Rogers to End Throttling in March – Now That They Can Just Charge Users an Arm and a Leg
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For most of the last decade nobody has exemplified the clumsy, ham-fisted approach to network management better than Canadian cable company Rogers. From crippling encryption and VPNs to <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/116080″>throttling legitimate apps and games like World of Warcraft, Rogers has accounted for nearly <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/115059″>half of all network neutrality infractions in Canada. Recent MLabs data highlighted that Rogers was among the <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/116699″>worst ISPs in the world when it comes to aggressively slowing user traffic.
It was Rogers constant and clumsy throttling of World of Warcraft traffic that finally got the company in hot water with regulators, the CRTC last week <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/118046″>officially ruling Rogers was violating Canada’s new network neutrality rules after years of complaints.
Many of those complaints originated right here in our forums, with anger from Jason Koblovsky, Teresa Murphy and the Canadian Gamers Organization leading to a campaign pushing the CRTC to finally act. In a response to the CRTC, Rogers today announced that they’ll finally stop throttling user traffic starting in March. The move comes on the heels of a <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/117512″>similar December decision by Bell.
“New technologies and ongoing investments in network capacity will allow Rogers to begin phasing out that policy starting in March 2012,” said Kenneth Engelhart, senior vice-president of regulatory affairs in the filing. “These changes will be introduced to half of Rogers existing Internet customers by June 2012 and to its remaining customers by December 2012.”
While that’s certainly a win for users, Rogers spends the lion’s share of their filing taking pot shots at the CRTC and denying any wrongdoing in their implementation of Internet Traffic Management Practices (ITMP). While acknowledging a “few isolated cases of misclassification,” Rogers continues to insist their network management platforms rarely catch legitimate traffic in their net.
Rogers says that “out of an abundance of caution” and “to allay any concerns which the Commission s investigation may have created,” the company has reconfigured their Cisco hardware so that unclassified traffic that utilizes peer-to-peer ports are no longer traffic managed. In other words, Rogers has finally agreed to obey Canadian law but, despite being <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/MLab-Data-Highlights-the-Evolution-of-ISP-Throttling-116699″>universally derided as one of the worst ISPs in the world when it comes to heavy-handed network management — still swears they didn’t do anything wrong.
Either way, users in our forums say they’ll take it. Some argue the glacially-moving CRTC and Canada’s new network neutrality rules are to thank for Rogers’ begrudging change of heart. Others believe Rogers’ moves are motivated by the fact that the CRTC recently allowed incumbent ISPs to <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/117089″>drastically raise (already very high) rates on consumers and wholesalers, making dramatically degrading the quality of the bandwidth delivered less useful. In other words, cue the broadband price increases.
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