What Else is Bell Inspecting?
The other shoe has dropped in the on-going outrage against Bell. In addition to pissing off its resellers by degrading their service, it looks like some folks also believe that Bell is spying on them.
See, Bell has a bit of a problem. They told their customers they could have ‘Unlimited Internet’, but in reality what they meant was ‘Unlimited unless you download more than we might like‘. So Bell is now shaping peer-to-peer traffic using deep packet inspection to figure out what is torrent traffic and so on. This is why, if you like downloading and are a Bell customer, your rates slow to a crawl at certain times of the day. Worse, they are doing it to resellers too, meaning even if you are not a Bell customer, there is a good chance you are still being throttled (read the second link above). Only Internet service providers with their own equipment in the Central Office are immune to this. This means in Stratford, where I am, the only companies that can provide a Bell-free Internet experience are CygNet and Wightman (correct me on this if necessary).
Don’t think going to Rogers will help you. They do it too, only worse.
Throttling downloads is bad enough, but deep packet inspection also lets them watch what you are doing with your Internet connection. They have the capability to know what websites you are looking at, what you download, the porn you watch, the dirty emails you send to your lover (they’ve always had that capability).
Being able to figure out what users are doing with their Internet is not a new thing, but Bell’s willingness to collect this data and act on it is what you should be worried about. If they are willing to use it to inspect and shape your downloads, what else are they interested in? Do you suppose they might tip off the cops because you just so happened to be reading about, I dunno, ANFO, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and the CN Tower all at the same time. Or maybe they want to sneak advertisements into the content you’re reading. They can’t do that, can they? Oh yes they can. They can and they will.
If I was a Sympatico customer, I wouldn’t be down with this at all. I’d dropping this company like a hot rock.
