You can only frustrate your customers for so long before one of them decides to become an expert on the issues at hand and starts filing complaints with government regulators. That's the situation at Rogers, one of the top three Internet providers in Canada, which has admitted to regulators that it had been throttling World of Warcraft for months. One angry customer now wants fines levied against the company and reimbursement for her subscription to the popular MMORPG.

Rogers user Teresa Murphy filed the original complaint with Canadian regulator CRTC, which in turn asked Rogers to look into the allegations. In its response, Rogers admitted that it had been throttling World of Warcraft.

"Our tests have determined that there is a problem with our traffic management equipment that can interfere with World of Warcraft," said Rogers last week. "We have been in contact with the game manufacturer and we have been working with our equipment supplier to overcome this problem. We recently introduced a software modification to solve the problems our customers are experiencing with World of Warcraft. However, there have been recent changes to the game, which has created new problems. A second software modification to address these new issues will not be ready until June."

The issue isn't a new one; on forums at Rogers, Blizzard, and DSLReports, frustrated customers have vented splenetically for months. (Quotes are reproduced verbatim.)

"Okay, tonight was an absolute joke trying to raid. This 'issue' has gone on long enough. The throttling is actually getting worse. Sunday was a joke, last night was bad but tonight was unplayable. Please provide a date EXACTLY when you will be fixing this issue. You already 'fixed' it back in January. So why was that fix reversed? Are you trying to pad your stats to the CRTC by including online gaming in the P2P category to 'prove' that it's clogging up?"

"Well still cant play wow at night cause i get throttled exact same times 5-about 11 pm at night i dropped almost 400 a month into rogers garbage im starting to think that maybe its time to just go to dial up leats i know why im getting those speeds i cant do anythign anyways on cable and Rogers obviously doesnt care "

"Yet another evening (Wednesday) of raiding on Warcraft wasted. My latency topped out at over 2,600 before I was disconnected. Slide shows in real-time gaming are not fun, to say the least In my angry post the other night (thanks for editing out a non-swear word and putting *** instead, now making it look worse than what it was), I made the mistake of asking for a date when this would be fixed. That presumed Rogers actually wanted to fix it. So, allow me back up a bit re-state my question: Does Rogers intend to fix this issue such that online gaming will be viable on your network?"

wasted. My latency topped out at over 2,600 before I was disconnected. Slide shows in real-time gaming are not fun, to say the least In my angry post the other night (thanks for editing out a non-swear word and putting *** instead, now making it look worse than what it was), I made the mistake of asking for a date when this would be fixed. That presumed Rogers actually wanted to fix it. So, allow me back up a bit re-state my question: Does Rogers intend to fix this issue such that online gaming will be viable on your network?" "I just wanted to add that last night i decided to utalize a tunneling service and i did not recieve the lag spikes, so 100% sure theyre throttling World of Warcraft. I am not planning on paying 5 dollars extra each month for this service, so unless Rogers fixes this by this week, my 100 dollar plan is going over to Bell."

And Rogers has been working on the issue for several months. One month ago, an employee posted in a massive 34-page comment thread on the issue, saying, "Rogers had previously developed, tested, and were ready to deploy a solution that would have resolved the issue. Unfortunately, due to an update to Blizzard’s software, our solution was not successful. We are working with our supplier to solve the problem customers are experiencing with World of Warcraft."

The employee also said the company was testing StarCraft for similar issues.

Rogers' admission that no fix will happen for months has certainly not mollified its angry customers. "The quality of service Roger's provides is beyond sub par and the regulating bodies in Canada do next to nothing to stop it," one wrote yesterday. "Let's all move to Kansas City where Google is installing gigabit lines to every single home."

Now, Teresa Murphy has responded, sending the CRTC a further complaint (PDF) against Rogers. Her lengthy rebuttal suggests that Rogers has not been fully forthcoming about the problem, that it affects numerous games (and even Skype), and that regulators need to take action.

Murphy wants Rogers fined "for throttling multiple time-sensitive applications without prior CRTC approval, and then taking an unreasonable amount of time to fix this issue." Discriminatory traffic throttling is allowed in Canada, but throttling time-sensitive apps requires the approval that Murphy references (the large Canadian ISPs all throttle P2P file-sharing traffic, which does not require this permission).

In addition, Murphy wants to know if Rogers will be reimbursing her the US$15 she pays each month to play World of Warcraft.

The issue is heating up in Canada, attracting some national media coverage. It's part of a broader Canadian debate right now about Internet providers and the tough data caps they impose (Rogers and Bell have plans that start at 2GB per month), since the initial impetus for all this throttling was alleged "congestion" of ISP networks. But the deep packet inspection hardware can be difficult to configure with perfect accuracy; when Comcast used the tech to limit some BitTorrent uploads, it also received complaints of inadvertently affecting several unrelated applications.