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.

Did some digging

[masterwit]

I don't play WOW myself but I hate selective service blocking...found this digging around for a couple of minutes:

Thank you for your letters of February 23rd and 25th, 2011 regarding the impact of Rogers Internet traffic management practices (ITMP) on the interactive game called World of Warcraft.

Our tests have determined that there is a problem with our traffic management equipment that can interfere with World of Warcraft. We have been in contact with the game manufacturer and we have been working with our equipment supplier to overcome this problem.

We recently introduced a software modification to solve the problems our customers are experiencing with World of Warcraft. However, there have been recent changes to the game, which has created new problems. A second software modification to address these new issues will not be ready until June.

We have determined that the problem occurs only when our customers are simultaneously using peer-to-peer file sharing applications and running the game. Therefore we recommend turning off the peer-to-peer setting in the World of Warcraft game and ensuring that no peer-to-peer applications are running on any connected computer. Rogers will engage our customers to ensure they are aware of these recommendations, while continuing to work on a longer term solution.

We sincerely regret the inconvenience that some of our customers have experienced in playing World of Warcraft and will continue to work with the game supplier and our technology supplier to solve the remaining problems as soon as possible. source

(I have doubts about that portion above in bold.)

Re:Did some digging

[Pantero Blanco]

We have determined that the problem occurs only when our customers are simultaneously using peer-to-peer file sharing applications and running the game. Therefore we recommend turning off the peer-to-peer setting in the World of Warcraft game and ensuring that no peer-to-peer applications are running on any connected computer. Rogers will engage our customers to ensure they are aware of these recommendations, while continuing to work on a longer term solution.

Are they missing the point or just playing dumb?

For one, their "advice" isn't going to accomplish anything. That's like fixing a broken limb by amputating it.

Secondly, Rogers is the one that's breaking things, so it's their responsibility, not the responsibility of their users. Whether a workaround exists is irrelevant, because they shouldn't be breaking things in the first place.

Re:Did some digging

[eternaleye]

Interestingly, that's not supposed to happen. The original design of the internet (specifically, the congestion control mechanism) doesn't account for the massive buffers routers carry nowadays, and relies on packet overflows resulting in packets being dropped immediately, rather than after some enormous buffer fills up. Those buffers completely screw over latency during large transfers, a symptom of which is the ping lag you mention - because the buffer slows the response to overflow, the congestion control on the big transfer thinks there's no congestion, and speeds up. When the buffer fills, it doesn't drain properly because as soon as it starts to drain the large transfer fills it up again. Meanwhile, the ping has to wait while the entirety of the buffer is flushed ahead of it; that can be on the order of 30 seconds, an eternity on the network. This is the main place that the idea that BitTorrent oversaturates the network comes from - these buffers are the real cause, not BitTorrent. Even FTP with large enough files will cause the same problem; there just weren't enough people doing large transfers for it to be visible before BitTorrent. Look up 'bufferbloat' and visit http://gettys.wordpress.com/ for more info.

Re:too bad

[Zeek40]

You'll regret that you didn't stand up for your WOW addict friends when the internet police get finished with them and decide to come after your goat porn next.

DADVSI and HADOPI

[tepples]

Wouldn't it be better [for the RIAA and MPAA] to try this [latest "fuck the consumer" crap] in France?

They already are. What do you think DADVSI and HADOPI are?

For non-Canadians, let me explain that Rogers.....

[ip_freely_2000]

...are a bunch of dicks in everything they do. They've never thought of a fee that is too insulting for their customers. They wrote the book on poor service. They only exist because the government provides protection to a corporation that provides too many political contributions.

WOW and other games affected

[Anonymous Coward]

If I'm not mistaken, the torrent aspect of WOW also extends to its normal gameplay connection since Cataclysm. In that they altered their network traffic protocols which resulted in high ping times for users of various ISPs. I think RIFT has the same issues with its traffic being delayed by ISP traffic management software because it sees it as P2P traffic.

I think this is an example of how the witchhunt against pirates and the reluctance to upgrade systems to meet consumer demand will hurt innovation and use of the internet overall.

My understanding is developers are making these protocol changes because they are more efficient - except they are being blocked by ISPs.

Sadly, we do need government regulation to keep the playing fields level, and to ensure that we see continued growth and development of various industries over the Internet. If every ISP employs the same measures, and smaller providers must follow the traffic restrictions of their own larger providers, there is no Choice and Free Market to influence the behaviour of these corporations. It is also clear that these corporations are working hand in hand with IP Holders such as the MPAA and the RIAA. So there is no decoupling of the various business considerations.

I'm not sure why Anti-Monopoly and Anti-Trust laws haven't kicked in yet to prevent what is obviously destructive to competition and a free market. Perhaps Rogers wants Blizzard to knock on its doors and offer money to allow WOW traffic to flow unimpeded?

