Rogers Admits Traffic Management Throttles World of Warcraft
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Thank you for posting this
The other complainant and myself are currently drafting a response to Rogers, asking about the OTHER games and services which are also being throttled, which Rogers forum agents seem to be ignoring. 7 months from the issue arising to being fixed because their employees were ignoring all customer complaints regarding this issue is completely unacceptable.
…
Well… while WoW does use P2P technology to transfer patches, the bandwidth use of the game proper should not be THAT hight to actually be a danger to the infrastructure.
But ofcourse, that would actually ask canadian ISPs to have sane reason to screw errrm i mean “manage” the traffic on their network to “prevent” network congestion.
Of course DRM and throttling is ONLY for pirates.
Looks to me
like the settings in the software are to enable throttling on a stream by default and then turn it off if we know what the stream is. Using this type of setup of course it’ll throttle if the stream changes…
Is there no harder way?
Sales
I find it somewhat amusing that the providers are telling us they can’t provide all the bandwidth they are selling us.
It’s a bit like you going to the gas station, pay for 50l but then only get 25l because the gas station oversold the gas. Nobody would take that.
Instead of UBB or throttling providers should be forced to only sell the bandwidth to their end customers that they can actually provide.
@Michael
Sort of, but I would express it as the right to buy up to 50 litres of gas over one month, and the ability to take delivery of it at up to 1 litre per second when you are taking delivery.
To me, under a proper UBB situation you would pay $X for the connection to the network at a specified speed, and then $Y per Gigabyte for the actual data transported (uplink plus downlink) to cover the use of the network. To put this into a telephone perspective, this would be $X for the connection and then you pay for every call, local or long distance (picture pay as you go cellular). Where there is a third party ISP that is offering an “unlimited” cap, they are charging you for the access at a particular speed.
Based on the description of where the congestion occurs, it appears to me that the problem experienced by Bell et al is WHERE they plug the third party ISP into their network… rather than plugging them into the backbone directly they’ve decided to plug them into one of the feeders, assuming that the usage patterns would be the same as they’ve decided that their own customers would exhibit under different contractual conditions.
Technical info
Firstly, this has been true for some years. Though Rogers has recently stepped up its aggressiveness wrt to torrents. In fact, they can’t reliably detect torrents, so they hammer on anything encrypted that doesn’t seem to be a VPN.
Anyway, the reason this is a problem is because when Rogers detects P2P, it imposes a massive traffic jitter. So your ping times, instead of being a nice reliable 5-10ms, vary wildly between 10ms and 2000ms. Basically, this makes WoW unplayable because the time it takes for your game to talk to the server suddenly becomes very very random and the game doesn’t like it (and will eventually kick you).
I don’t get why this is suddenly news though- it’s been true for about as long as Rogers have been throttling traffic. I guess more people are noticing now because WoW actually does P2P download while the game is running, whereas before the 4.0 release (December) it was only doing P2P when the game wasn’t running.
@Christian
Wow’s had P2P for patching for years. Its NEVER affected gameplay before these botched DPI updates in September.
Also, there is NO P2P download while the game is running. If theres a download while the game is running due to users logging in before being fully patched (as was changed with 4.0.1 in October, NOT December), its a direct stream on port 80. This has been stated several times by Blizzard staff.
Opportunity
TekSavvy should make a hard marketing push for Rogers WoW players. I think they would get a lot of converts.