In March, Canadian gamers were upset to learn that World of Warcraft traffic was being throttled by Rogers Cable and Telecom, the country’s largest broadband provider. Now the company has admitted that other games’ online traffic might trip its pipeline monitors and result in their throttling, which Rogers called “inadvertent.” Canadian gamers do not accept that answer.
Canadian regulators investigated the matter after the Canadian Gamers’ Association requested an inquiry into Rogers’ practices. Rogers, for its part, admitted that the same factors that could lead to Warcraft traffic being “misclassified” as peer-to-peer traffic could have resulted in the same thing happening to Call of Duty: Black Ops multiplayer gaming. Basically, if something goes above 80 kbps or more, that trips the “network management” system, i.e. throttling.
Rogers says that the games in question can all run underneath that rate, and so those who are experiencing throttling must be running some other peer-to-peer application alongside their gaming. Rogers also says the games in question can run fine under that 80 kbps threshold, which the Canadian Gamers’ Association disputes.
Rogers’ counsel, in a letter to the CTRC, complained that the CGA’s co-founder, Jason Koblovsky, wasn’t cooperating to help find a solution. Rogers said it would be pleased if Koblovsky “would allow our technicians to help him find solutions.”
Koblovsky shot back that Rogers was ignoring a simple solution.
“Rather than fixing the issue and actively whitelisting gaming systems to ensure they are not affected … Rogers is continuing to rely on consumer input and complaints rather than put forth the active testing needed to ensure compliance with CRTC policy,” he said in an email. “We believe this approach is inappropriate under these circumstances.”
The CGA will ask the CTRC for a new law requiring providers such as Rogers to have a formal way for customers to report complaints.
Leave a Reply