CRTC Says Rogers Violating Federal Net Neutrality Rules 165
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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So forget about downloading a Linux ISO?
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Back then linux was on floppy disks.
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I was downloading ISOs in 2000....
Re:Finally (Score:4, Interesting)
And it's done on a per-IP basis, not a per-household or per-account basis. Since you get (at least) 2 dynamic IPs per Shaw Internet account, all you have to do is separate your "normal" traffic from your "excessive" traffic.
For example, we setup to routers at our house, with a switch between them and the cable router. They each get a different IP via DHCP.
Torrents and other "bandwidth hogs" go through one router. All other traffic goes through the other router.
That way, when they throttle all traffic through one IP, it doesn't affect our normal web browsing activities.
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4 GB in a month is not excessive. That's less than the average bandwidth of a 14.4k modem. Remember those?
Most sane Internet services set their cap at 250 GB these days. A 30 GB cap is considered paltry. 4 GB is... well, the only place that's remotely acceptable is on an untethered cellular phone.
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That's Shaw, not Rogers (Score:3)
I started with Shaw. Then Shaw and Roger re-divided, and my account was switched to Rogers. No choice.
Now, I get 50Mbps down or so (it rarely goes full-speed), but it is enough for Netflix. Bittorrent is throttled.
Still, I don't have Cable TV, so I can't buy the "top end" internet package... The highest tier I can buy is 150GB/month for $70/month ("Hi-Speed Exteme Plus")
$5 more for 20GB/month for an overage "guarantee". If I don't buy the "guarantee", I spend $1/GB overage, capped at $50/month.
Of course, I
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Shaw's current limits are much higher (Score:2)
Their current monthy data allowances start at 60GB for the 2Mbps plan. The 20Mbps plan has a 200GB allowance, and there are a number of truly unlimited plans.
Re:Finally (Score:4, Insightful)
Your experience is probably because their 100 Mb is only available as "unlimited" (500GB cap).
nope, there's a real unlimited option (Score:2)
There are three 100Mbps plans, the 500GB cap one is $84.90/month, the 750GB one is $94.90, and the truly unlimited one is $134.90.
Theoretically, on the unlimited plan you could download 30 terabytes in a month.
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Must be a regional thing. All they show as available here is 100Mbps/500GB or 250Mbps/750GB, and a few lower plans.
Either that or they don't show the higher limit plans on the site.
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It's probably because Saskatchewan's other ISP has ONLY unlimited plans. SaskTel only goes as fast as 25/2 on DSL (unknown on fibre, apparently they're keeping that a secret but probably 200/10 or so) but it's unlimited so many people switched when Shaw started to charge overages..
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Site [sasktel.com] says 200/40. The September announcement [gov.sk.ca] about them starting with the UofR says gigabit down (unspecified upstream) "by the end of this decade".
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Now we just make BT look like skype traffic.
No, you jerk. BT traffic should look like the bulk asynchronous data transfer that it is. You do not need low latency networking for transfer of large files, so don't try to be an asshole by pretending it is anything else as that just encourages ISPs to do deep packet inspection and other wrong things.
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but this is exactly how bit torrent (and related protocols) survive. They'd be stomped dead by ISPs otherwise. I hate the inefficient and high resource consumption of p2p apps* and although ISPs are rather less affected by this aspect than their customers they *are* affected by the insanely aggressive nature of them. In the fight-to-the-death that bit torrent has started they do everything they can to avoid being controllable at the expense of everything else.
I recently had occasion to investigate some bit
Not a Victory... (Score:2)
...unless there are serious repercussions.
It's no more a victory than a bully who's been caught stealing your lunch money. They won't repay, they won't stop bullying, they just wont' bully you for your lunch money... probably.
(BTW, Teksavvy is offering cable Internet now. Switch if you can.)
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I'm another /.'er more than happy to recommend TekSavvy. I'm on a 5 MB DSL dry loop. I've been a customer over 3 years w/ service in Vancouver and now Toronto.
