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CRTC Says Rogers Violating Federal Net Neutrality Rules

Posted by Unknown on from the smoke-signals-are-faster dept.

beaverdownunder writes "A Canadian CRTC investigation in partnership with Cisco has found that Rogers Communications has violated federal net-neutrality rules by throttling connections related to P2P applications. Rogers has until noon on February 3rd to reply to the accusations or face a hearing." Quoting the letter sent to Rogers: "On the basis of our evidence to date, any traffic from an unidentified time-sensitive application making use of P2P ports will be throttled resulting in noticeable degradation of such traffic."

2 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Finally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    RTFA before you get too excited. They do throttle bit torrent, openly, because it is legal for them to do so. FTFA:

    The Telecommunications Act and CRTC regulations allow throttling of peer-to-peer file sharing programs like BitTorrent, but not of time-sensitive internet traffic like video chatting or gaming.

  2. Missing Information by magamiako1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    A lot of the comments here are missing some information, so let's put it this way:

    The throttling argument started a while ago when gamers detected problems with World of Warcraft on the Rogers network. In fact, Blizzard Entertainment personally spent a ridiculous amount of resources to try contact Rogers but Rogers spent the whole time insisting that their throttling was not affecting WoW, even though gamers and Blizzard had found concrete proof otherwise.

    Interestingly enough, if you switch your connection to a wholesale distributors of Rogers Internet, TekSavvy, in the affected areas, the throttling problem goes away--even though it's going over the same network backbone as if you were provided a Rogers pipe directly.

    Blizzard also attempted to limit the ports used for WoW back to the original game ports (3724), but this was only a temporary solution as they wanted the other connections to help with reliability.

    Long story short, a WoW community member living in Canada kind of spearheaded this and has been a part of this from the absolute very beginning.

    It grew to the point that the CRTC has investigated itself, and this is where we stand now.