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.

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Torrent, BitTorrent, P2P, Internet, ISPs