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CRTC Tells Rogers To Stop Throttling Online Gamers
Meshach writes "Recently Canada's telecommunications regulator revealed that net neutrality was failing and that throttling was taking place. Apparently several months later things have not improved and Canada's telecommunications regulator on Friday gave Rogers Communications Inc., 'mere days' to stop throttling online games."
Agreed. And you should have added a 'fuck rogers' too. To give you an idea, if anyone in the 'States had Rogers for a day, they would beg to go back to even the worst American ISP/cable company. I'd call Rogers a bunch of cunts, but cunts are useful.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Not to nitpick, but have you lived in both places? I, for one, only torrent and game at home, so I can only account for the places I've lived and the ISP's I've tried.
If so, what's the difference?
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Many ISPs today are implementing packet shaping in an extremely simplistic way. They simply rate limit everything and then whitelist the most common game servers, such as WoW. The problem comes when Blizzard commission new servers and the addresses change. Then for a few days-weeks, everyone gets extreme lag. If you are not playing an extremely popular game, it may take you months to get your ISP to whitelist the servers. If you are playing a game where anyone can host a server you are totally screwed.
FYI, this isn't a troll... it is a widely held sentiment in Canada.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Actually, it is a troll.
This troll may represent widespread sentiment about the CRTC. To be fair to those trolls, the CRTC seems to be both ineffective and under disproportionate industry control. Yet I have also found that these trolls have an overly simplistic view of the CRTC and demand that it is disbanded because of that.
The reality is that we need the CRTC in Canada. We need a reformed CRTC to be certain, but insisting that disbanding the CRTC will end the abusive domination of communications companies is beyond irrational.
Can't think of Rogers without my blood boiling, what a bunch of cheap salesmen always thinking how to nickle dime you to death, restricting your service, etc.
F@ck them...
We need CRTC for sure. We DO NOT need this CRTC. It needs to be disbanded and reformed again. what we have now is a fucking joke. one thing should be: No former industry executives should ever be allowed to serve. this is reason #1 why this CRTC is a fucking joke.
How the HELL did they ever get thru to someone competent at Rogers? I mean, seriously. Or, maybe they haven't.
rewriting history since 2109
What a pathetic company... Sadly I agree with the troll.... Rogers sucks!
The problem with Rogers is they throttle everything that looks like P2P. My limited understanding is that they look at the number of simultaneous connections to one host and if you go above their threshold, BOOM connection reset! For things like Xbox Live this means you can't play any team games, like Call of Duty, because your buddies will keep getting disconnected or time out.
For those who can, switching to TekSavvy cable solved all those problems for me. Now I can host game servers, run torrents at line speed (and beyond, thanks to SpeedBoost), and generally enjoy broadband as it was intended. Their cable service is new and limited to a few cities as they have to install their own hardware, unlike DSL which piggybacks off of Bell, but man is it ever worth it just to be rid of Rogers and my huge Rogers bills...
-Billco, Fnarg.com
This is something that really should have been addressed a while ago, not after months and months of hoping Rogers would fix it. Many Canadian telecos like Rogers and Bell are seriously needing some reining in on more than a few matters. I really hope that the CRTC is finally getting reality instead of being spoon fed it by Bell and co.
It's also unfortunately clear that unless the public screams bloody murder that the Canadian--oops, HARPER--government will do very, very little proactively to improve the internet situation. Unless votes are threatened--ziltch.
With more competition, providers in the US are better at pretending to do good things for you.
rewriting history since 2109
Teksavvy have been offering MLPPP as an addon service for a while; it allows their subscribers to evade Bell's throttling. There's even a fork of the Tomato firmware dedicated for this. And a friend told me that one of their customer service reps said you can work around Rogers' throttling using this modem. Just opt for ISPs that aren't Bell or Rogers.
I am getting fed up with this idea.
