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."

They throttle everything

[billcopc]

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...

Stop getting throttled altogether

[rsax]

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 [fixppp.org] 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 [tigerdirect.ca]. Just opt for ISPs that aren't Bell or Rogers.

Re:A complete bullshit

[theshowmecanuck]

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.