About a month ago, a Canadian gamer and World of Warcraft player wrote an angry letter to the government’s telecom regulator to complain that her ISP, Rogers, was inappropriately throttling WoW, making it essentially unplayable.
Normally, ISPs like Rogers use an aggressive deep packet inspection (DPI) based throttling system to track and throttle peer-to-peer traffic, which is used by services such as BitTorrent. However, the system Rogers uses incorrectly identifies WoW as P2P, thus throttling it “accidentally,” according to Rogers.
An excerpt from Teresa Murphy’s complaint details the issue, as she writes:
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.
When the CRTC forwarded the complaint to Rogers, Rogers admitted they know there is a problem, but that it won’t be a quick fix, saying it may be June until a fix can be made. However, Rogers stands firm in that the game is only throttled if a person concurrently runs P2P software, and recommends “turning off the peer-to-peer setting in the World of Warcraft game and ensuring that no peer-to-peer applications are running on any connected computer.”
It makes me wonder if other MMOs have similar problems with Rogers, or if it is isolated to WoW. Any of you have Rogers who have had issues playing MMOs?
[Source: Ars Technica]
Rebecca actually doesn't live in Canada, but will do her best to think "North"! She currently resides in Houston, Texas, with her husband, four chihuahuas, and pretty much every modern video game machine she can get her paws on. She is a particular fan of handheld gaming, particularly on her DSi XL, iPhone, and iPad.
Yeah, I’ve had issues when I used to play WoW. Our provider is Rogers. They pretty much suck, but they don’t offer Bell in the area so we’re stuck.
I hear Bell is much, much worse. Unfortunately I don’t think an independent alternative (Teksavvy) is in your future, since they’re not even in the city I live in yet. =(
Hi Rebecca
I am Elise with Rogers and would like to bring some details.
As you mention in your blog post, we have been investigating issues related to World of Warcraft (WoW) and we recomment a temporary workaround.
What we know today is that there is a problem with our traffic management equipment that is inadvertently slowing the game for some customers. While we have fixed some issues with a software modification, new problems have emerged that we expect will be addressed with a second software update in June.
As you explain, we believe the problem occurs when P2P is running while simultaneously playing the game. If customers like Dana are experiencing problems we suggest they turn off the peer to peer setting within the WoW game and ensure no other P2P file sharing applications are running while playing WoW. WoW does use P2P for software updates, but with this setting changed you should continue to automatically receive software updates through other methods.
This is only a temporary solution. We continue to work closely with the game manufacturer and our equipment supplier to help resolve this issue as soon as possible.
We also want to thank all our customers for their patience while we are working on this issue.
This updet in Rogers image looks good on them. I am not a gamer but I do use P2P on a business level and really hate their (rogers) dishonesty and gouging.
I signed up for a service with no caps. Althought Rogers has increased my bandwidth speed they have introduce caps withoutfurther agreement from it’s clients.
How can a provider advertise a bandwidth when they cap it’s usage to a few days worth of service at that speed? Then, to add insult to injury, Rogers begins to throttle cetain packettes. I would be sure non ofthis would be stated up front in any contract arrangement for service. This would also violate the agreement for arranged bandwidth speed. This is not an Internet bottleneck problem, this is voluntary restriction of agreed speed capability.
To further and complicate things, Rogers is doing packette inspection to accomplish this speed trap. Rogers can now be implicated in future litigation cases as knowing what transpired, legally and yet not showing the diligence due to arrest any illegal activities. Withholding evidence is a futher possibilty.