Canada's telecommunications regulator appears none too pleased with Rogers Communications explanation for the throttling of game streams over its cable ISP network. The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission wants the company to crank out out a plan for fixing the problem—and by Tuesday, September 27. Bottom line: Rogers must come up with a scheme to avoid the "misclassification" of interactive game traffic, so that its network management system won't shape and slow World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, and other popular games.

"Commission staff also requests that Rogers provide a detailed report to the Commission once the problem is resolved, demonstrating that the problem has been fixed," the letter continues. The requested document should include an overview of the solution, how it deals with the "underlying" dilemma, and "a description of the changes made to Rogers' ITMP [Internet Traffic Management Practices] disclosures in order to accurately reflect resolution of this problem."

On top of that, it appears that the CRTC plans to issue new guidelines "for responding to complaints and enforcing framework compliance by Internet service providers" this week. Critics of Rogers hope that will make it easier to resolve ISP/game related disputes.

Cataclysms

This particular snafu started showing up at the CRTC's door almost a year ago, when Canadian users of WoW began complaining of traffic shaping interference—something Canadian ISPs do during peak traffic periods. As a December 2010 letter to the Commission presented the problem, Blizzard's WoW expansion "Cataclysm" included content-to-client mechanisms that caused ISPs to mistake streams for P2P traffic, thus exposed to network management throttling.

The complaint charged that while Bell Canada seemed to be addressing the snag, Rogers was ignoring it. "I would like to conclude by observing that this is a perfect example of the type of scenario's net neutrality is supposed to protect," the missive contended:

The Rogers customers that are impacted by this problem aren't engaging in illegal activity; they aren't sharing copyrighted materials and they also are not impacting Rogers' ability to manage their network (in fact, the communication bandwidth that the World of Warcraft client requires is quite small). Instead, they are trying to enjoy a subscription service that they have paid for, and paid for twice over.

Ditto declared gamer Teresa Murphy in a subsequent letter:

Users have been complaining to Rogers about disconnections and latency increases, making gaming in World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2 impossible to do during peak periods (which just happens to be when Rogers shapes traffic). Unfortunately, nothing was done because Rogers Tier 1 Tech Support workers refused to open service tickets to actually look into the issue, and to add to this, they vehemently denied Rogers was throttling/packet shaping at all to customers, despite the ITMP stating (at the time) they did indeed throttle p2p uploads.

It took a while, but the volume of complaints eventually aroused the CRTC's attention. Commission staff "is in receipt of the attached customer complaint" regarding Roger ISP practices, a February 23, 2011 letter to Rogers politely noted—the letter in question was Murphy's. The notice added that CRTC rules stipulate that network practices that result in a "noticeable degradation of time sensitive audio or video traffic" must receive a green light from the agency before being deployed.

Whitelisting

This and subsequent requests prompted Rogers to look into the matter. By March the cable ISP admitted that the problem was real. Its more detailed response came in the form of a network engineering report, dated July 25, 2011. The self-audit explained that by May, Rogers engineers understood that a "misclassification" of World of Warcraft had occurred. And so "a fix was put in place," the company explained—"whitelisting" WoW in a manner that excluded it from traffic management.

But as the CRTC kept communicating with Rogers (presumably in response to consumer complaints), the ISP went back to the lab to see what continued to go wrong. During July tests, the company couldn't observe any misclassification of WoW at all, regardless of whether whitelisting was applied. "Rogers suspects this is due to changes that might have been made to the game," the engineering survey noted.

And so Rogers deployed an "upgraded" whitelisting system. "The upgraded solution does not even classify the whitelisted traffic," the report explained. "We are confident that this solution prevents WoW traffic from being subject to traffic management and this is confirmed by all of our tests."

Only if you P2P

Despite this, the gamer gripes and CRTC pleas for further investigation continued to arrive at Rogers' door. One of these included the strong suspicion that the impact of Rogers' network management system on games was "a lot more widespread" than just WoW. The Commission now wanted to know whether Rogers' ITMP system was affecting games besides Warcraft, and possibly even non-gaming applications. Has Rogers tested for this? Is it disclosing this problem to its customers? The government wanted more answers.

Rogers' September 2 response outlined the cable ISPs' current policies regarding games and P2P applications. Keep in mind that Rogers' traffic management policy is to limit upstream P2P file sharing data on applications like BitTorrent and uTorrent to 80kpbs:

In the case of World of Warcraft, we found, in the tests we conducted, that no customer impact is identified unless P2P file sharing applications are running at the same time thereby driving traffic to over 80 kbps. World of Warcraft runs well below 80 kbps. It therefore would not otherwise be impacted by our ITMP which is activated for traffic at 80 kbps and above. Similarly, in respect of other games, gaming systems or non-related gaming applications that have been reported to us by our customers, we have tested them and found that there is no impact on customers when P2P applications are not also running. Like World of Warcraft, other games also run well below 80 kbps and therefore would only be impacted by our ITMP if they were misclassified and other P2P applications were running at the same time.

Not so fast

With Rogers' re-acknowledgement that it does shape WoW traffic under certain P2P related conditions, the CRTC clearly wants the ISP to come up with an alternative approach.

In 2009, "the Commission stated that when noticeable service degradation occurs to time-sensitive traffic, it amounts to controlling the content and influencing the meaning and purpose of the telecommunications in question," the September 16 letter advises. This is a reference to the CRTC's ambiguously worded Telecom Regulatory Policy of October 2009, which emphasized that ISP traffic shaping should be used only as a last resort.

Based on the September 2 response, "Commission staff considers that Rogers' ITMPs could potentially continue to misclassify time-sensitive traffic such as other online games and therefore this could be affecting those games. Commission staff considers that Rogers should address and resolve this misclassification problem."

We contacted Teresa Murphy for a response to this latest development. She and co-complainant Jason Koblovsky run the Canadian Gamers Organization. No surprise that they're cautiously optimstic.

"We're hoping that the CRTC is acting on my previous complaints on how difficult it was to get Rogers and then the CRTC themselves to look into this issue," Murphy told us, "(a previous WoW complaint by another Rogers customer was closed without the CRTC even bothering to look into it, which is disappointing), and is trying to be more proactive and consumer-friendly. I'm also hoping the CRTC closes the loophole where the ISPs tell customers to inform THEM about mistaken throttling of applications, instead of reporting them to the CRTC."

"Right now they're able to essentially say 'Oops, our bad, it'll be fixed when its fixed' and will only fix programs that users have complained about, despite knowing other programs being affected," she added. "That just needs to change."