Democratic Media, testified that peer-to-peer applications are “throttled” and the network “capacity controlled” in that portion of the University of Minnesota’s campus network that serves the student dormitories
I began to wonder about Canada’s universities. Not just their internet traffic management practices, but I also wondered whether we have any idea how many connections are being provided by these internet service providers.
When my kids were in student dorms, their universities charged a non-trivial fee for internet access service. This would appear to define them as internet service providers, but they don’t seem to be captured in CRTC lists since they don’t fit any of the categories – resellers, resellers of retail high speed internet, carriers, etc.
As a result, we may have tens of thousands of residential student subscribers to university-provided internet services that do not appear in counts of broadband adoption in Canada. With CANARIE as an unregistered carrier providing the backbone, it isn’t clear that we are fully capturing the connectivity picture in subscriber studies. Are the universities themselves counted as a business location? [On the other hand, I find it interesting that many school boards are registered carriers.]
Is it possible that the CRTC’s subscriber surveys – to be released shortly in its annual Communications Monitoring Report – may not provide a complete picture of Canada’s broadband internet connectivity?