Rogers Admits To Throttling World Of Warcraft [Canadian ISP With Already Horrible Monthly Bandwidth Caps Now Admits That They Accidentally Throttled WoW Gamer, Blames Software]

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It’s no secret that if you start clogging up your DSL or cable connection by download massive amounts of porn or something else from BitTorrent, the ISPs will gently being throttling you back so you don’t hamper the internet connections of everybody on your block. But, after users complained that their innocuous World of Warcraft traffic was being throttled back, Rogers admitted that they had been doing that, albeit “accidentally”.

Rogers customer Teresa Murphy filed a complaint against Rogers with the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission), the Canadian communications regulatory agency, claiming that their protocol-based throttling technique wasn’t exactly bulletproof. She complains:

Rogers’ filters are picking up several very low bandwidth-intensive games incorrectly as P2P activity. Provided these games are fully patched, they can play on a dialup connection with minimal issues, and uses approximately 100-200MB of your monthly cap (as stated by a game manufacturer employee, on the game’s public forums). It’s really not that much considering a single Netflix video in HD is 4GB. These games are time-sensitive applications (such as VOIP is), and like any time-sensitive application will lose connection if throttled, which is why they aren’t supposed to be throttled…

I don’t use P2P at ALL, and yet I’m still affected by this issue because Rogers sees my gaming traffic incorrectly as P2P… Personally, I wouldn’t even care about P2P being throttled, except for the fact that Rogers’ filters are so shoddy they’re lumping non-P2P in with P2P, making many applications completely unusable. Please continue to look into this. It’s not fair that Rogers customers are paying for a service they can’t even use.

After getting pressure from the CRTC, Rogers admitted they had accidentally throttled the game:

Our tests have determined that there is a problem with our traffic management equipment that can interfere with World of Warcraft. We have been in contact with the game manufacturer and we have been working with our equipment supplier to overcome this problem. We recently introduced a software modification to solve the problems our customers are experiencing withWorld of Warcraft. However, there have been recent changes to the game, which has created new problems. A second software modification to address these new issues will not be ready until June.

To workaround the problem, Rogers suggests turning off the “peer-to-peer settings” in the game, as well as making sure that nobody else on your net connection is running a P2P client.

This certainly doesn’t look good for Rogers, and has to be a case against protocol-based throttling.

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