Wireless Nomad, the small Canadian ISP that we profiled last year, has now stepped into the network neutrality debate (and we would expect nothing less from an ISP that was co-founded by a former EFF activist). The company has filed papers with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission asking that Bell Canada, which has begun using deep packet inspection to throttle all peer-to-peer traffic between 4:30pm and 2am, be forced to stop its practice. According to the filing, Bell "cripples Internet access for those communications by reducing their speed by approximately 90 percent" and "unduly impairs legitimate communications such as encrypted sessions."

Bell has been using such traffic shaping techniques on its own network since last year, but in March 2008, it expanded its filtering to encompass resellers of its Internet service—even when those resellers explicitly offered neutral connections to subscribers.

The tactic has infuriated the community of small ISPs in Canada, most of which depend upon line-sharing provisions to stay in business. Bell's action has removed one of the key ways in which the ISPs can differentiate themselves from Bell's own service (price is the other big one). When news of the move leaked out, the Canadian Association of Internet Providers filed a complaint with the CRTC, Canada's telecoms regulator, asking that Bell be forced to remove the filters from its wholesale service.

To read the article, click here [1].