Parent poster can always switch to TekSavvy for Cable high-speed. Uses Rogers, same modem basically, except you use TekSavvy backbone. I haven't tried it though.
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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.
Have you looked in to TekSavvy.com? They provide internet over Shaw (& Rogers, I believe) cable connections. Not sure about your area of course.
According to another post [slashdot.org] to this story, throttling goes away by switching.
I'm a satisfied TekSavvy (TSI) customer over Shaw's cable infrastructure. Paying less per month than subscribing from Shaw and TSI takes a cut, so Shaw only gets a tiny amount of what they used to when I was their customer. Enough to pay for maintenance, not enough to subsidise their
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Why is Canada dominated by this company?
Here in the U.S. we have two sometimes three different internet companies to choose from. It prevents them from being abusive to customers (since then we would just switch companies).
Here in some places (but not enough) of the U.S. we have two, sometimes three different internet companies to choose from.
FTFY
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Here in some places (but not enough) of the U.S. we have two, sometimes three different internet companies to choose from.
FTFY
Thanks. I happen to live one of those places. The ONLY option here is AT&T 3.5mbps ADSL. Other possibilities are an AT&T EDGE(No VZW coverage here) connection that averages somewhere around 20kbps or satellite. No thanks (this coming from someone that makes a living repairing and fielding enterprise SATCOM systems).
I am fortunate enough that I was able to switch over to AT&T Business Class DSL(No bandwidth caps) for LESS than I was paying for the same AT&T Residential DSL. I get excellent SN
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I imagine it has something to do with population density. We are kinda spread out up here.. makes it hard to have competing services given the cost of infrastructure compared to the number of potential customers.
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It prevents them from being abusive to customers (since then we would just switch companies).
That works until they start colluding, as Rogers and Bell do.
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I don't know where you live, but every market I've lived in in the past decade (which has been 4 of them now) in the US has had the following internet options:
1. Verizon DSL. moderately priced, but slow. Like "what the hell is it 1999?!" slow.
1a. perhaps one or two companies reselling verizon DSL. same product, different company on your monthly bill. what's the point.
2. Comcast or Timewarner or Cox cable. Faster, but prone to both overselling and random packetloss. 9 times out of 10 they don't care about ei
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All I've got is Comcast. That's all I've ever had, too. So if Comcast treats people where I live poorly, there's nothing that can be done (outside of canceling Comcast and getting awful satellite or dial-up).
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Why is Canada dominated by this company?
Shaw and Rogers, over the years (Rogers has been around since the 1960s), bought up smaller competing cable companies, then did a cross-country territory swap: Shaw got the West, Rogers got the East. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Cable#History [wikipedia.org]
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I have the choice of low speed Qwest DSL where I can't use a router, or higher speed and higher price Cox cable modem service. Cox blocks mail ports, so I can't connect with a mail client to any email server other than their own.
I have amazing choices available to me.
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Where would this be? And which "mail ports?"
[E]SMTP? Pretty rare any more for any residential service to permit that; it's just too easy to find home machines botted as spam relays.
I connect to non-local IMAP ports from my Cox connection all the time; in fact, none of the email client ports are a problem.
Yeah. I'm guessing you're talking about SMTP, and that stopped happening almost anywhere last millennium, unless you're a business-class subscriber.
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There are gobs to choose from: See canadianisp.ca [canadianisp.ca].
To be fair most all of them rent most of their infrastructure from Bell or Rogers, but their policies can be quite different. For example, my ISP permits me to run servers and is net neutral on their network. Once the packets hit someone else's fiber it's beyond their control of course.
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Effectively, it has to do with foreign ownership rules. (Ironically, something that the CRTC is responsible for enforcing, which lead us to this problem in the first place.)
So! Because of some legal argle-bargle, Canadian telcos must have majority ownership in Canada. It means that a big US company can't come and set up shop. Nor anyone else from anywhere else. Wind Mobile kinda skirted the rules a bit, but it was a desperate play and it looked like it wasn't going to work for a while there.
