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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."
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.
From the CRTC, that is. Apparently they didn't get the memo stating who their masters were.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
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.
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.
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.
A hearing!
Come back to me when there is actually a penalty involved.
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.
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.
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.
If your VoIP call suck, then switch to a better ISP.
How is this possible if only one wired broadband ISP serves your area?