Canada’s major ISPs have all turned over to regulators information about their use of deep packet inspection to throttle file-sharing apps, and one thing is clear: Canada’s Internet, like its beer, is straight-up cold-filtered.

Canada’s Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) famously decided last year to allow Bell Canada to single out P2P traffic for bandwidth throttling between the hours of 4:30pm to 2am. But even as it allowed a practice that the US Federal Communications Commission had just put the kibosh on, the CRTC also launched a much broader hearing on the entire issue of network neutrality.

With the ISP responses now in, it’s clear just how widespread deep packet inspection (DPI) has become at Canadian ISPs. It’s enough to make staff Canuck Frank Caron weep into his Molson’s.

Cold-filtered Internet

Christopher Parsons, a grad student at the University of Victoria (the Fightin’ Vikes!), has done yeoman’s work by combing through the numerous (and lengthy) ISP submissions to CRTC and compiling them into a set of tables (PDF). This makes it simple to compare responses across ISPs, and one of the obvious places to start is with filtering. So who uses DPI to throttle Internet traffic?

• Bell Canada: Yes, with a vengeance, but only P2P between 4:30pm and 2am
• Cogeco Cable: Yes
• MTS Allstream: No
• Rogers Cable: Confidential (but probably yes)
• Saskatchewan Telecom: No
• Primus Telecom: No
• Shaw: Yes
• Barrett Xplore: Yes, and also prioritizes VoIP
• TELUS: No
• Bragg: Confidential

The list above might make it seem that only half of Canada’s responding ISPs use filtering, but a bare list takes no account of size. Bell, Rogers, and Shaw are three enormous ISPs that together dwarf everyone else on the list, and all three appear to be throttling traffic.

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