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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?