ISP's War On BitTorrent Hits World of Warcraft

jfruhlinger writes "Canadian Internet users have the prospect of a metered Internet looming over their head, and now World of Warcraft players who use Rogers Communications as their ISP are encountering serious throttling. The culprit seems to be Rogers' determination to go after BitTorrent. WoW uses BitTorrent as a utility to update game files — something most users probably aren't even aware of."

Comments

This is my suprise face.

[_Sprocket_]

I'm sure a lot of us saw this coming. Back when I was living in some apartments, the only broadband was a cable company (Ygnition) that does apartment complexes, etc. Little choice for broadband providers. So I went with them. Their TOS forbid bit torrent by name. Thankfully, it was either an empty threat or they knew enough about what was going on to ignore WoW update traffic.

Re:too bad

[icannotthinkofaname]

Or, alternatively, we keep the sheep addicted to the virtual world, the ISP somehow decides to recognize gaming as a legitimate use of the network, they refuse to throttle the bandwidth for something that isn't illegal, and we get to keep our p2p channels open as a result.

More likely, I think, a middle ground would be for Blizzard to somehow use a nonstandard port for their torrent activity, and then the ISPs throttle p2p traffic on ports that aren't that one. Yes, the rest of us probably get around that by manually configuring to use the new port, but it's just an idea. My ideas are never bug-free, so somebody feel free either to tell me that I'm completely wrong or to figure out what to change to make it work. Maybe if Blizzard uses a different port and somehow signs the packets...I don't know...I'm really just BS'ing all over my keyboard here....