If I sign up for 10Mb service, I feel I should get it. If I agreed to 29.99 a month, I should pay it. I feel terribly shortchanged when I do not get the service advertised, regardless of the "businesstalk" fine print in their contract.
I live in a country (USA) whose lawmakers find me in terrible breach of law if I as much as download a song. Yet a "health insurance" company can accept premium after premium for years, only to rescind the insurance when the insured comes to need it. None of our "honorable" suits-and-ties of Congress even see fit to require the insurance company to even as much as refund every premium ever sent them. Geez, that's like asking a shoplifter just to pay for what he stole.
Here we are, in a "jobs" crisis, yet we behave like first graders turned out to the play-yard. The first big kid takes control of the merry-go-round and wants a buck to ride. The "engineer" kid gets fed up and starts building his own. The "entrepreneur" who snared control of the first merry-go-round sees it and sends his thugs (lawyers) over to smash it.
Now, our governments are all in a tizzy cause the only way they can keep any cash in the economy is to run the printing presses fullbore.
This whole mess has originated in Congress. It will take a leap of Congressional insight to fix it.
Hint: Enforce the payments law only to the extent one pays for what one GETS. If the ISP screws up the credit rating of one who withheld payment because of throttled bandwidth, then whoever submitted the credit rating ding will be liable for damages, no different than the one who is liable for damages for downloading a song.
There is nothing like responsibility for insuring honesty.
Its something sorely lacking in today's authority laden political and business hierarchies.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
It is unfortunate that the alleged brutalizing and violence-inciting tendencies of video games are somewhere between tepid and nonexistent.
Even the most black-hearted ISP would think twice about pissing off hordes of foul mouthed and odorous basement dwellers if a series of spree-killing reprisals were a serious risk...
AND blows!
I lived in the U.S. for a little more than six years (got back to Canada 3 years ago).
To compare apples to apples plans, Rogers has a plan with 150 GB cap with a bandwidth of "up to" 32Mbps down (and how many sites will let you capitalize on that?) and "up to" 1 Mbps up, and costs $70 per month before taxes (13% sales tax in Ontario), etc. ($1 CDN is about $1.01 U.S. as of today). The evil empire AT&T has a plan with a 150 Gigabyte cap with a 12 Mbps (good enough for me anyway) down and 800 kbps up for 30 dollars a month with no contract. (I just looked up the prices for the place I used to live in Saint Louis. I chose these two plans because when looking up the ATT prices, this was the fastest package available in that area.)
ATT charges 10 dollars for every 50 GB overages in cap (20 cents per Gigabyte). On the plan in question, Rogers charges $1.25 per Gigabyte overage (or $62.50 for every 50 GB over the cap).
Rogers does have a 250 Gigabyte plan if it is available in your area that costs $100 per month and has "up to" 50 Mbps down (again, I don't know any web site that I go to that makes that worth anything). The overage "only" costs 50 cents per GB (or $25 dollars per 50 GB).
Up to a few months ago, the highest cap plan I saw for Rogers was around 80 GB, and I suspect these newer higher caps are the result of a huge amount of consumer complaints when they grossly reduced caps when Netflix was introduced to Canada either late last year or early this year.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
And CRTC members should not be allowed in any senior role (or any role) in a major telecom company after as well.
FWIW, In the last ten years I also lived in Seattle for a while (a year and a bit). Before 2000, not included in the six years I mentioned in the above post, I also spent a little under a year in Rhode Island, and did some short term project work (couple months each) in California and Illinois. So yeah, I know a bit about the United states.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Not to nitpick, but have you lived in both places? I, for one, only torrent and game at home, so I can only account for the places I've lived and the ISP's I've tried.
If so, what's the difference?
He's informed and you're not.
Thanks for playing the Telecom Shill Ggame.
