In response to consumer complaints posted in the company's official forum, Canadian ISP Bell Sympatico has admitted that it uses bandwidth throttling technologies to impose limitations on peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing during peak hours. This revelation is further evidence that net neutrality—the principle of equal treatment for all traffic through a network—is eroding.

"[W]e are now using a Internet Traffic Management to restrict accounts that are using a large portion of bandwidth during peak hours," a Sympatico forum administrator wrote in response to a user complaint. The forum administrator also provides a list of affected applications, which includes BitTorrent, Gnutella, Limewire, Kazaa, and other widely-used P2P applications. Readers of Broadband Reports had been suspicious for some time that the ISP was throttling traffic.

"Bell Sympatico has launched a solution to enhance the online customer experience and improve Internet performance for all our customers during peak periods of Internet usage with the introduction of Internet Traffic Management," another response says. "There continues to be phenomenal growth of consumer Internet traffic throughout the world, and Bell is using Internet Traffic Management to ensure we deliver bandwidth fairly to our customers during peak Internet usage."

The rhetoric issued by Sympatico in defense of bandwidth throttling resembles Comcast's recent defense of similar practices. The ISPs claim that bandwidth throttling leads to a better Internet experience for customers. As numerous advocacy groups have pointed out in response to such claims, bandwidth throttling and other kinds of discriminatory content filtering fundamentally change the nature of the Internet to the detriment of consumers. Selectively blocking transmission of content hardly constitutes a valid means of improving the Internet experience.

The bandwidth throttling practices used by these companies are made more egregious by the secrecy surrounding the precise nature of what gets blocked and when. In the official Sympatico forum, the company representatives who admit that bandwidth throttling is occurring are declining to respond to questions about the extent of the throttling or the conditions that Sympatico uses to determine whose connectivity to degrade. Some ISPs, like Comcast, actively punish employees for disclosing such information to the public.

P2P is thought to make up between 30 and 50 percent of all Internet traffic. Many consumers who pay more for faster Internet connectivity do so because they want faster P2P service. The increasing number of foreign and domestic Internet service providers that use bandwidth throttling is sure to provide ammunition to those who believe some sort of government intervention will be necessary to ensure that broadband subscribers have full and unfettered access to any application, any site, any time.