Post Tagged with: "rogers"

Rogers Must Come Clean on Traffic Shaping

Appeared in the Toronto Star on April 16, 2007 as ISP Must Come Clean on 'Traffic Shaping' With well over a million subscribers, Rogers is universally recognized as one of Canada's leading Internet service providers.  The company offers several tiers of services, including the "Extreme" package that boasts of "blistering […]

Read more ›

April 16, 2007 12 comments Columns Archive

Canadian Telecom Competition

The Globe and Mail on why telecom deregulation opens the door to price increases.

Read more ›

April 14, 2007 Comments are Disabled News

The Unintended Consequences of Rogers’ Packet Shaping

A day after the government confirmed its telephone deregulation plan over the objection of a Parliamentary committee and moved forward on plans to create a new, independent telecommunications consumer agency, it is worth pointing to a necessary complaint once that agency is operational (and to the CRTC in the meantime).  For the past 18 months, it has been open secret that Rogers engages in packet shaping, conduct that limits the amount of available bandwidth for certain services such as peer-to-peer file sharing applications.  Rogers denied the practice at first, but effectively acknowledged it in late 2005.  Net neutrality advocates regularly point to traffic shaping as a concern since they fear that Rogers could limit bandwidth to competing content or services.  In response to the packet shaping approach, many file sharing applications now employ encryption to make it difficult to detect the contents of data packets.  This has led to a technical "cat and mouse" game, with Rogers now one of the only ISPs in the world to simply degrade encrypted traffic.

This raises many issues but I would like to focus on just two in this posting.  First, not only is BitTorrent legal in Canada, but a growing percentage of the file swapping on BitTorrent clients is authorized.  This includes a substantial amount of open source software development, independent films, and other large files.  By reducing the bandwidth available for this application, Rogers is impairing the ability for Canadian artists to distribute their work and hampering the development of open source software in Canada.  Moreover, this could lead to a situation where Rogers' own content is unfairly advantaged over competing content.

If that was not bad enough, there is now speculation at my own university that the packet shaping is making it very difficult for University of Ottawa users to use email applications from home.  

Read more ›

April 5, 2007 132 comments News

Net Neutrality in the Media

Amber MacArthur, now with CityNews, produced a good intro to the net neutrality issue.  Interestingly, both Rogers and Bell refused to appear on camera for the story.  Meanwhile, Shane Shick at Computing Canada provides his perspective, concluding that "if we value access to information as we do access to health […]

Read more ›

March 15, 2007 Comments are Disabled News

Rogers Warns Customers on Vista

Several people have written to note that Rogers is warning customers about incompatiblities between Microsoft Vista and Rogers Yahoo Online Protection 2.0.  The company is advising customers to uninstall the security protection when upgrading to Vista. Further, Rogers acknowledges that there are security risks because of the incompatibilities.

Read more ›

March 14, 2007 1 comment News