In a letter sent dated December 19, 2011, Bell Aliant and Bell Canada have informed the CRTC that they'll stop the practice of Internet Traffic Management Practice (ITMP), commonly known as bandwidth throttling, on March 1st, 2012.

For the past several years, Bell has been slowing down peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application traffic between 4:30 p.m. and 2 a.m. because these programs were clogging the networks and negatively affecting time sensitive applications.

The companies say that over the last three years, their network capacity has increased significantly while P2P traffic, as a proportion of total traffic, has been declining which means the company can withdraw the shaping of P2P traffic on the companies' networks.

The Companies say they will continue to monitor traffic levels and take steps to ensure a good user experience for the majority of end-users served by their networks in accordance with their ITMP Framework.

Bell Aliant and Bell Canada will also be issuing a separate letter to their customers to ensure that they are aware of this change.

Readers should note that this only affects the speed of P2P speed during peak hours. A Bell Internet subscriber will still be subject to their monthly bandwidth cap which is the maximum amount of data they can download every month before they are charge for additional usage.

Discuss the changes in Digital Home's Canadian Phone and Internet forum.