Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

eng
c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
The problem is that providers in various service levels can interfere on the user’s
experience for other reasons, as we have seen. And this is aggravated by the fact that
we live in a situation of a virtual monopoly of the Internet provision. Consequently,
the “broadband” services available in Brazil fit among the most expensive in the
world, while their quality is low and their supply is restricted to a few cities — those
that attract the interest of the market.
To aggravate a situation already highly unstable for users, major Internet providers
also establish arbitrary limits for accumulated monthly traffic. Let’s go back
to our example and do the maths. We will assume that TeleVirtua, the operator in
our example, determines that this monthly limit is of 3.5 GB (three gigabytes and
a half). If the guaranteed download speed was 512 kb/s and the costumer used this
entire bandwidth to download a file, he could download it at 184 MB (megabytes)
per hour. As an example, a full CD with a new version of Linux is about 700 MB
— and at that speed the CD could be downloaded in just less than four hours. But
operators will add these 700 MB to this user’s accumulated traffic balance. If he
trespasses the limit of 3.5 GB, which is the equivalent to downloading five of these
CDs in a month, the operator sets its traffic shaper to reduce the download speed
available to that user until the end of the month. How big is this reduction? It is also
arbitrary, and it is not even mentioned in the contract. Five CDs may seem like a lot
if you only use e-mail and make visits to news web pages. But if you regularly use
multimedia services such as YouTube, Vimeo and many others, this limit can be easily
reached. A user is then suddenly unable to watch videos without interruptions,
or has to give up downloading large files. For arbitrarily reasons, what he had hired
is no longer valid until end the month.
The ISP estimates those values according to the “underbought” transit bandwidth
utilization and the total gross volume of use of all costumers — and then
reduces the speed for those who have the heaviest use, even if they have exactly the
same contract as the other ones. In this estimation, it may include both the peer-topeer
traffic between the user’s computer and the servers of its own content provider
— in our example, GloboTerra — and the national and international transit that is
used. The operator can even hide these criteria from its costumers.
Many argue that the solution would be to have all services of connection and
data transport offered under public regimen. I am not sure about this solution in
the case of local providers. And we should recall that fixed telephony in Brazil is
provided under the public regimen, but over the years, since the telecoms privatiza-
110