Happy Geek -Time Corner: Rogers and Traffic-Shaping

Time to dork out and rant a little. For a while now, Roger's High-Speed Internet has been actively "traffic shaping" speeds for its customers. What this means in laymen's terms, is that Rogers can tell what you are doing with your connection, and uses software to kill it.

My case and point: I use Bit Torrent to download television shows that are not on the air in Canada. Until Rogers began aggressively traffic-shaping in my Toronto neighborhood, it was a breeze. I could download a pretty decent-sized file in less than an hour. And all was good. Now, my high-speed connection has become about as useful as a carrier-pigeon at the North Pole. My downloads have dropped to less than 5.0K/sec (that's slower than a dial-up connection, non-dorks). Unacceptable.

The argument that this is mainly used to curb peer-to-peer filesharing (e.g. BitTorrent, Napster, Emule, etc.) because it hogs the bandwidth. Unfortunately, this is the lamest argument I've heard for a number of reasons:

1) File sharing, in Canada, is perfectly legal. The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled on a few occasions that the sharing of files regardless of their type in Canada cannot be stopped or even reported by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to those that would like to take legal action.

2) Customers have paid for a level of service that is not being provided. Roger's charges a lot for high speed services (all three levels), and as such promises to deliver your content at a certain speed. Traffic-shaping denies paying customers what they paid for, an internet connection at a certain speed. Why pay top dollar for the fastest connection (which is what I do), when I can only have this speed when Rogers determines I deserve it?

Its like ordering a pizza with extra cheese, paying for it, and then getting a pizza with even less cheese than normal. THEN having the pizza guy tell you "sorry, if we'd given you what you ordered, you would have used up all our cheese. So you can have this instead."

3) It's not customers hogging the bandwidth, it's Rogers. According to unnamed insiders, Roger's new Home Phone service works over the same transmission lines they use to distribute high-speed internet. I can only assume that Rogers grossly underestimated the hit their bandwidth would take sharing home phone and internet (and digital cable?) all on the same pipe. The point is: Rogers screwed up and overestimate how much spare room they had, and now we all must pay for their mistakes.

And it's not just the grey-area of filesharing that's being affected. There are numerous reports on Apple's forums of serious problems customers in Canada are experiencing downloading podcasts and purchased music through the companies iTunes software. That's right, Roger's is screwing with Apple. Free tip: Apple doesn't not take kindly to being fucked with. They have the reputation of suing people for a lot less. Don't screw with a service people are paying for.

So what can we do about this? Believe it or not, there are a few options; although their effectiveness may be questionable:

1. Use a file sharing program with encryption. Bit Torrent clients like uTorrent, BitCommet (not as effective anymore), and Azureus have beta clients with encryption that can hide whatever blizz-blazz Roger's can see that triggers the death of your connection. As these clients move into major release, more and more people will begin using them and the situation should get a little better for us. I recommend you download the beta version of the latest uTorrent, and in the options set your port to 1720. There is a pretty good forum available here, that has been following the problem across Canada and offers some good suggestions (some work better than others depending on where you are and your own situation, so its a trial and error sort of thing).

2. Complain directly to the Office of the President of Roger's Cablesystems. As recommended at DSL Reports:

If you are unhappy with Rogers, please forward your complaints to Rogers executives directly. This will ensure your comments are heard and taken into consideration for future policy changes.

Mail a formal letter to:

The Office of the President
Rogers Cablesystems - Rogers Yahoo! HiSpeed Internet
855 York Mills Rd
Don Mills, Ontario
M3B 1Z1

You can use this address also to complain about the performance issues and other problems that you cannot get resolved through customer service channels.

When writing, to ensure that you are listened to, explain your issue carefully, directly and as simply as you can. Don't rant. I am sure they ignore rants!

Probably like a resume ... you have no more than a minutes reading time to make an impression that they will want to read on and treat your complaint seriously. Rants are too hard to read.

3. Switch to Bell Sympatico High-Speed (if available in your area). Bell doesn't offer quite as high a speed as Rogers, but the prices are cheaper, the deals are better, and NO DOWNLOAD RESTRICTIONS or TRANSFER LIMITS. I hate to say good things about Bell, but they actually give you what you pay for in this situation.

This situation is totally unfair in my books. Roger's is taking advantage of customer ignorance, and in some situation, the fact that customers have no other alternatives. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Roger's has to be held accountable to its customers. You pay for a service, so demand it. Enough people complain, the media takes interest. Media takes interest, things will change.