CRTC Says Rogers Violating Federal Net Neutrality Rules

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."

Comments

Finally

[iONiUM]

Rogers (and Bell) have been abusing their customers since the beginning, this is just another example. I hope the CRTC sticks it to them, and I really hope this becomes very public. Please share this everywhere, so the hatred towards this duopoly in Canada can grow even more.

And yes, I use Rogers, because I literally don't have another choice. And they definitely throttle torrents, during "prime" hours, which is apparently 8am-11pm.

Re:Finally

[stanlyb]

Hey, what is going on? Is today the new April.1st?

Re:Finally

[atlasdropperofworlds]

So does Shaw. I get bizarre behavior with Skype (distortions, connection problems) at non-peak hours. If I run speed test at those times, both my download and upload capacity max out. It's all very annoying. I also have inside information that Shaw has had throttling equipment in for almost 10 years now, and that they do use it.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is Canada dominated by this company?

Here in the U.S. we have two sometimes three different internet companies to choose from. It prevents them from being abusive to customers (since then we would just switch companies).

Here in some places (but not enough) of the U.S. we have two, sometimes three different internet companies to choose from.

FTFY

Re:Finally

[fullmetal55]

Inside information not withstanding, as a longtime Shaw High-speed customer, (we signed up with "Shaw Wave" when it was first brought into our town in 1998) They told us up front, that excessive use will cause throttling. As Shaw migrated to @Home, It was again mentioned that throttling high-usage accounts would occur. with the caveat that it was once you reached 4 GB of data downloaded per month you'd be throttled down, with your speed refreshed the first of the month, repeat offenders would receive letters, and face possible disconnection. They've had the ability to for longer than 10 years, and have only in the last 10 years (since abandoning @Home) not advertising this ability in their TOS. in experience however, the throttling only ever took place for repeat offenders, who continually broke the barrier got Shaw's attention.

Re:Finally

[compro01]

It prevents them from being abusive to customers (since then we would just switch companies).

That works until they start colluding, as Rogers and Bell do.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Finally

[phoenix_rizzen]

And it's done on a per-IP basis, not a per-household or per-account basis. Since you get (at least) 2 dynamic IPs per Shaw Internet account, all you have to do is separate your "normal" traffic from your "excessive" traffic.

For example, we setup to routers at our house, with a switch between them and the cable router. They each get a different IP via DHCP.

Torrents and other "bandwidth hogs" go through one router. All other traffic goes through the other router.

That way, when they throttle all traffic through one IP, it doesn't affect our normal web browsing activities.

Re:Finally

[compro01]

Your experience is probably because their 100 Mb is only available as "unlimited" (500GB cap).

Someone's gonna get fired!

[TheSpoom]

From the CRTC, that is. Apparently they didn't get the memo stating who their masters were.

Re:Someone's gonna get fired!

[denis-The-menace]

CRTC

Definition:
  acronym for "Captured Regulator of Telephone and Cable"

Purpose:
To provide the illusion of a regulatory body for communications in Canada
by ignoring offences of the companies they regulate while ignoring the needs
and the will of the people they were meant to protect.

Status:
Currently staffed by past and future Bell, Rogers and Telus executives.
Actively lobbying for draconian laws written by US content bodies (RIAA, MPAA).

Re:Someone's gonna get fired!

[Anrego]

Totally this.

As a Canadian this action on the part of the CRTC would seem in my benefit. This is the CRTC where just yesterday the former head was whining about how the Internet is making it hard for them to control what Canadians watch. This is the CRTC that wanted to give us caps which may have been appropriate in 1996. That wanted to effectively end video streaming in Canada. This is practically unheard of.

Re:Someone's gonna get fired!

[Mashiki]

Bell and Rogers have been controlling the CRTC though Konrad Von Frankenstin(yes I know not his name) for years, those of us involved in fighting for digital rights have seen it time and time again. The whole UBB fiasco was a direct result of his: "and these guys said..." mentality. He was replaced at the end of his term by the conservatives. Simply because he was doing what wasn't in the best interest of Canadians.

Despite all the whining and crying of people, and how they bitch and moan the the conservatives are evil people only out for corporate interests. So far, they're the only government we've had that's pushed for more competition in the markets. Wind mobile(when rogers and bell), tried to cockblock them for example, and block not only the spectrum bidding, but tried to block them out of the market because they weren't "canadian enough" yes we do have that on the books here(thanks liberals). Or when UBB came up, and the industry minister said: "We will overrule the CRTC on this issue if we don't feel it's in the best interest of consumers."

YES!

[GigaBurglar]

How about that for irony. If this succeeds it will be +1 for the internet. I love how people are actually taking a stand; I just hope it's enough for things like ACTA which will or will not be ratified next week..

Re:It should be throttled.

[danbob999]

Why?

Let say we both pay $40/month for our internet connection.
I use only 1GB P2P/month, and you use only 1GB VoIP/month. We both have no other traffic.

