Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games

[Sep 17, 2011, 12:15 pm ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission issued an order yesterday to Rogers Communications giving the internet provider until September 27 to formulate a plan to cease throttling online games such as World of Warcraft, reports the Calgary Herald. Noting that Rogers own traffic management policy states that "online games, such as World of Warcraft, should not be throttled or slowed down, and would only be affected if Rogers misclassifies the games and other peer-to-peer applications were running at the same time." For its part, Rogers states it has corrected the issue with World of Warcraft and is "not aware of any problems with any other online games." Thanks Ant via Slashdot.

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Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games

Sep 17, 2011, 14:53

Parallax Abstraction

SpectralMeat wrote on Sep 17, 2011, 14:35:
I am thinking about switching to Teksavy a lot cheaper then Rogers. unfortunately I used my Rogers e-mail address to register to a lot of things that are pretty important and I am in the process currently to switch everything over to something like gmail or yahoo mail. That currently is my biggest obstacle to get over.

The only reason ISPs still offer e-mail service for free rather than removing it or charging a fee for it is so they can lock you to them. My girlfriend's parents used Bell and have hated the service for years but her Dad refused to go through the hassle of switching because everyone he knows is only aware of his @sympatico.ca address. I argued with him about that for months before he finally got fed up with outages they were having, e-mailed everyone he knew to say he was switching to GMail and dumped Bell for TekSavvy Cable. He's thanked me multiple times for pushing him on it because it's faster, way cheaper and doesn't go down every few hours. Plus when he calls tech support, he gets someone in Canada!

As big a hassle as switching e-mail is, as long as you do it to a public service like GMail, you only have to do it once. It also seems like a bigger hassle than it often is. If you e-mail your contact list a month or two before changing and make a list of everything you subscribe to (most services let you change the address of an existing subscription), it's not too bad. Some people will even downgrade their old ISP service to the lowest possible tier for a couple of months after switching to give more transition time but that's a bit extreme.

The only disadvantage of 3rd parties is there's higher initial setup costs because you have to buy the modem up front for usually around $100. In the end, you save money though as Rogers/Bell charge at least $5/month in perpetuity to rent their modem and most of the time, they're old modems which don't handle the modern error correction and congestion management methods the newer ones do. But when you buy a modem to sign up with a 3rd party, you own it and can take it to any other cable provider you want. Rogers will even let some modems the 3rd parties use back on their system if you push them about it.

The best thing Canadians can do right now to avoid the kind of nonsense being mentioned in this story (as well as other pressing issues like UBB) is stop giving these greedy big telcos your money and go to their leaner competitors who know how to provide good service. Rogers still makes money off of companies like TekSavvy but it's far less than they make if you subscribe to them directly.




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		Date	Subject	Author
	1.	Sep 17, 12:20	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Cutter
	2.	Sep 17, 12:25	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	necrosis
	4.	Sep 17, 12:45	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Parallax Abstraction
	3.	Sep 17, 12:42	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Parallax Abstraction
	5.	Sep 17, 13:10	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Minuit
	7.	Sep 17, 14:23	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Cutter
	11.	Sep 17, 14:50	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Mashiki Amiketo
	22.	Sep 17, 17:12	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Cutter
	24.	Sep 17, 18:12	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Mashiki Amiketo
	26.	Sep 17, 22:53	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Teddy
	27.	Sep 17, 23:20	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Mashiki Amiketo
	28.	Sep 18, 00:58	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Fantaz
	29.	Sep 18, 01:04	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	PHJF
	30.	Sep 18, 02:48	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Fantaz
	37.	Sep 18, 13:42	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Parallax Abstraction
	34.	Sep 18, 10:07	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Riker
	35.	Sep 18, 13:42	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Alamar
	36.	Sep 18, 13:42	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Parallax Abstraction
	31.	Sep 18, 03:16	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Bhruic
	32.	Sep 18, 07:52	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Teddy
	33.	Sep 18, 09:46	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Bhruic
	38.	Sep 18, 14:29	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Mashiki Amiketo
	40.	Sep 18, 20:47	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Bhruic
	39.	Sep 18, 15:03	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	dubfanatic
	13.	Sep 17, 14:58	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Tanto Edge
	16.	Sep 17, 15:45	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	beigemore
	18.	Sep 17, 16:20	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	jdreyer
	6.	Sep 17, 13:36	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	theyarecomingforyou
	8.	Sep 17, 14:25	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	necrosis
	9.	Sep 17, 14:35	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	SpectralMeat
>>	12.	Sep 17, 14:53	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Parallax Abstraction
	14.	Sep 17, 15:05	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	SpectralMeat
	15.	Sep 17, 15:22	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Mashiki Amiketo
	17.	Sep 17, 16:11	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Dev
	10.	Sep 17, 14:45	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Wallshadows
	19.	Sep 17, 16:25	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	jdreyer
	20.	Sep 17, 16:26	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Dev
	21.	Sep 17, 16:38	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Pigeon
	23.	Sep 17, 17:46	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Dev
	25.	Sep 17, 19:26	Re: Rogers Ordered to Stop Throttling WoW and Other Games	Riker