Canadian ISP Rogers Admits to Throttling World of Warcraft

Out of the “Well, that’s not surprising!” file comes a story of Canadian ISP Rogers and its throttling of the most popular MMO game around, World of Warcraft. One avid WoW fan, Teresa Murphy, had gotten tired of getting booted from her game and having sluggish performance aside, and as a result consulted Rogers about the issue. After being fed a “pack of lies”, she then went to the CRTC, the regulator of most things Canadian media.

The “pack of lies” statement isn’t one that surprises me about Rogers at all, and in truth, I’ve had to hold myself back from going on some wild tangents about the company in our news section. How a phone bill can be $61 one month and $63 the next with the exact same services is beyond me, but it’s hardly atypical of the company.

Upon inspection, Rogers did discover an issue, and it seems to be related to the fact that Rogers does throttle P2P traffic. It might seem odd for that to be an issue with WoW, but because Blizzard uses BitTorrent technology to both stream the game world and update the client, anyone who plays the game does in fact have a P2P-like connection running most of the time they are playing. Thus, it’s easy to see how this could happen.

While Rogers acknowledges the issue, it claims that it can’t be fixed until June, which is rather extreme when we’re barely into April. At that rate, it’d be easier for most customers to just switch ISPs so that they could actually use both their ISP and WoW services that they’re paying for. Of course, it’d be easier if there was actual competition out there…

“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.”