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.]

A story in Wireless Week talks about the view of some folks that wireless carriers could become more like Amazon, selling all shapes and sizes of digital products.

Carriers now support downloads, streaming video, SMS, mobile payments and more. This expanding mobile ecosystem has prompted carriers’ billing service providers to get ready for a future where their carrier clients transform from basic technology service providers into digital retailers.

Will the carriers actually put these products onto your phone bill or will they simply facilitate retailers connecting to conventional banking and credit cards?

When the phone bill comes at the end of the month, will consumers remember that the charges include the movies, music and other products that they clicked on, or will they focus on the big number next to the words “Pay This Amount”?

Rogers has announced a significant upgrade to the speeds on its mobile wireless network with the evolution to HSPA+ technology. Beginning in the greater Toronto area, Rogers mobile customers will have access to download speeds of up to 21 Mbps, beating many wired internet access services.

Rogers is the first wireless provider in North America and only the sixth carrier in the world to launch HSPA+ at peak speeds of 21 Mbps, putting Canada on top of the world in technology and innovation and once again, bringing leading-edge technologies to Canadian consumers first.

Rogers will offer next generation Rocket sticks that can take advantage of the new speeds.

In the past week, Rogers Wireless has made a number of announcements that should continue to maintain its leadership – wholesale services to Videotron, Manitoba joint venture and with this announcement, an ability to roll out a serious mobile-based broadband service across the country that can compete with wireline services.

Less than 2 years ago, Rogers became the first carrier in North America to launch 7.2 Mbps service, advancing on its April, 2007 launch of Vision services, also a North American first.

There is more to competition than just pricing. With these investments in innovation, Rogers is signalling that its approach will be to continue offering world beating services to Canadians.

Relevant to yesterday’s posting, Rogers’ advanced 21 Mbps HSPA+ network is powered by Canadian innovation, developed by Ericsson in Montreal.

The Canadian nationalists are coming out of hiding, expressing concern about the loss of our national icon, Nortel, to those evil foreigners from Ericsson. Our governments had earlier turned their backs on Nortel as we invested in other Canadian firms like, ummmm, General Motors.

Now that the first Nortel asset auction has been completed, we are hearing that the Ontario government wants Ottawa to intervene to ensure that Canada’s national interest isn’t harmed.

These Ericsson folks aren’t the typical raiders. They aren’t Americans – they’re too busy bailing out … well, just about everything.

These are Swedes, Europeans no less.

People who play hockey and curling almost as well as we do. They eat herring three times a day. Herring isn’t really fish; it is what fish eats. Are we really going to let a treasure like Nortel fall into the hands of people who eat bait?

Before we allow Ontario’s Finance Minister to bash these folks too much, we should remember that Ericsson Canada is already one of the largest R&D; organizations in Canada, having invested more than $2B in Canada over the last 10 years. Of course, Ontario may consider that to be foreign investment, since Ericsson has such a large Montreal-based research centre. The Montreal labs have been around for 20 years, and represent one of the most important locations for Ericsson’s wireless network development, with more than 1500 people, Montreal is its largest R&D; centre outside Sweden.

Ericsson’s Montreal presence is important enough for Canada that it is featured on a government website that speaks about why companies should invest in Montreal as the:

Site of an ICT cluster built on the success of leading companies including Bell Canada, Electronic Arts, Ericsson Canada, CGI Group, IBM and Ubisoft International

Ericsson has been in Canada for more than 50 years and it has established deep relationships in this country. Ericsson executives participate in leadership roles in Canada’s R&D; and technology community, including our university engineering programs and CANARIE. Ericsson Canada’s CTO works with me on an advisory board for a University of Toronto’s Engineering graduate program.

Ericsson has another R&D; centre in Vancouver with more than 200 people; its Toronto headquarters employs 150 people.

I’ll be watching to see how we stick-handle our way around welcoming Ericsson investment in jobs in Montreal but discourage them keeping jobs in Ottawa. Our government’s response will have implications for the willingness of foreign companies to continue investing in Canadian jobs.

You could say I’ll be waiting with baited breath.

Update [July 28, 9:30 am]
Mark Evans writes about The Politics of Nortel’s Future this morning.

Sometimes I wonder if people really understand how peer-to-peer file sharing works. I listened to the CRTC discussions and I am following some of the “post-game analysis”.

Some of the rhetoric is just plain silly. Frankly, I think that there are a lot of outspoken people who might want to stop to listen and think before speaking out.

Like the call for a class action lawsuit that I read about on Tech Media Reports:

Yet Rogers disclosed that the upload speeds are actually identical for P2P traffic as they are both throttled equally. I find that extremely deceptive and can’t help but wonder whether they open themselves up to a class action lawsuit by Extreme subscribers who don’t get the service they think they do.

I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that before someone sues someone else, you need to have someone who experienced some harm.

Let’s go back to look at the first principles for what is meant by P2P file transfer in order to understand why there is no harm to the uploader.

Most consumers subscribe to an asymmetric internet connection. That means that it works faster in one direction than the other. For most of us, we receive information (download) faster than we can provide it (upload).

So, lets say that I want to download a file that you have. If I get it from you directly, the fastest I could possibly receive it would be based on your upload connection speed, regardless of my faster download speed. I might get frustrated because I subscribe to a fast download capability and I might even blame my ISP, even though the real problem is that the source of the traffic is what is slowing down the transfer.

So, either you could upgrade to a very expensive symmetric internet service, or I might find a creative way to get the file faster. Many of the types of files that I want to get from you (music, movies, courseware, etc.) are sitting on other computers, not just yours. So some bright minds thought that I could get the file twice as fast faster if I got a few pieces from you, and a few pieces from another person at the same time. After all, you may only be uploading at say, 640 kbps and my download capacity is 8 times that. So, if two is better than one, why not try to get 8 streams working at once, or even more.

The P2P file transfer software tries to find people from around the world who have the file that I want and gets them all to provide pieces so that we all max out the upload and download capacity of our pipes. And, as soon as I get the first piece of the file, my computer gets identified as a potential source for other people.

You get the picture.

The software, by design, is supposed to keep the pipes full.

When I use the peer-to-peer file sharing application, my purpose is to have access to files found on other people’s computers. While I may altruistically want to contribute the files on my computer to the global pool of access points, I am trying to imagine a situation where I have a real concern about whether other people can get my files at full speed versus any kind of upload constraints that are imposed by my ISP.

After all, by design, the software will find other computers that are also sources for the file, so the person downloading from me isn’t harmed either.

I understand frustration by users in having an ISP manage download speeds. That could add to the time it takes to receive the whole file. But even those more aggressive management techniques don’t impact real-time applications like streaming video or other bulk file transfer protocols such as direct point-to-point downloads, such as those used by most companies.

P2P file transfer is not how you send an email or send your photos or update your blog or file your term paper, or do real time streaming. What is wrong with managing P2P upload speeds to ensure the proper operation of the rest of the applications – for you and everyone else served by your ISP?