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."

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: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.

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: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.

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.