Back in February, a Canadian gamer wrote the government's telecom regulator with an unusual complaint: her ISP, Rogers, was allegedly throttling games like World of Warcraft, making them all but unplayable. Even more unusual, the government demanded that Rogers look into the accusation, and the ISP has now admitted that it is, in fact, throttling WoW in some cases. But only by accident.

Like other large Canadian ISPs, Rogers throttles heavily, clamping down on P2P traffic and handing out miserly data caps starting at 2GB per month. But the company has always maintained that its throttling accurately targeted file-sharing programs and not other software.

In her complaint (PDF), subscriber Teresa Murphy said Rogers was telling "a pack of lies" and that its aggressive deep packet inspection (DPI) based throttling system wasn't nearly so accurate.

Rogers' filters are picking up several very low bandwidth-intensive games incorrectly as P2P activity. Provided these games are fully patched, they can play on a dialup connection with minimal issues, and uses approximately 100-200MB of your monthly cap (as stated by a game manufacturer employee, on the game's public forums). It’s really not that much considering a single Netflix video in HD is 4GB. These games are time-sensitive applications (such as VOIP is), and like any time-sensitive application will lose connection if throttled, which is why they aren't supposed to be throttled I don't use P2P at ALL, and yet I'm still affected by this issue because Rogers sees my gaming traffic incorrectly as P2P Personally, I wouldn't even care about P2P being throttled, except for the fact that Rogers' filters are so shoddy they're lumping non-P2P in with P2P, making many applications completely unusable. Please continue to look into this. It’s not fair that Rogers customers are paying for a service they can't even use.

Canada's telecoms regulator, CRTC, sent a letter to Rogers about the complaint; last week, it received a response (PDF). The problems are real, and they won't be fixed for months.

"Our tests have determined that there is a problem with our traffic management equipment that can interfere with World of Warcraft," said Rogers. "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."

Rogers insists that this situation only occurs when subscribers are using P2P applications at the same time, though Teresa Murphy insisted she did not do so. The ISP recommends "turning off the peer-to-peer setting in the World of Warcraft game and ensuring that no peer-to-peer applications are running on any connected computer."

Sorry, Canadian gamers—though at least your pain serves the larger purpose of reminding us just how obnoxious this sort of protocol-specific throttling can be.

Separately, Rogers just coughed up $275,000 after the CRTC said it had been calling its own prepaid mobile customers without their consent.