The Canadian government’s telecommunications regulator has had enough of Internet service provider Rogers Communications throttling online game connections. The ISP tried to provide a reason but the government seems unsatisfied with the answer. The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission has given the company until September 27 to put together a plan to deal with the problem of game throttling.
"Commission staff also requests that Rogers provide a detailed report to the Commission once the problem is resolved, demonstrating that the problem has been fixed," read a portion of the letter sent to the ISP by the commission. "The requested document should include an overview of the solution, how it deals with the "underlying" dilemma, and "a description of the changes made to Rogers' ITMP [Internet Traffic Management Practices] disclosures in order to accurately reflect resolution of this problem."
The CRTC also plans on creating new guidelines "for responding to complaints and enforcing framework compliance by Internet service providers" sometime this week. Critics of this particular ISP think that these new guidelines will make it easier to resolve ISP and game related disputes.
The ball was put in the CRTC's court last year when Canadian World of Warcraft players began complaining of traffic interference during peak traffic periods. A December 2010 letter to the Commission revealed that content-to-client traffic was being mistaken for P2P traffic, and therefore being throttled by Rogers.
Ars Technica has more background information on this story here -- including a response from Teresa Murphy, who is a co-complainant alongside Jason Koblovsky. You may know Jason from his regular blog posts and his occasional contributions at GP.
Source: Ars Technica
Comments
Re: Canada to Rogers: Come up With Plan to Stop Throttling ...
Rogers (and Bell) are going to soon have to face up to the future of the internet service. They're too invested in selling other services (such as Phone and Television) that conflict with web-services for them to actually make a stand as a good and reliable ISP. With the increasing availability of web-video and services like Google Voice, it's getting less and less appealing to pay for the obscenely overrated sevices Rogers provides.
Case in point, I recently moved, and dropped Rogers as a provider; they were charging $65 a month for the high speed service I was using, and a $1.50 for every gig over the first hundred of use -- as my fiance and I do everything on the web, we were regularly getting an extra $10-20 on our bill every month, no problem.
Our new provider is charging $10 less a month for a higher speed connection, no caps, and a few other perks. We're now saving about $25 a month; our bill is never a surprise. The connection is just as stable, and it makes services like Netflix functionally free. And we don't have to deal with other anti-consumer policies like this one.
The only reason Rogers and Bell retain their customer base is because they are the biggest companies with the best recognition and largest marketing efforts. And if they don't shape up, more of the little guys are going to tear customers away from them bit by bit until nothing is left.
Re: Canada to Rogers: Come up With Plan to Stop Throttling ...
What ISP are you using?
Living in Canada is awesome. We enjoy the universal healthcare and gun-free environment of a European country while getting all of our games released at the same time as the US.
Re: Canada to Rogers: Come up With Plan to Stop Throttling ...
Distributel; I have nothing but praise for them so far, though the service is still fresh.