Rogers ups the traffic throttling ante
p2pnet news | Freedom:- As Canada’s largest ISP, Bell Canada has been getting all the attention in the traffic shaping / net neutrality controversy.
But Ted Rogers also shackles users and his company now seems ready to introduce a spy system leading to what amounts to a double hit on P2P file sharers, as well as a further blow against net neutrality.
“Some of Rogers’ heaviest Internet users could soon be reaching for their wallets before they download ‘free’ movies or video games from file-sharing websites such as BitTorrent,” says the Toronto Star.
For ‘heaviest users’ read P2P file sharers, and Rogers Communications is apparently on the verge of metering downloads, calling it a “utility-type model”.
Under this second tier of traffic throttling, consumers would pay the company according to how much bandwidth was used.
“It’s argued that such an approach will help ensure Rogers’ network isn’t clogged by a small number of users who have a voracious appetite for broadband capacity,” says the story.
This approach does, of course, assume the alleged small number of users really are responsible for hogging bandwidth.
However, as p2pnet’s Ottawa Gal pointed out recently, according to Danny McPherson, CTO of Arbor Networks:
- 20% of traffic comes from P2P applications
- During peak-load times, 70% of subscribers use http.
- Only 20% are using P2P
- Http still makes up most of the total traffic, of which 45% is traditional web content including text and images.
- Streaming video and audio content from services such as YouTube account for nearly 50% of the http traffic.
- Streaming content such as TV shows and YouTube is on the rise.
“Rogers has already introduced usage caps on its various tiers of home Internet service, which have traditionally been priced in Canada as all-you-can eat services, albeit with varying levels of download speeds,” says the Toronto Star.
Exceeding existing limits, “will trigger extra charges,” says the story going on to quote company CEO Ted Rogers is saying proudly, “I believe this will be the first time that this has been done in North America.”
“Rogers is rolling out a system that will place alerts directly on the Web page a subscriber is viewing,” ‘alerts’ being a euphemism for ‘warnings’.
But, states company COO Nadir Mohamed, Rogers will continued to shackle traffic to “relieve congestion during peak hours” by, “using special software to sniff out bandwidth-hungry applications such as peer-to-peer services and steer the data into the equivalent of an Internet slow lane”.
“Canadian Net users and smaller ISPs have become allies in a bid to force telco giant Bell Canada to stop using P2P file sharers as an excuse to shackle bandwidth,” p2pnet posted recently, going on >>>
Called traffic shaping or throttling, the corporate ‘management’ action not only severely restricts services users have paid for, it also impacts net neutrality and prevents online freedom of speech, say critics. In its first submission to the CRTC (Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission) CAIP demanded Canada Bell be ordered to to immediately halt its traffic throttling activities. Bell responded by virtually telling CAIP and Bell customers —- users and ISPs alike —- to take a hike.
CAIP has now come back with a second CRTC submission in which it asks for an interim order on an, ‘urgent and expedited basis’ telling Bell Canada to, ‘immediately cease and desist’ from interfering with the wholesale ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) access services it sells to competitors, especially its tariffed Gateway Access Service (’GAS’).
Bell also claims it’s being forced to use throttling because of the activities of 5% of users.
Rogers will, of course, be well aware its decision to introduce a Big Brother-like monitoring system on top of its existing bandwidth shackling policies will add fuel to the raging net neutrality controversy, but clearly believes it’ll win the day, suggesting industry minister Jim Prentice is well aware of the move and hasn’t evidence disapproval.
Smaller ISPs who, like their customers, are vigorously protesting the use of traffic shaping, are staging a protest rally in Ottawa on May 15.
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.Stumble It!
traffic shaping / net neutrality – Canadians vs Bell Canada: CAIP, II, April 25, 2008
Toronto Star – Rogers to limit ‘free’ Internet, April 30, 2008
Ottawa Gal – Bell Canada’s ‘5% of users’ claim trashed, II, April 25, 2008
p2pnet – Canadians vs Bell Canada: CAIP, II, April 25, 2008
protest rally in Ottawa – Net neutrality rally now May 15, April 24, 2008
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April 30th, 2008 at 5:46 am
I don’t get it. Rogers already has bandwidth caps. For example, witht their “Express” service, you get 60GB/month, then it’s 2$/GB extra. So what’s new about this???
April 30th, 2008 at 5:54 am
I don’t think everyone is aware that Rogers is injecting adds/notices in the web pages they view.
