CRTC Tells Rogers To Stop Throttling Online Gamers 118
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."
My ISP has this problem too. (Score:3, Interesting)
Many ISPs today are implementing packet shaping in an extremely simplistic way. They simply rate limit everything and then whitelist the most common game servers, such as WoW. The problem comes when Blizzard commission new servers and the addresses change. Then for a few days-weeks, everyone gets extreme lag. If you are not playing an extremely popular game, it may take you months to get your ISP to whitelist the servers. If you are playing a game where anyone can host a server you are totally screwed.
"Throttling" services (Score:4, Interesting)
If I sign up for 10Mb service, I feel I should get it. If I agreed to 29.99 a month, I should pay it. I feel terribly shortchanged when I do not get the service advertised, regardless of the "businesstalk" fine print in their contract.
I live in a country (USA) whose lawmakers find me in terrible breach of law if I as much as download a song. Yet a "health insurance" company can accept premium after premium for years, only to rescind the insurance when the insured comes to need it. None of our "honorable" suits-and-ties of Congress even see fit to require the insurance company to even as much as refund every premium ever sent them. Geez, that's like asking a shoplifter just to pay for what he stole.
Here we are, in a "jobs" crisis, yet we behave like first graders turned out to the play-yard. The first big kid takes control of the merry-go-round and wants a buck to ride. The "engineer" kid gets fed up and starts building his own. The "entrepreneur" who snared control of the first merry-go-round sees it and sends his thugs (lawyers) over to smash it.
Now, our governments are all in a tizzy cause the only way they can keep any cash in the economy is to run the printing presses fullbore.
This whole mess has originated in Congress. It will take a leap of Congressional insight to fix it.
Hint: Enforce the payments law only to the extent one pays for what one GETS. If the ISP screws up the credit rating of one who withheld payment because of throttled bandwidth, then whoever submitted the credit rating ding will be liable for damages, no different than the one who is liable for damages for downloading a song.
There is nothing like responsibility for insuring honesty.
Its something sorely lacking in today's authority laden political and business hierarchies.