Why should you get priority over me? I paid as much as you and deserve what I paid for, at full speed.
If an ISP can't offer unlimited traffic for $40/month, then they only have to put data usage caps (preferably only during peak time since that's when there is congestion).
Until I bust my usage cap, I should be able to do what I want without being throttled.

Re:It should be throttled.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because a VOIP phone call will suck if the network is congested. Whereas your P2P download can take an extra 30 seconds to keep my call quality good. FYI, I worked on SNA and traffic prioritization was baked into the protocol for exactly these purposes -- TCP/IP is actually quite a dumb protocol in this regard.

Re:It should be throttled.

[tonywong]

Why is this common sense? Might need to download a manual shouldn't have a lower priority than your need to talk to Gramma over the interwebs. If your portion of the service you contracted was throttled because _you_ wanted it, that's fine, but my service shouldn't be throttled to your needs. Besides, I manage my QoS with my own firewall, and which packets get prioritized are none of your business, nor should it be my provider's unless I ask them to.

Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

A hearing!

Come back to me when there is actually a penalty involved.

Re:It should be throttled.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because VoIP is sensitive to things like latency spikes. P2P isn't. If the packets are given the correct priorities, your download finishes in just about the same amount of time while the other person has a nice audio quality. If the VoIP packets aren't given priority your download won't be significantly faster (the same amount of data is still being sent over the same pipes), but the call quality will be abismal.

Re:It should be throttled.

[Anonymous Coward]

But the network is congested because the provider has sold what they don't have. Why you think any other users should be punished because of that fact is beyond me. Fact is, overselling with 10-20:1 ratios on network connections is no longer tenable.

Missing Information

[magamiako1]

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.

Re:It should be throttled.

[BlueBlade]

I think people are confusing arbitrary throttling with priority queues. What Rogers and Bell are doing is arbitrarily limiting the rate of p2p traffic to 25KB/s. This is just rate limiting. If, on the other hand, they would treat VOIP traffic as higher priority and process those packets first, possibly dropping the lower p2p traffic if the link is congested, that would be perfectly fine. Just don't rate limit p2p to 5% of advertised bandwidth for no good reason.

Re:It should be throttled.

[tepples]

If your VoIP call suck, then switch to a better ISP.

How is this possible if only one wired broadband ISP serves your area?

Re:It should be throttled.

[dgatwood]

Yes, it is. It's just throttling over a short period. Latency and throttling are one and the same. You have a piece of pipe that can take hold ten marbles at a time before the marbles come out the other end. If the marbles can flow at only a certain speed (say one marble pulled out per second), then this behaves very much like a network cable. (See, it is a series of tubes.)

It's basically inevitable that bandwidth will be oversold; the cost of running the lines would otherwise be prohibitive. So this is similar to having two people who are allowed to put marbles in at a rate of one per second. Remember that you can only take out one per second from the other end.

Assume that the two people usually put in one marble every two seconds. On average, neither is throttled. However, person A has to guarantee that his marbles get there in exactly ten seconds, and person B does not. If at any point, person A puts in one marble slightly before that two second mark, this means that it delays person B's marble by a second. For that brief moment in time, person B is effectively capped at one marble every three seconds, because he or she was not able to insert a second marble until three seconds after the previous marble.

For a sufficiently large download, the period doesn't even have to be short. Assume that you and I both have connections rated at 1 GB per hour. If you download a 10 GB file over the course of 10 hours, and I make a video call that transfers 2 GB over the course of 2 hours, we're using the same amount of bandwidth averaged over the relevant period.

If the total shared bandwidth available is only 1.5 GB per hour, you can't have the 1 GB per hour you need for the transfer while I have the 1 GB per hour I need for my video call. However, if instead of rate limiting you to 1 GB per hour the whole time, the service provider rate limits you to .5 GB per hour during that 2 hour call and makes up for it by opening up the full 1.5 GB per hour to you during the following two hours, your download time is the same, but my call was successful.

In effect, what service provider temporarily increased the latency of your packets by squeezing them into the gaps between the higher priority traffic, then made up for that latency by reducing the latency it would otherwise have applied during a period when the network was less congested. However, you would say that the network provider throttled your connection during a period of higher demand.

The important factor is not whether the peak demand exceeds the peak bandwidth available, but whether the average demand exceeds the average bandwidth available, and whether the service is advertised based on best-case available bandwidth or average-case available bandwidth.

That's Shaw, not Rogers

[ratboy666]

I started with Shaw. Then Shaw and Roger re-divided, and my account was switched to Rogers. No choice.

Now, I get 50Mbps down or so (it rarely goes full-speed), but it is enough for Netflix. Bittorrent is throttled.

Still, I don't have Cable TV, so I can't buy the "top end" internet package... The highest tier I can buy is 150GB/month for $70/month ("Hi-Speed Exteme Plus")

$5 more for 20GB/month for an overage "guarantee". If I don't buy the "guarantee", I spend $1/GB overage, capped at $50/month.

Of course, I can't just buy the "guarantee".

I am looking into TekSavvy.