Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.