So the big telco
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In most of Canada you are limited to just 1 or 2 potential sources for a net connection. Many years ago the various companies divided up the country between them, agreeing to operate only in certain areas so as to reduce the competition (This should of course be illegal I think but the CRTC has never said so). The two biggest companies out west are Shaw Cable and Rogers TV. They do not compete according to that agreement. Shaw (I think) left operating in Calgary entirely, and Rogers stopped operating in Vic
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We used to have Videotron here in Edmonton - until Shaw bought them.
Actually, it was kind of weird - Videotron had half the city and Shaw had the other half (I'm going to guess divided by the river, but I'm not sure). So no-one was really surprised when one bought the other, although most of us wish it had gone the other way.
Someone's gonna get fired! (Score:4, Insightful)
From the CRTC, that is. Apparently they didn't get the memo stating who their masters were.
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CRTC
Definition:
acronym for "Captured Regulator of Telephone and Cable"
Purpose:
To provide the illusion of a regulatory body for communications in Canada
by ignoring offences of the companies they regulate while ignoring the needs
and the will of the people they were meant to protect.
Status:
Currently staffed by past and future Bell, Rogers and Telus executives.
Actively lobbying for draconian laws written by US content bodies (RIAA, MPAA).
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Bell and Rogers have been controlling the CRTC though Konrad Von Frankenstin(yes I know not his name) for years, those of us involved in fighting for digital rights have seen it time and time again. The whole UBB fiasco was a direct result of his: "and these guys said..." mentality. He was replaced at the end of his term by the conservatives. Simply because he was doing what wasn't in the best interest of Canadians.
Despite all the whining and crying of people, and how they bitch and moan the the conser
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Totally this.
As a Canadian this action on the part of the CRTC would seem in my benefit. This is the CRTC where just yesterday the former head was whining about how the Internet is making it hard for them to control what Canadians watch. This is the CRTC that wanted to give us caps which may have been appropriate in 1996. That wanted to effectively end video streaming in Canada. This is practically unheard of.
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Actually, since part of the CRTC's mandate is to promote and protect Canadian content, complaining about how the Internet makes that more difficult makes sense. (And yes, I'm fully aware that the media companies have managed to subvert, pervert, and otherwise avoid that mandate whenever possible).
Of course, the answer isn't to block off the internet, but since that's an answer that makes the media companies happy, that's what they'll roll with.
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Oh I totally get why it makes sense for the CRTC to make such statements (as completely backwards as they come across).
But the point is, from my vantage, the CRTC is all about making insane decisions that hurt Canadians for a goal that they probably don't even understand (what the hell is "Canadian culture" in the context of our media anyway .. I'm Canadian and I only vaguely know... is it Red Green!).
Seeing them do something that isn't along their traditional approach of "my shoes don't fit any more so I'm
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But the point is, from my vantage, the CRTC is all about making insane decisions that hurt Canadians for a goal that they probably don't even understand (what the hell is "Canadian culture" in the context of our media anyway .. I'm Canadian and I only vaguely know... is it Red Green!).
I think at this point it's simply defined as "made in Canada" - Canadian writers, producers, actors, etc. I could go all warm-fuzzy about "Canadian stories", but that's almost beside the point. Right now it's cheaper to pay a US channel to grab Simpsons reruns than it is to film a Canadian show - so if we want a Canadian film and TV business, we need some carrots and sticks.
YES! (Score:2)
Oh noes! (Score:3, Insightful)
A hearing!
Come back to me when there is actually a penalty involved.
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Just like everywhere else.
+1 depressing.
Pot kettle black (Score:2)
WHAAA! (Score:2)
The CRTC...
Our CRTC?
I know this comment is pointless.. but I just don't know what to say.. I'm kind of scared..
Missing Information (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Bell does the same (Score:2)
So, can we expect CRTC to investigate Bell too?
