Telus has taken the exceptional stand as a Canadian carrier not to throttle its clients. It is one of only two Canadian telcos (the other is Videotron) that have chosen the path of net neutrality – while Bell, Rogers and Shaw practice the controversial Internet traffic control method known as throttling.

So why buck the Canuck trend? Even the North American trend? Is it in the name of democracy and a level playing field perhaps? Not exactly.

Client privacy plays a key role, but that reveal comes later.

‘Everything is very much consumer-driven,’ according to Telus’ SVP, government and regulatory affairs Michael Hennessy. He says Telus has yet to hit such a capacity crunch that it would even consider throttling fortwo reasons.

First and foremost, he says, ‘We define it as a flat network so traffic load is distributed and we’ve been putting a lot of investment into upgrading it. So big reason number one is that we continue to invest in the network,’ which goes hand in hand with what he calls ‘right pricing’ of customer plans with reasonable limits.

‘The problem is the more we compete on unlimited plans, the more you encourage wasteful behavior,’ Hennessy maintains. ‘They’re attractive for consumers because you don’t hear a clock ticking, but they’re not very useful if you start to worry about a capacity crunch. So if you do some right pricing, you can avoid a lot of that situation.’

Dig a little deeper and Hennessy reveals that the second reason Telus refuses to throttle is effectively that privacy is considered a priority for Telus’ clients.

‘We’re one of the few carriers in North America that’s never got into deep-packet inspection,’ he explains, saying the company has never even invested in the equipment that would allow it to ‘block that instead of that.’

‘Ultimately, it’s not a good idea to do that. There are more effective ways of doing it that don’t raise the ire of your customer,’ he maintains, pointing again to usage-based pricing.

Hennessy doesn’t directly link the two, yet says that Telus now handles as much as 70% of the videoconferencing market, implying privacy may be a factor.

The Telus exec also says that as consumers become ‘their own programmers [with] YouTube downloading and all that stuff,’ that eventually, one can ‘run into a capacity crunch.’ Again he says the solution is investing, but warns that balance is required.

‘Ultimately you can spend billions to add more capacity, but there’s a limit to how much you can charge, and particularly in a competitive market,’ he warns.

Unlimited plans also raise the question of why do some people need so much capacity, which leads to the raging issue of how to control Internet piracy.

Hennessy still says DPI is not the answer, but instead suggests that content copyright is the solution.

‘If we totally ignore piracy and copyright issues because it’s politically convenient, particularly in a minority government… then I think we all lose in the end,’ he says emphatically. ‘At some point we have to seriously address how are people going to continue to invest in [content] if there’s no opportunity to protect that intellectual property.

‘That doesn’t mean that you need Draconian copyright laws, because they don’t work,’ he elaborates. ‘It’s something everybody should be working on, because at the end of the day, if there’s massive erosion because of piracy, then there’s less investment in long-form content, and the quality overall of the content that’s left is lessened, or you’re subject to control of really mass media content by a very small number of parties that have a particular format or ideological preference,’ he warns.

Hmm. Did a carrier just warn a news hound about big brother? Pretty unique.

Hennessy quickly veers back towards the land of the familiar when queried if Telus uses ‘economics’ to make most decisions about its core businesses and clients.

‘Primarily we’re in the business of carriage, wireless, telephone, Internet and we are increasingly in the business of content distribution, and we’re in the content value-added services like e-Health. I think about 70% of all videoconferencing is also now on the Telus network. But at the end of the day, we’re privately run, shareholder-driven, and you don’t make big investments unless you think you can get a return on it.’

So, where can the industry expect to see the next big battle?

‘The bigger problem I can see coming along is going to be on the wireless networks because spectrum is much more limited. Suddenly networks that were originally built for voice, and had lots of spectrum to support that, are now being turned into networks to support video. And video feed can be 40 times what voice consumes, so that’s the bad news.’

How does Telus plan to handle that? Stay tuned.