I've been subscribing for about 10 years to a local cable Co / ISP that was lately bought by Eastlink. When I got my HD cable box they upgraded me (for free) from 4.5 Mb/s to 15 Mb/s. Two days ago I got a letter advising that since they have completed the fiber deployment in my neighborhood they are upgrading me (again for free) to 40 Mb/s. Undisclaimer - I don't work for Eastlink or own shares, just a satisfied customer.
If you wish to thank anyone for this, Ressy on Freenode has been spearheading this movement for nearly a year now, having worked closely with Blizzard support staff to uncover the throttling being used as well as worked closely with end users affected by the issue.
Or, they could, you know, invest in their networks and bring them into the 21st century. It's entirely possible to operate a profitable ISP at lower prices without any kind of throttling or data caps, and without any kind of proxies, BRAS systems, and whatever other manner of junk they put between your loop and the Internet. They just don't want to stop overselling and underdelivering, to paraphrase contemporary internetworking parlance.
The reality is the parent isn't a troll. The person who modded them is. Because they have no fucking clue, what they they're modding about. Rogers, much like the CRTC needs to die in a fire. Preferably screaming, in flames, while bathing in gasoline.
Om, nomnomnom...
Why does it have to be that complicated?
I just have a 50/5 Mbit connection, no shaping, no cap, for approx $65 per month.
I've had months where I only downloaded an estimated 40-50GB, others (most?) where I probably exceed 500. No problem. I can't see the exact numbers as my provider doesn't post them, then again I don't have to.
In some ways I'm pretty sure it's cheaper for the provider as well, as they don't have to waste resources on counting individual accounts exactly, or a fairly large complaints department to handle people disagreeing with their usage.
It is not an "up to xx" connection, though other providers in the area use the "up to" label, even if they are now told they can't.
Even if not all sites I visit delivers 50mbit, a lot actually does.
Australian ISPs give you x amount of GB per month as part of your plan. Some offer the option to buy more data blocks or even (in a few cases) unlimited data. When you exceed your quota your entire internet connection is rate limited to 64k or 128k or something similar (exactly how much depends on the ISP and plan)
If I am on a 50GB plan and want to use the entire 50GB in the first week of the monthly cycle downloading from BitTorrent, I can do that and my ISP doesn't care.
Say what you will about shaping but bandwidth ain't free and its far better to have hard limits for how much you can use and no restrictions on how you use that than to have the ISPs block p2p, BitTorrent or whatever else.
Here's a question about ISP bungling. I signed up with Shaw in British Columbia pretty much the week they began service. I've used them for a long time, and have mostly been pleased with the service.
A couple of years ago, I started to have some severe performance problems. On my OpenBSD firewall, I would start a ping process and watch the ping arrival times. About once a minute, the ping responses disappear for 30s. Then all thirty ping packets showed up simultaneously with measured delays more or less forming the integers 30..1. And for a while subsequently, packets would flow normally again.
If the ping is the only process running, it would ping one per second for hours. As soon as I ran any other packet stream through the firewall concurrently, I would see this problem again. At the time I had a GB network switch which worked well, but tended to run awfully hot, and some suspect cable runs. I messed around with gear substitutions quite a bit thinking it was OpenBSD going strange with ethernet corruption. It's hard to imagine what corner of the room OpenBSD has available to send all those packets to cool their jets for up to 30s. For a long while the machine was a Pentium Pro that just wouldn't die, with Intel nics (usually fxp0). I also had many old Via Rhine cards around, and those were in there from time to time. My packet filter was bog standard with some of the scrubbing options enabled.
Finally I've convinced myself the problem is not at my end, and I call up Shaw. I get this chipper 20-something who thinks he has the world by the tail. My experience with Shaw is that 1/3 of the agents are useful, 1/3 don't get in the way, and 1/3 detect competence as an obstacle to concluding the service call. This guy was 99th percentile in the last 1/3. Smart enough to think he could define his way to a conclusion, but not smart enough to pick up the exponential decline in my tolerance for his behaviour.
