Hi iSeal. I work for an ISP that sells consumer broadband. Being a small ISP, we resell dsl service on the incumbent telephone company's network, however the backbone connection is through another provider. Even during peak hours, the capacity of our backbone connection is not threatened. If it were, it would be our prerogative to increase our capacity in proportion to the usage requirements of our customer base. While some smaller companies may split 50mbps connections between a thousand users (though you'd probably only manage comfortably with 500 users), bandwidth becomes more cost effective to purchase in larger volumes, so if your customer base is large enough, you needn't worry as much about clogging the tubes. Now I'm not in any way opposed to traffic shaping. Whether we admit it or not, there have been traffic shaping rules in existence in networks for years. Be it an office increasing QoS on their VoIP lines, or an ISP ensuring that HTTP gets a little bit better treatment than SSL. The issue that has been faced lately by many smaller ISP's is the lack of transparency of the major carriers (i.e. videotron/bell etc) and their imposition of shaping rules on customers or resellers without any prior notice, and even in Bell's case, outright denying that there was any traffic shaping. At this point in time, Bell has yet to offer any evidence that their tubes are clogged. Given Bell's track record of not scaling their network as fast as their customer basis, it wouldn't surprise me if they had congestion at some points, however if this were the case, and it was not feasible to scale up their network accordingly, at the very least providing options with regards to traffic shaping would be at least somewhat of a sane thing to do. There is nothing inherently wrong with ISPs charging different rates for services with different levels of priority on their network. Why not charge $5 or $10 more per month for a non-throttled connection. In my experience, most power-users would be willing to pay for that extra kick, provided they are not being bullied by the incumbents...

Apparently, Videotron doesn't see that P2P is a way of eliminating network congestion. It is far more efficient and lest congesting than a direct client/server model. Pretend for a moment that I'm Trent Reznor. I 'could' release my album on line, stick it on a hosting server, and ask my millions of adoring fans to download it from me directly. But that would clock the tubes, specifically, those near my hosting server. OR I could let them download a tiny torrent file, and they can download my latest album from each other. Which sounds like it would cause more network congestion? With advancements of P2P, congestion problems are further solved as there have been a couple Torrent client plugins I've heard of that try to find peers geographically close to you, thus filling fewer tubes with your pron.

Eww... while reading the comments, I saw that you said you'd installed RT and I just about threw up in my mouth. Please do yourself a favour, and if you use RT, please make sure you have the latest version, and/or can tart up the interface to make it more pleasing to look at. Now let me please excuse that autonomic reaction and say it's based solely on personal experience using an ugly and disorganized implementation of RT. Secondly, while it might actually be very practical and useful as a ticketing system, a ticketing system isn't necessarily the direction timothy would want to go in. A operation ticketing system can be very useful (essential) for managing tasks, duties, escalations, follow ups, etc, but as far as documentation or communication is concerned, they don't tend to be structured in a way that gives the immediate response of a chat room. I agree with several previous posters in that perhaps a better approach would be to improve training procedures and documentation so that agents have access to the information they need rather than relying on a chat typed interface. I personally recommend mediawiki, as pretty much everybody on the planet knows how to use it, you'd want to have a more monitored or secure editing process.

What this doesn't change is that Gattaca was a truly awesome film.

Does this clause include Posted Items (that Facebook is now calling "Links")? i.e if I post an article on my wall, or perhaps a piece of music hosted elsewhere, is facebook claiming the right to redistribute and/or sell it at will? And if so, doesn't that contradict existing copyright laws?

Was aggressive behaviour linked to violent media and games in the same study that linked colon cleanser to losing those 10 pounds you can't get rid of with regular exercise?

Is it just me, or are the implications of this fiber cut being greatly exaggerated. I was able to traceroute to an IP in Iran with no problem. Perhaps the lights have gone out for a large portion of the population, but their local hosting services are still up. (and yes, I checked to ensure that the server was physically in Iran and not hosted elsewhere) It's my understanding that the goal of something like the Internet is to have no single point of entry, so if one major fiber goes out, you still have alternate routes in place.