Ouch Bell Canada Throttles Bandwidth Without Telling Resellers: Customer Service nightmare

The news floating around over the past 24 hours has been the news that Bell Canada has been “traffic shaping” aka throttling bandwidth on their DSL service.

Okay, this isn’t great, but okay it’s their pipe, right?  Close, but there is a twist, Bell Canada sells access to the pipe to other ISPs (Telus does the same thing) and neglected to inform the resellers of this little detail:

Up in Canada, it appears that Bell Canada has decided to start implementing traffic shaping features without letting its resellers know. That means that customers are discovering that their traffic is being impeded at times and their own ISP has no clue about it. And it’s blocking perfectly legitimate activities. In fact, one person points out that he’s having trouble downloading the show that the CBC is purposely offering on BitTorrent. Source: Techdirt: Bell Canada Decides To Throttle Traffic Without Telling Resellers

Love that Bell Canada blocked the CBC.  Like the CBC doesn’t have enough trouble getting people to watch their shows!

This has been making the tech news rounds about the perils of an non-neutral net (some coverage):

• Alec Saunders
• Michael Geist
• Arstechnica

My question is, with really very few access providers here in Canada, if Telus and Shaw (for example where I live) started doing this, what is a net pro to do?  I can’t afford getting a T1 to my apartment (like I’d really need that much bandwidth).  The only game in town is Telus or Shaw.

Should it be legislated that ISPs can’t do this?  Or that consumers have an option to get an “unthrottled” account (of course we’d probably pay through the nose for that)?

I’m not seeing any solutions on the horizon and with Bell’s little stunt, it’s really only the consumer and the reseller who is going to get screwed.