Bell Canada Inc. has submitted detailed information to regulators in support of its controversial practice of “throttling” certain types of Internet traffic, a move the phone company argues is necessary to relieve congestion on its network.
The phone giant claims to have offered proof to the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission that sniffing out and slowing down bandwidth-intensive peer-to-peer file-sharing protocols is necessary to prevent a serious degradation in Internet service for some 700,000 users within less than a year.
While Bell acknowledges the “most logical solution” to fix network congestion is building additional capacity, Mirko Bibic, Bell’s chief of regulatory affairs, said doing so would be uneconomical since much of it would go unused during non-peak periods.