April 30th, 2008 at 5:55 am
So whatâs new about this???
“Rogers is rolling out a system that will place alerts directly on the Web page a subscriber is viewing” for one thing
April 30th, 2008 at 6:02 am
that’s it?
I guess if my bandwidth was limited, I would be glad that my ISP alerts me before they start charging me extra. I don’t see how this will “will add fuel to the raging net neutrality controversy”.
Most major ISPs in Canada have monthly caps on the bandwidth use.
April 30th, 2008 at 6:46 am
I agree with the above poster. This is just another phony P2Pnet alarmist story written so Newton can rake in more advertising dollars.
April 30th, 2008 at 6:49 am
I wonder if their new ‘extra’ charges will be as exorbitant as they are now. I’m certainly not as big as Rogers and I currently pay .20 cents a gigabyte on a small virtual hosting account. On one of my managed servers I pay $20 per 1Mbps, which works out to roughly 300 gigabytes per month. I’d be more then willing to pay Roger $40/month for 300 gigs of bandwidth but he would probably want about $750.
April 30th, 2008 at 7:13 am
@ the “phony” user comment
lol “another phony P2Pnet alarmist story”
LOL
If its so phony, then I dare you to state it in this Rogers forum to the actual NON-PHONY users who already got the Rogers web injections and so forth:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/rogers
Go on I dare you. Tell them its all make believe phony hype and its never happened and what they are experiencing is an acid trip.
Dare you..
:p
April 30th, 2008 at 7:18 am
@ “so Newton can rake in more advertising dollars”
The income from the new ads started a couple of weeks ago has reached a staggering $21 (twenty one).
Cheers!
April 30th, 2008 at 8:01 am
So according to the DSLreport forum,
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20286767-Extreme-Overusage-Reminder-Banners-while-you-surf-now
it seems as if Rogers had monthly bandwidth caps but was not charging if you exceeeded the cap? can a Rogers subscriber confirm?
If the banner only pops up once a month, then I don’t see this as a problem. BUt if it stays there everyday, that’s way too annoying.
April 30th, 2008 at 11:42 am
If Bell or Rogers was tapping our phone lines shouldn’t they be charged with a crime, and how in the hell can they be trusted with voip and iptv data streams if its their competition and they make millions of dollars from selling similar or same services to control it, it would be like hiring mangers who work for walmart to manage zellers. Their is a major shift in technology for phone and tv and these companies have a big portion of their infrastructure built on these models which will be irrelevant soon, soon as they build fiber network to our door which will be in a 100 years if they have their way. There is lot at risk here and I think bell and Rogers are hoping will miss it, you cannot give these companies that much control they will benefit and will suffer for it. For the people by the people, it should be government run or heavy regulated. Lets get a list going of all things at stake and send them to CRTC.
April 30th, 2008 at 11:55 am
You shut your damn mouth! Uncle Ted is a good man!
Dont write articles when you dont know what’s going on. Half of this is cutting and pasting quotes.
Come on!
April 30th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
this issue with the banner ads, is they are forcing their content on top of what you actually look for.
when this story first broke several months ago, Google was up in arms because they were the first site that Rogers said they would place banner ads onto. Rogers should not be allowed to place their content on top of the content actually desired by the user.
additionally, the deep packet inspection used to determine what kind of data is sent by end users, and then throttling by type is the real concern.
Net Neutrality is the belief that all content on the internet should be treated equally. A service provider such as Rogers should not be allowed to provide one type of content over another.
the equivalent, would be the national postal service opening your mail, and deciding how fast they want to deliver it, or, whether they want to deliver it at all, purely based on the content of the package. additionally, using this example, the postal service could then decide that if you want this content, you must pay EXTRA, simply because they have decided that this will be the case.
the ongoing concerns are that service providers will engage in deals with content providers to limit or exclude the transmission of information.
and, let me tell you, I know first hand that this is already happening.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Well, I’m personally going to get another smaller company. I use p2p once in blue moon, and frankly what the hell is the use of high speed for regular web pages? There isn’t one..save for youtube etc., and frankly…paying all that money to watch people sing, dance, stupid pet tricks etc., is not really worth it.
I never use the internet at home anymore, email is about the extent or msn.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
As a web site designer and a hosting provider I am disgusted that Rogers can deface my work and inject adds or warnings into it. How do i carge them for this use of my space?
