This company's name is indeed a palindrome - most specifically the entity providing Internet service to the communities is. I work for the company that manages operates the network. We have been doing far north and otherwise remote earth station installation and Internet provision for many years now. Both backhaul and last mile. We've developed a fairly unique skill set around this exact challenge. We are northerners ourselves, and no one else was coming in and bringing Internet to these places for us, so we did it ourselves.

If you have a large enough dish and transmitter, on C-Band, and you have a satellite with the right coverage footprint, it's really no problem at all going beyond 70 degrees. The company I work for provides high speed Internet service into Grise Fiord, Nunavut at 76.4N on Anik F2. There is a limit of course, but 70 degrees is not it. It's really a question of throwing adequate resources at the problem (dish size, and power). It's also possible to get fairly respectable bandwidth out of C-Band if you are able to use higher MODCODs (as a result of having adequate dish size and transmitter power). You can get >90Mbps on a full transponder of C-Band with 16APSK 8/9.

We do have competition, it happens to be the incumbent telco who is also the only transit provider in our region. I could grumble about the frustrations involved when your provider is a regulated monopoly, and also your competition, but that is a discussion for another time.

We charge what the market can bear for our service. We are an old skool ISP from back in the days of yore, well before the world of consumer broadband. We understand our market and its unique nature very well. We can and do make provisions for customers who require or desire guaranteed service at a certain data rate for whatever traffic they want. We are talking huge $$$$$ to do that.

What people do with their connection is, technically speaking, my business. I don't want to be in the business of policing peoples' usage, really I don't. I don't even really see it as policing quite as much as I see it as traffic directing. I understand you see it differently. I don't mean this disrespectfully, but I do have to wonder if your idealism is tempered by a technical appreciation of how P2P traffic grows without bounds. Mine is.

We have a choice to make. I can give preferential treatment to protocols I recognise as as being less of the swamp-my-entire-network variety, or I can engineer to an extent where just the capital expenditure alone would increase the cost-per-sub into the hundreds of dollars a month, or I can just let P2P kill my network, piss off all my customers, including the 90% of subs who aren't P2P users, and go out of business. If it were really a black and white world, I would come down unequivocally on the side of information wants to be free. The world isn't black and white, it comes in shades of grey, and when it comes to Internet traffic, information may want to be free, but I can't allow it to be free enough to destroy my network and undermine the viability of our company.

So yes, I get to decide what rogue traffic is on my network. I am not forcing anyone to be a customer, but if you are my customer I promise to do my best to provide you with the best possible service I can. I take a lot of pride in it, and most of our customers are satisfied ones. We do outline that we shape traffic in our ToS, I don't think it is buried on page 4, it is probably buried on page 3 or something.

We try and act in good faith in our traffic shaping policies. If I am informed that I am failing to classify traffic fairly, I approach it with humility, and I rectify it. If someone really wants to get up my nose and down my throat because they see their P2P performance as inadequate on my network, oh well. I might lose some of those customers. Ironically, I actually provide each customer with CIR for their P2P, it is just a really low CIR. I see making most of my customers happy most of the time as my main job. I believe I am mostly successful in that. I have had to make tough choices and compromises to achieve that. Anyone is welcome to come into this market and make different choices, and I will wish them the best of luck in their endeavours. Cheers.