Two-tiered interweb – the other side

I wrote to my ISP to express my concern about the trend toward further monetizing access to the internet. At first they were bewildered:
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Dear Adrian Taverner:

Thank you for taking the time to contact us. We appreciate the
opportunity to correspond with you.

Upon reviewing the message post you have forwarded to us, after
consulting with our technical Internet supervisors, we are unclear as to
your exact concern. Shaw Cablesystems offers High Speed Internet access
which does not block or prohibit users from any particular Internet
websites.

If you have any specific questions or concerns, kindly elaborate or
specify your concern and we will be happy to address any queries you
forward to us. You may email us directly to eservice_vancouver@sjrb.ca.

Yours truly,
Shaw Cablesystems G.P.

Katy Ghaeni
Customer Relations, Vancouver

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Fair enough, I thought. I had assumed they would know what I was talking about. So I emailed back in more detail:

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I appreciate your prompt response to this issue, Katy. My concern isn’t so much immediate as it is anticipatory. I refer you to this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4552138.stm

This article is the latest in the past few weeks across various publications including Wired and the International Herald Tribune as popularized by Digg.com.

To come to the point my concern is that Shaw may see an opportunity for revenue in further restricting web access by its users, either in a two-tiered subscription service or in leveraging web companies to pay for un-throttled load times versus their competition when accessed through Shaw.

Shaw has introduced Digital Phone service, using VoIP technology. The tempting next step is to protect that investment by limiting use of services like Vonage or Skype. It may also be tempting to give preferred bandwidth to Yahoo, for example, if Google isn’t willing to pay a premium to reach your customers.

I directed my email to Investor Relations to make my position clear: I am content with my subscription. There are cheaper alternatives out there but I appreciate the level of service I receive from Shaw. If at some point Shaw moves to increase revenue by monetizing preferred bandwidth for specific sites or restricting access to competing services I would like it known that I would consider another ISP that maintained neutrality. I believe enough consumers share my opinion that there would be a significant impact to Shaw’s bottom line. This should be seen as an opportunity to win converts from Telus, rather than a chance to gouge consumers the same way as the other guy.

Thanks again for your attention. It really is appreciated.
– Adrian

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Hello, Adrian.

Thank you for taking the time to contact Shaw Customer Care. We
appreciate the opportunity to correspond with you.

We do appreciate you providing us with your feedback with respect to
Internet access, specifically its ideal, egalitarian nature. At Shaw we
strive to exceed customer expectations and have made a commitment to do
our best to provide unbiased, neutral access to the resources the
Internet provides.

You have raised some interesting points in your correspondance and we
want to take some time to clarify the position that Shaw and other
Internet Service Providers currently take with respect to tiering their
services.

A. Bit Torrent and Upstream Dependant Services (i.e. Skype):

Please note that torrents account for approximately 40% of traffic on
the internet these days. While we don’t throttle the speeds of this type
of activity, we do need to provide a certain quality of service for the
other services that operate on our network. Not to mention provide
balanced bandwidth allocation for other internet customers who are not
frequently downloading – and wish to enjoy the benefits of a broadband
connection. When overall traffic reaches extremes during peak times, we
need to ensure an equilibrium for all types of traffic exists – and
sometimes prioritizing packets is a necessary action to achieve this.

B. Vonage and Primus – 3rd Party Voice over Internet Protocal Services

All public Internet networks (this is not unique to Shaw) encounter
intermittent bandwidth shortfalls as bandwidth is consumed by low
priority applications such as Internet browsing and email. Bandwidth
availability is an important issue when using voice services because the
amount of bandwidth available at any given time can vary based on
Internet usage. For example, peer to peer music or video downloading
can create periodic loading at the expense of other Internet
applications. With Internet telephony, voice data is treated like
regular data. Under peak loads voice frames will be dropped equally with
data frames. Regular data, however, is not time sensitive and dropped
packets can be corrected through the process of retransmission. Dropped
voice packets, which are time sensitive, cannot be corrected in this
manner.

Shaw does provide customers with the option of subscribing to a
Quality-of-Service (QoS) enhancement to overcome delay issues that are
unique to Internet packet networks to ensure that customers are provided
with Internet telephony service at acceptable performance levels.

C. Blocking Access to Websites:

We do not and will not plan on blocking access to Web Content, with the
exception being specific services hosted by Shaw (i.e. Shaw Newsgroups).
Shaw High-Speed Internet makes every effort to provide robust, reliable
Newsgroup access using over 1.3 terabytes of mirrored disk space across
the country; all are dedicated to the Newsgroup service. Unfortunately,
there are limitations to what we carry and this generally means the
space is allocated according to popular demand.

At one point, more than 35% of total resources were being diverted to
accommodate bandwidth concerns surrounding ‘Warez’ newsgroups. This
resource drain was being consumed by only 2% of our customer base. We
redistributed resources to provide better overall selection of
frequently accessed text based newsgroups.

Further, Shaw Newsgroups will not be populated with threads that are
considered illicit and illegal – for example child pornography and/or
bestiality. The choice to manage newsgroup availability is common with
ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) today.

We believe the merits of this decision are justified, possible
shortcomings not withstanding.

If you need any further help or assistance, please consult our website
at http://www.shaw.ca or call us at 604.629.8888.

Thank you for choosing Shaw.

Matt
Customer Relations – Vancouver
Shaw High Speed Internet Service
van.help@sjrb.ca

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So aside from everyone appreciating everyone else, what are they actually saying? Obviously they don’t want to burn any bridges. They do admit to prioritizing packets for internet telephony for those that are willing to pay for it. And they place great significance on their Newsgroups traffic, which I’ve never been a part of and frankly didn’t know existed. They state that browsing traffic is “low priority” which must come as a surprise to the majority of users. And it’s gratifying to see torrent traffic is such a large percentage, though disappointing to see they officially frown on it. Seems to me they’d just do the smart thing and improve their service rather than complain about its failings.

So what are they actually saying? It looks to me like they’re hedging their promises, a little. But at least they are stating that they won’t restrict traffic for specific web sites, which is more than Telus, the other major operator in Canada, can say.

Am I placated? At the moment. I don’t think I’ll be getting screwed quite yet as far as my own requirements go. We’ll see how it all plays out over the next year or so.