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RTFA. Bell has made an official filing with the CRTC stating their intention to cease all throttling on March 1st, so any such hearing would be pointless. On top of that, Bell's throttling hardware doesn't work the same way, it uses DPI, which at least tries to identify P2P instead of just throttling anything on P2P ports like Rogers does.
Rogers, eh? (Score:2)
Any relation to that jerk in Georgia?
Re:It should be throttled. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It should be throttled. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It should be throttled. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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When the network is congested, it like any other shortage means the price is too low, at least at that time of day. Because that's so easy to fix, there's really no need to prioritize packets.
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When the network is congested, it like any other shortage means the price is too low, at least at that time of day. Because that's so easy to fix, there's really no need to prioritize packets.
I assume your easy fix is to simply increase the price. How does this provide more bandwidth? Do you think that people who are paying MORE for their internet will think "I need to use it less"?p.
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They can offer incensitive to move big downloads at night, when the network is not used. They just have to put a data usage cap during peak time.
How is that significantly different than simply throttling the P2P while the VoIP is requiring bandwidth? You'd rather have a permanent cap "during peak time" than fully open transport except in certain circumstances?
And how does raising the price "incensitive" anyone to do their work at night? I'd say it means "I'm paying more, I expect more."
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During those circumstances, you're stealing from one person to give to another. It's more equitable to give everyone equal access, even if it means reducing demand by raising the price (in this case, through peak hour bandwidth caps). That's how a free market works.
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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.
Perhaps if P2P protocols weren't throttled people could invent more interesting things to use them for, including more time-sensitive applications?
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Because a VOIP phone call will suck if the network is congested.
The ISP could alternatively decide to always prioritize VOIP traffic and ensure all VOIP packets received longer than n milliseconds ago were sent before any other traffic, which IMO is vastly different than applying P2P throttling.
my packets shouldn't interfere with yours (Score:2)
And vice versa. Ideally, the ISP should be doing per-subscriber throttling such that each subscriber cannot exceed their rating. As long as each subscriber is within their limits, they should all be treated equally.
How does the ISP know whether my packets are high priority or not? Just because they're using certain ports doesn't mean they're coming from the expected applications.
Re:It should be throttled. (Score:5, Insightful)
If your VoIP call suck, then switch to a better ISP.
How is this possible if only one wired broadband ISP serves your area?
Re:It should be throttled. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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That's not the same thing as throttling.
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Yes, it is. It's just throttling over a short period. Latency and throttling are one and the same. You have a piece of pipe that can take hold ten marbles at a time before the marbles come out the other end. If the marbles can flow at only a certain speed (say one marble pulled out per second), then this behaves very much like a network cable. (See, it is a series of tubes.)
It's basically inevitable that bandwidth will be oversold; the cost of running the lines would otherwise be prohibitive. So this
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apparently you don't actually deal with QoS, haven't supported VoIP, have never dealt with what bit torrent (and other P2P protocols) do to a network, or how traffic shaping works and how bit torrent actively works to defeat shaping.
But then again, I'm responding to an AC...
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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?
Because his application is time-dependent and yours is not. If his application can't get packets through for thirty seconds, the connection is as good as dead. If you can't get packets through for thirty seconds, you probably don't even notice, and in the long run it doesn't make any difference.
Until I bust my usage cap, I should be able to do what I want without being throttled.
And the hell with anyone else and what they have paid to do. Yes, I know, the bad guy is the cable company that doesn't provide enough bandwidth so that every customer can get full throughput simultaneously. Becaus
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I'm pretty sure that if you can't get packets through for 30 seconds on a p2p connection you are going to time out... You are basically saying that your phone call is more important than someone else's download.
You are basically saying that because you need to go to work and the roads are congested, I should stay home and not go to the store so you can have a pleasant drive to work.
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I'm pretty sure that if you can't get packets through for 30 seconds on a p2p connection you are going to time out...