The usual ensued. He basically insisted that we connect a "regular" PC directly to the connection. I used my partner's OS X machine, since "regular" for me lives at the bottom of a dark closet never to be exhumed. We went to a speed measurement site, and the connection performed flawlessly. Cognito sum ergo, Horatio, there has never been an issue with Shaw network configuration since the caveman woke up with a headache after sleeping on top of the monolith. In bakeoff-free inference logic: A => B and B => C, then A => C, where => stands for "doesn't fuck up" when used together.
I convinced him that this was not sufficient (to get me off the phone) so we continued to assess and we ventured into some simple A/B comparisons, I forget the details. He sent me off to the back room to reset the connection yet again (god knows why). I came back 15s longer than some of the previous times. He asked me why. I said, "first, before I mucked with new test, I checked that our baseline case had remained unchanged".
He was instructing the tests to run A - B - C - E - W - Vishnu - Xenu and beyond. I was going A - B - A - C - A - D - A - E. Only I was fast enough it took five iterations for him to notice. He chewed me out for not following his instructions to the letter. HARSH words were exchanged at this precise juncture. Shaw's telephone support recording device passed through the glass transition phase before hardening onto the capstan. We terminated the call and for a week I had no more time available to waste on the problem. Then one day the problem just went away. Magic. By this point I had permanently replaced the Gbit switch, and I thought, weirder things have happened, but is it really possible that OpenBSD has a 30-second holding tank for outbound ping packets only when other packet streams are running concurrently? There are things in life that are implausible, yet true, but these usually have some shred of potential mechanism before you discover how three balls all fall into the same pocket on a sin
And you can stay up there in Canaduh too. Yah hey!
Sounds pretty good compared to Videotron.
"Thanks for playing the Telecom Shill Ggame"
What??? You think I work for a telecom co?
Well, I'll add that to the list - I work at M$, I suck RMS daily, and I look like a man (that was the worst one!)
Thanks AC, I love you too!
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Yes! Fuck Rogers in the 24th century!
If I sign up for 10Mb service, I feel I should get it. If I agreed to 29.99 a month, I should pay it. I feel terribly shortchanged when I do not get the service advertised, regardless of the "businesstalk" fine print in their contract.
If you want guaranteed network bandwidth from your ISP get a business connection via a direct fibre pull and pay $300/month (to start).
Oversubscribing is a fact of (economic) life. It's true of ISPs, highways/streets, mobile networks, etc.
While Internet service providers have said they need to manage online traffic to deal with network congestion during peak hours, the CRTC has instituted a policy stipulating that the noticeable degradation of time-sensitive Internet traffic requires prior commission approval under Canada's Telecommunications Act.
Maybe they should deal with network congestion by building a faster infrastructure. Perhaps that gigabit network that "nobody could possibly use" IS necessary.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
The default is to randomly drop packets, which effectively shares the bandwidth equally between all TCP streams, and UDP is kind of undefined. At home I have set up "tc" on linux to share the bandwidth equally between my machines (+1 allocation for wi-fi leechers). It's a pain to set up, but it makes *much* more sense to divide bandwitdh by IP address than by TCP stream. Why can't ISP set up something like this?
In tc one can use a "Hierarchical Token Bucket (HTB)" where one can set 1) a "rate", which is the guaranteed rate that a class of traffic (e.g. an IP address) gets, and 2) "ceil" which is the max. bandwidth that the class can use if there is additional available bandwidth. Excess bandwidth is shared according to the relative proportion of the rates. The ISP could set the "rate" to be 1/10 of the advertised speed, or what ever factor they use. Protocol-based shaping and prioritation can then be done within each class, affecting only the relative priority of a user's data, but IMHO this is better to leave to the user (though, it's difficult to do ingress shaping for the user).
ISPs have really expensive routers, why can't they do this? Should be simple actually, much easier than tracking connections. There is no reason that 3 Mbps of Skype traffic from customer A should trump 3 Mbps of torrenting from customer B. Just keep the buffering at the shaping device, and the latency will be small.
