Total Telecom: Throttling Rampant in Europe

While the CRTC has recently reprimanded Rogers for continuing to implement the discriminatory use of P2P throttling, the pro-Internet community in Europe is calling for tough action from regulators to confront widespread throttling practices. Article by Nick Wood for Total Telecom: European operators are regularly using traffic management techniques that throttle or block access to certain online services, claimed the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) on Monday.

The industry body, comprised of representatives from the EU's 27 national telco regulators, published preliminary findings from a report it submitted to the European Commission earlier this month that collected data from a 400-strong sample group of fixed and mobile operators, consumer organisations, industry associations and a number of private individuals. The full report is due to be released this quarter.

"The most frequently reported traffic management practices are the blocking and/or throttling of peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic, on both fixed and mobile networks, and the blocking of voice over IP (VoIP) traffic (mostly on mobile networks, usually based on specific contract terms)," said BEREC, in a statement. "When blocking/throttling is implemented in the network, it is typically done through deep packet inspection (DPI)." Read more »

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Read more at totaltele.com

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