So fix P2P so it doesn't time out when it faces delays. It's broken if it does.
You are basically saying that your phone call is more important than someone else's download.
I'm basically saying that getting the packets through for a phone call in a timely manner is more important than getting the packets through immediately for a file sharing connection, yes. Nobody is preventing the file sharing from happening, it's just not as fast as it would be if there were no other users. Gosh, the entire net works that way, at times. Packets for a P2P can be delayed and nothing is hurt. Packets for VoIP bei
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But who says who is more critical? We all accept that ambulances and emergency services are critical and thus take precedence. They have big flashing lights that tell you so. How do you know that the guy in the normal car speeding down the road is trying to get to the hospital because his mother is dieing or he is just being a jerk? I can make the claim that my file is vitally important and screw your phone call. You can have a call with choppy audio but I need that file now. I don't know what your ph
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Not my problem.
Gimme gimme gimme. I'm the only important person on the planet. Ok.
You seem to ignore that the same process that slows you down a bit today might slow someone else down tomorrow when YOUR network traffic needs a bit of priority. It's called "sharing". Part of being a grownup mean knowing how to do that.
Beside, who knows if my P2P application isn't time-dependent?
If you are using a P2P application for time-critical information, then YOU are at fault, not the person who is actually using a time-critical service. You just made it your problem.
My ISP do not throttle anything and I can make VoIP calls just fine.
Thank goodness all ISPs
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If your P2P application is time dependent, it can't be throttled under the CRTC's ITMP framework. If it's not time dependent, it can be.
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Rogers does't even make a distinction between P2P and *ANYTHING* else. That's why they're in trouble.
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You are free to find another VOIP provider that does not permit P2P traffic at all.
Re:It should be throttled. (Score:5, Informative)
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I've always gotten close to it (Score:2)
When I paid for 5Mbps I got 4.9. Now I pay for 25Mbps and I generally get about 22.5.
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Then it would no longer be "neutral", would it?
That's kinda like the whole issue, they are throttling one type of traffic and prioritizing others. If we're all paying the same amount for the same amount of bandwidth, how I use said bandwidth is at my discretion, not yours or my ISPs. If I want to sit here and watch the same Youtube video of adorable kittens over and over and over and over and over again, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, that's my business, is it not?
Why should VOIP or any o
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Then it would no longer be "neutral", would it? That's kinda like the whole issue, they are throttling one type of traffic and prioritizing others.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with prioritizing one KIND of traffic, it has to do with prioritizing SOURCES -- as in "Rogers VoIP services get priority over Skype and Vonage...", or "Rogers streaming video gets priority over Netflix".
Throttling P2P and other non-realtime data so that real-time (VoIP, e.g.) can get through is not violating net neutrality. It's network planning and is part of the IP.
Why should VOIP or any other web service get priority? What makes their usage more worthy of the bandwidth?
VoIP is not a "web service". VoIP should get priority because when bandwith is limited it needs it for th
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VoIP should get priority because when bandwith is limited it needs it for the service to work. Your P2P will handle delays in packets getting through. It doesn't care. VoIP does because people do.
Since when is that my problem? If the ISP isn't providing enough bandwidth to support VOIP along with all the other traffic, they need to bone up on their infrastructure, not start arbitrarily slowing down my perfectly legitimate use of the bandwidth I pay for. What you're basically arguing for is prioritizing one set of customers over another. That's fine if they want to do that, but why the fuck should I have to pay the same rate as they do if I'm not going to receive the same service?
And it's not just
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Since when is that my problem?
Since you signed up for a shared service. While you might be the only user of the cable coming into your house, it isn't very far down the line before it hooks up with a lot of other people and you all get to share the same line.
What you're basically arguing for is prioritizing one set of customers over another.
No, I'm arguing that prioritizing one KIND of traffic from ANY user is ok. That has nothing to do with who the customer is or what "set" they belong to.
but why the fuck should I have to pay the same rate as they do if I'm not going to receive the same service?