What about the rest of us?
The worst part of this whole thing is what Rogers has admitted trips their throttling filters
"Other peer-to-peer applications are running at the same time"
"The game or application was misclassified by network traffic management systems, as in the case of World of Warcraft"
"All the applications classified as peer-to-peer traffic have a combined bandwidth of 80 kilobits per second or more – the threshold that trips the network traffic management system."
Emphasis mine, I don't know about anyone else but paying for an "Up to 75Mbps" connection (quoted from their website as 'Ultimate Internet') and then getting throttled at 80kbps is akin to theft.
With more competition, providers in the US are better at pretending to do good things for you.
I live in a typical small city just outside one of the largest cities. I don't really see a lot of this "competition" of which you speak. I have 2 real options, the local cable company or the local phone company, both of whom overcharge if you don't buy a bundle with a service I don't want; both of whom have horrible bureaucracies that result in some of the worst customer service of any industry. Neither the cable company nor the phone company pretended to do good things for me when I called for explanation of their obfuscated billing statements nor when their systems were malfunctioning or down. Their attitudes were both: "Well why don't you sit on hold for an hour and then we'll connect you to some random guy in India who can't help you and doesn't even comprehend your language very well. He won't do anything, but really we don't give a shit anyway because you don't have any better choices."
It would be nice if they went after Telus next for throttling the skype connections from their smartphone database plans. Every time i use my iphone and skype, i get such bad connection upload/download speeds, yet the exact same amount of upload and download speed is fine when using skyp on say my computer.
I am sure they are watching for any skype connections to tamper with, as this costs them money from a long distance stand point.
Arrrg! Gotta clean the Mountain Dew of the monitor!
That saying doesn't apply to two things: governments and ISPs. And sometimes stupidity is malice, look at corporations that hide safety concerns from their employees.
Note that the CTRC are still "requesting" and that Rogers are still in denial. I think I know who's going to blink first on this one.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Problem solved.
I have a (general) policy of avoiding companies who believe in the "what the big print giveth...the fine print taketh away." As they are not really interested in serving me, as raping me.
Unfortunately, you'll end up making a lot of exceptions to your (general) policy because a lot of companies that take away in fine print tend to be monopolies. Utilities such as home Internet service providers depend on easements to pull their cable under the last mile of roads. Because there's only so much usable space under a road, there are few players in the market, and these tend to be either monopolies or at best in tacit collusion.
CRTC to the rescue, that is a laughable notion. They have been ensuring a complete lack of competition and quality of telco services for decades Their pockets have been lined by big telco in Canada since inception All this apparent act of consumer heroism is more likely a precursor to some deal or arrangement between the CRTC and big telco to screw customers even more, such as some extra bullsh*t access fees, or squashing net neutrality in Canada once and for all. Mark my words, there is no way Rogers is not getting something back from this charge against them. Throttling might be turned off for a few months before something more Draconian is introduced that limits traffic better and to greater advantage to big telco that has the full blessing of the corrupt CRTC.
Just moved to Ottawa. My roommate's SC2 is definitely throttled (our connection isn't great but more than enough for sc2) and I've noticed a lot of odd behavior with torrents (took 4 hours to get an Ubuntu iso on a torrent which was a very well seeded, but 20 minutes on direct HTTP) and Netflix.
Meanwhile, most Xbox Live games seem absolutely fine.
You look like a man? hmm, I will have to reassess my image of you in my head :)
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Well played, sir!
No I don't, but I have an AC who always says I do.
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I figured it was a nicer way of saying it than "pics or GTFO" but I guess it didn't work :)
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You'll find that I've already answered that with pics and been trolled as described above.
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AND swallows!
So that's what the mean by "UNLIMITED PLAN" - "unlimited throttling". :\
Immigration to Canada