April 30th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Fuckin’ government… why don’t they get off their asses and do something useful for once. We need a Pirate Party, like Sweden
April 30th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
I think the largest issue here is the fact that Rogers is injecting the words “Rogers Yahoo!” into google.com. From Google’s standpoint, they can’t be too happy about a direct competitor’s name being added to their homepage.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
well now isnt this special –
I remember a time when we only had 3 tv channels, – news came from kindly old gentleman with an authoritative voice at 6pm and lasted half an hour – dads were the bread winners, mail and milk were delivered to your door, not some box down the block, kids played real games outside(we were not allowed inside if it was light out), and the ever present threat of the world being blown to bits by a nuclear bomb launched by our arch enemy the commies, made life seem real —
Big Brother was a “possible” future written about in the book 1984 – (yes people actually read back then too)
whats my point?
We’ve become too dependent on this internet “pass time”! We’re at the point where most people think its a right – not a privilege – to be online. Personally I think we’ve become lazy and spoiled – we’ve let so many others do the thinking for us for so long that we now have less control over our lives than at any other time in our history. Sure the internet provides an abundance of information, but its overwhelmingly used for watching movies, stealing intellectual property and playing games until 3am and the biggest use of all – PORN. — Instead of empowering people – it’s put them to sleep. Instead of enriching our lives, it’s made us fat. Instead of creating child geniuses, it has instilled and re-enforced the need of instant gratification.
– if everyone was to get the hell outside and do something other than “PLAY” on computers, maybe the MONSTERS that run internet access in CANADA wouldn’t be so damn powerful. Guard yourself against complacency – take a walk and clear your head
Lets all get off our asses and do something real for a change
April 30th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Hear, hear Old Dude!
..to all points. Here’s another….spell check has taken away correct spelling. Everywhere I go , no matter what position in society or high up on the ladder……PEOPLE CAN’T SPELL. (look at some of the above letters)
And society is worried about bandwith……….at least we could spell it in our era.
Peace
April 30th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Why should we be forced to endure the “message” and “brand” being injected into our daily life?
Does Bell Canada have the right to cut into a phone call to let us know we’re behind on our telephone bill?
Rogers is pushing the envelope with this by dressing a wolf in sheep’s clothing, just as Bell Canada with its tightening of the pipes under the guise of “network management”. This is how our freedoms are eroded. Slowly, establishing acceptance and precedent. Do not be mistaken, this is indeed the sacred cow of Net Neutrality being slaughtered. One porterhouse at a time.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
A shaw tech mentioned they need to save bandwidth for thier oversold VOIP application. Now they are dealing with a network that is too slow for all the VOIP contracts they have sold.
The plan is to harrass their internet customers and run traffic shaping to save the expense of a required expansion they would need so their network can handle VOIP alongside their regular traffic running at normal speeds.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Hannibal went down , Egypt went down , other civilizations went down, communism went down ,Hitler went down , others mother suckers went down, so will rogers and buBell (means super crap in my language )
alleluia amen
April 30th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
@ Old Dudette
Please don’t feed the trolls =D
April 30th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Everyone:
Just uninstall your P2P apps and don’t buy anything. Everyone wants your money, get it?
Try living life like it was before the internet, I know you can do it. I can still listen to a ballgame on the radio for free. I have unlimited chat with the neighbours. Here in Canada, you can still watch TV with an antenna and there’s no subscriber fee (Try it). It’s not a bad idea. The internet is not that important! Really!… And now I am going to shut off this computer, go outside and gaze at the stars. B-Bye!
April 30th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Dave, you hit the nail on the head. They are like an airline that oversold seats and are now looking to bump.
As for you Dude & Dudette, should you not be outside playing with your children rather than hypocritically slamming technology. Oh sorry, you are probably dogging it, surfing, and wasting your employerâs money at the office.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Dudette
“bandwidth” not “bandwith” lmao. Nice spelling lesson your passing out there. Might wanna STFU from now on.
April 30th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
I worked for the local telephone company in BC, in the engineering end of things, until I retired. There was the commercial sale of bandwidth according to use and then there was the home users which were treated differently. Now that there are users who want huge downloads (movies are huge) it just seems like a logical step to start metering us the home user as well. Eventually we may see systems that provide much broader bandwidth but that’s not here yet, the providers like the big telcos and the cable companies haven’t kept up with demand. It will be interesting to see how it develops.