Because you are receiving the same service, just using it a different way.
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If my use results in my bandwidth being throttled, how is that "the same service"? The same service is the same bandwidth, not "oh, you're downloading a torrent, so you're only going to get 5 mbps instead of the 10 the VOIP guy is using, but you're both paying for the 10 mbps plan."
Like I said, it sets a horrible precedent, because you know they're going to turn around and do the same thing with video streaming services. "Oh, it's neutral; we're throttling all video streaming traffic, not just Netflix". O
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No. P2P traffic can be delayed, but it shouldn't be throttled. If I'm using my paid for connection and you're using your paid for connection, why should you get more bandwidth than I do?
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>>>P2P traffic should take a lower priority over VOIP and other more interactive traffic.
You didn't read the ____ing summary. This IS an interactive P2P application and that's why it should not be throttled.
Also
If they laid fatter "pipes", like 100 Mbit/sec to every home, they wouldn't need to throttle anything. Throttling is only necessary when you fail to lay sufficient bandwidth to handle the load.
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I think people are confusing arbitrary throttling with priority queues. What Rogers and Bell are doing is arbitrarily limiting the rate of p2p traffic to 25KB/s. This is just rate limiting. If, on the other hand, they would treat VOIP traffic as higher priority and process those packets first, possibly dropping the lower p2p traffic if the link is congested, that would be perfectly fine. Just don't rate limit p2p to 5% of advertised bandwidth for no good reason.
NO. Using port numbers is invalid. (Score:2)
What happens if I write a new VOIP app using a different port? Until it gets big enough to be popular, the ISPs won't prioritize it and it'll have crappy QoS.
The only person with full knowledge of their own traffic patterns is the end user, they should be the ones doing the prioritization. Each subscriber should get a proportional amount of the total pipe based on their current subscribed bandwidth, but your VOIP call shouldn't take priority over my homemade streaming video app.
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P2P traffic should take a lower priority over VOIP and other more interactive traffic. That is just common sense.
No it's not. Traffic is traffic. You want QoS, do it on YOUR end.
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The problem the CRTC has is not that Rogers is throttling P2P. That's perfectly allowed under the CRTC's ITMP framework. The problem is that Rogers is throttling anything on P2P ports over a certain speed, and only whitelisting games after the fact. That's not allowed. If I design a new time-sensitive app and run it on the same port as some P2P software, Rogers will throttle it, and then whitelist it if I complain. This is forbidden.
They basically work on a whitelist system now (throttle everything by defau
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know about the other VOIP solutions.
But if you're using Skype, that is using P2P technology to get across, so when they're throttling P2P, they're throttling Skype. And since many P2P users also encrypt their packets and use the same port as Microsoft Messenger, Microsoft Messenger also becomes collateral damage for P2P throttling.
Some cap (Score:2)
it's no one's business what I do with it unless I'm violating some cap.
Enjoy your 5 GB per month, because wireless is often the only alternative for people dissatistified with cable.
Re: (Score:2)
Doing so would violate net neutrality by prioritizing one service over another service of the same basic type. You don't have to mandate basic round-robin scheduling to avoid the problem you're describing here. All RR scheduling does is ensure that during periods of high demand, neither VoIP solution works instead of both of them working.
disagree...should throttle ONLY based on IP (Score:2)
If we've paid the same, there's no reason for the ISP to throttle us differentially. The ISP has no idea whether I'm using the standard ports for things, so therefore they have no idea whether my packets are latency-sensitive or not. What if I want to do a conference call with some sort of fancy multicast VOIP client that uses nonstandard ports?
In an ideal world the ISP would throttle all current users in a ratio relative to their subscription speed, they would communicate the current allowed speed to the
Re: (Score:2)
If there is some other type of traffic that has a bigger dependence on real-timeliness than VOIP (I doubt it)
SSH.
Re: (Score:2)
I believe it's related to limits on unlimited accounts.