We may all need to pay a separate VPN provider to play our MMORPGs and other games in the future. Then they'll probably spend MILLIONS developing software that can inspect VPN packets and determine if it's likely to be gaming, video, or torrents. Instead, of course, in spending those millions in upgrading infrastructure.

Make no mistake, none of these companies are strapped for cash. None of them would be pushed to the brink by the use of World of Warcraft, Torrents, or Netflix across their networks. They post >40% profits.

Re:WOW and other games affected

[Anonymous Coward]

(I'm a UI AddOn developer for World of Warcraft. I also work on anonymous P2P software, and actively research and develop censorship evasion techniques. I do not work for Blizzard.)

You are mistaken. So, in fact, are Rogers (and so also were Virgin Media UK). This is a fault in their traffic classifiers.

These traffic classifiers actually see the normal connection to the WoW servers as "P2P traffic" simply because it's encrypted and it can't recognise it - that's right, they're throttling everything they don't explicitly recognise, and they haven't whitelisted traffic to the Blizzard servers (which is silly, because the IP addresses are well-known). This is the same issue that hit Virgin Media when they tried a similar "throttle everything we don't recognise" policy, and the simple solution is to stop being such an asshat by doing that.

At worst, only the web-seed (a single outbound HTTP connection to Akamai) remains connected in current versions of the Blizzard Launcher while you actually play; in particular it closes the upload connections. It does that to save your ping, and the connection remains open if you are still streaming content while you play - but that's all Akamai HTTP traffic, not torrent. If your bar is green, when you close the launcher, even that closes.

Recognised VPN traffic is also detected and they've tried to throttle it on Rogers, according to my data.

The trouble is that they probably don't realise that this kind of thing, and the kind of (closely-related) incredibly sophisticated censorship system in place in, say, Iran, is simply a driver for the development of network protocols that lack the usual traffic analysis markers you'd use to classify and censor, throttle or prioritise them, and in turn, the wrapping of those protocols in steganographic network transports. Want to make your connection look like SSH, or TLS? No problem. HTTP? Sure. I can make it harder to recognise with less computational power than you'd need to try to recognise it. Go ahead, spend millions - won't help against a mimic function. It increases the overhead a little, but not as much as throttling or blocking affects it, so in the long run, all you'll do is choke your pipes more, because you're being an asshat.

Please, if you're going to manage traffic, shape it sensibly. Prioritise, don't block or throttle. Have enough overhead to allow people to use the internet how they wish, and use easy, sensible traffic shaping techniques to increase the performance of the network for everyone, by reducing buffer bloat and latency for quick protocols, supporting ECN properly, letting uTP be nice to you, but do have enough network backbone to allow the traffic to flow. Spend the money on more bandwidth. Or things are really going to suck for you in the coming years - because if you can't play with your toys nicely, we'll take them away.

Nonsense

[tycoex]

Everyone knows that Torrents are only used for illegal file sharing.

Re:F..... Rogers/Bell

[billcopc]

I just switched to TekSavvy Cable, which is being rolled out in a few metro areas. No throttling, no spurious RST packets. For the first time in years, I can download torrents reliably and play on Xbox Live without timeouts... This is like old-school broadband, before the telcos started filtering everything to shit.

Re:Not news..

[Vectronic]

No... no it's not.

Just because a large portion of the world has shitty internet, doesn't mean everyone should have shitty internet. It's only funny in the sad/pathetic/hopeless sort of way... just because they let it happen doesn't mean we do. If everyone else drank urine, and we drank water... we'd protest when people started pissing in our faces too...

I'm fine with universally limited bandwidth, ie: Xk/s down, Yk/s up... but throttling specific uses of it is retarded... from 00:00 to 18:00 I can download "normal" things (HTTP, etc) at 1.7MB/s (which also used to apply to torrents), torrents are limited to about 350k/s... between 18:00 and 00:00 it's limited to 120k/s... which isn't terrible, however whichever way my ISP chose to implement it, fucks up everything else at the same time (even if I haven't downloaded any torrents), it turns my cable connection into noisy WiFi... websites that take a few attempts to connect, occasional messenger disconnects, etc. It was "unlimited" for years, till about 2 weeks ago.

I wouldn't have much of a problem with that either, except they still charge the same price for basically half the connection. No real alternatives either except to rent a higher package from the same ISP (to get speeds that the current plan says it provides), or switch the ISP which also means switching the connection to WiFi, or Satellite... both of which are useless, regardless of whatever arbitrary speed in some other country may be.

Re:Sources?

[ZDRuX]

I dropped my Rogers subscription just last week and moved to TekSavvy. Speeds are good (the same as Rogers), I'm basically paying 50% less, and I'm getting a consistent 15Mbits down. For anybody out there with Rogers.. please do all of Canada a favor and switch, even though Rogers is the one leasing the lines.