April 30th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
nscout, this isn’t simply an issue of a metered rate. this is metered based on the type of content.
imagine if you electrical company charged you more per kilowatt for electricity that powered your third-party oven than for electricity that powers a device that is branded by them.
that is the conflict that arises out of Rogers owning both content (ie television channels) and the service (physical cable tv lines).
they could, and likely will, charge more for content provided over the internet that competes with their television offerings.
April 30th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
I found myself a solution: Teksavvy! Their service is available in my area and I am in the process of switching Isps. I am sick and tired of handing my hard earned money over to Ted Rogers. He is a money-hungry old man and I am fed-up. He has no right to spy on us. We are not to blame his company cannot handle Internet and cable TV at a decent capacity. I do hope a lot of people drop Rogers and go for the competition. Fuck the CRTC! It allows these ***holes to have monopoly and do as they please!
ENOUGH!
April 30th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Mr Br Sir
Solution is Linksys router model WRT54GS with DD-wrt professional open source software installed
make yourself external wi-fi 2.4ghz antenna (see Google for it) , and of you go .
suck the suckers good luck
April 30th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
this debate is about figuring out how much we want to limit our potential as a civilization, by deliberately crippling our most promising technology, in order to protect our economic underpinnings. the whole logic of it is unsustainable.
clearly its time to reconsider how intrinsic this infrastructure is to our society. Its beginning to feel like one or two private corporations own all the roads in Canada. To complete the metaphor, they only let people drive on half of the available lanes, and pack the cars tighter in order to maximize profits. Now they want to convert a few of the available lanes into slow lanes, and that way pack the rest of the cars even tighter. building more lanes or simply opening the ones that are mothballed in order to relieve congestion isn’t even part of the discussion.
we could just face reality and recognize this is now an essential service, but we don’t have the moral courage to do the obvious and nationalize just yet, and given our quaint economic dispositions, we’ll probably settle for regulating all sorts of complicated and corrupt pseudo-market systems, and do our somewhat best to introduce sorta-competition.
But pretty soon its going to look pretty silly having the short term profit concerns of a couple of companies choke the economy and hold the rest of the market hostage. Anyway, these companies are needlessly alienating people for marginal gains and what may be remembered as a heroic, but misguided and hopeless assault on online video content. fairly foolish given the context.
ultimately, its a cry for help from companies that are squeamish with the idea of a world where cabling “to your house” and archaic “tv” type push media are irrelevant. the whole p2p etc nonsense is just a backdrop with which to create the required precedent to charge for traffic at different speeds. Once a slow lane is made, you can imagine a fast lane is soon to follow. once client side cabling is irrelevant, this may represent the only form of income and control they can hope for. in short, the antithesis of net neutrality is the long term business plan.
May 1st, 2008 at 12:34 am
and i can’t wait for someone to sue rogers for altring the view of copyrighted material of a website. YES this is perfect.
And its basically done via commercial purpose therefore it is punishable by a hefty fine and jail time.
Ask Maven the pirate how it went Mr. Ted “dumbass” Rogers.
January 24th, 2009 at 5:57 am
this throttling issue is one that has hit hard at my home office. i used to be with bell business dsl service 6 meg advertised . ( 4 meg actual due to network limitations and distance from hub) so after taking some ” advice ” from neighbors on rogers i switched for the 10 meg extreme package. install was easy and the tech even ran me a dedicated line for my service … line test showed 96% quality. speed tests at several sites including the rogers supported one. netted me 9.6 meg downstream / .996 meg upstream. nice and fast a near perfect connection …. so i thought. when using p2p apps i am limited to 5kbits a second, yes bits not bytes. downloading ubuntu a free open source linux based os from utorrent saw a maximum DL speed of 200kb/sec. according to rogers this is a fair throttle and support for p2p is non existant. they even had the balls to tell me to call microsoft and complain to them. ? i have had the service for 3 days now and there is no way i could have exceded any bandwidth usage caps. and the two neighbors i listed to, being on the same smp ( node ) are not throttled anywhere near this severe. oh yeah did i mention i am paying out the arse for business service!! there needs to be complaints sent to the CRTC. remember the old addage ” the squeeky wheel gets the most greese”
and yes i have a router, linksys /cisco systems and YES it is configured properly. and no the issue does not lie within my pc.