Major Canadian ISP admits throttling World of Warcraft | Hacker News Reader

Major Canadian ISP admits throttling World of Warcraft

arstechnica.com

93 pointspieter32 comments

Can anyone explain to me why Canada has such poor internet service? I kind of understand why countries like Australia and New Zealand don't have great internet plans, but Canada is right next to the US and yet has far worse service.

Canada is far less dense than even the United States and internet access is controlled by a duopoly, which is a bad combination for competition or affordable access.

Also the regulatory body (CRTC) thats is supposed to be watching over these companies is run entirely by ex-staff of said companies. So it's very similar to the big banks in the US (their negative actions don't have market repercussions because of their ability to dominate the market with the help of regulatory bodies).

Most of Canada lives in a few large metro areas, so density is not a factor (unless those metro areas are getting fantastic Internet service, which other posts in this thread suggest isn't the case).

People like to point to population density but I find the answer a little too easy - about 80% of Canada's population lives within 100 miles of the US boarder and a similar proportion live in one of 3 dense urban areas (Quebec City - Windsor corridor, Calgary - Edmonton corridor or BC's Lower Mainland.) Moreover, network infrastructure was heavily subsidized by the government and service to rural areas remains heavily subsidized to this day.

All that to say, there really is no excuse for how badly we lag behind except for the de facto duopoly.

I think for the same reasons as the US. Entrenched, equally-terrible service providers who co-conspire in their shitness. It's just magnified because Canada is so vast.

Nah, the previous answers have it more right. Strange regulation has enabled this kind of a situation.

Not strange regulation: regulatory capture, which is a subversion of the regulatory process by putting those being regulated in charge of regulation.

If vastness was really the issue, we'd see fiber everywhere in downtown Toronto. But we don't.

- Government-barred foreign investment.

- Corrupt duopoly (the collusion is so deeply obvious to anyone not mentally crippled).

- Regulatory capture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Because we let the politicians run us.

You make it sound like the US has something particularly good relative to the rest of the world. If only that were the case.

One such example, Comcast and P2P: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-08-183...

The governing body (CRTC) is corrupt. It's obvious to everyone, and I'm basing my vote on whether something is done to clean up that organization or not.

The service of our internet is fine for the most part. If I remember correctly, we even attained higher speeds than the US when using Netflix. The problem stems from pricing, support and ridiculous rules - like insane caps and overage fees.

I don't think we have far worse service than the US. North America lags parts of Europe and Asia by a wide margin, but I fail to see how the US is ahead of Canada.

Rural areas here are often underserved and it's no secret we are probably as bad as the US on that front. But worse? I doubt it.

My family in Barnwell, Alberta (pop. 600) has at least DSL these days, and possibly even cable, delivering streaming video and all that without any trouble. There are more remote locations so maybe it's not representative but it's the only info I have personally verified on that.

I live in BC and use Shaw's network to transfer at least 100 gigs per month, every month, at about 15mbps down and about 0.5 to 2 mbps up (like everyone else in North America). This costs $40/mo or something like that. I've done this for over 7 years and have received exactly 1 email from Shaw to inform me that I'm exceeding my limit. The email politely asked that I not do so and I ignored it without hearing anything further.

When mobile I use my phone as a 3G modem tethering my notebook and/or iPad to it using BlueTooth or WiFi. I have 6 GB of transfer each month and regularly use 2 to 6 GB each month. Speeds are pretty good at around 2 to 3 mbps down and something typically abysmal up. I pay $20/mo for the data service.

I have a choice in service on both fronts. Not enough choice for my liking, but a choice nonetheless.

So how is Canada worse than the US? I think we need to establish that the situation is indeed poorer here than in the US before we ask why.

Looks like the % of population online is similar: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats14.htm#north

Any other relevant data on this?

I've lived in Toronto, Ottawa, London, Waterloo, and Vancouver - and let me say Shaw's service is not the norm for the rest of Canada.

I live in the US now and I can say confidently that US home broadband is well ahead of most of Canada (particularly, Ontario), where the data caps are onerous, throttling and packet shaping extreme, prices sky-high, and your throughput is not anywhere near advertised. Ontario is a complete internet backwater by any measure.

I moved from the UK to the Toronto area and I have to say that Canada is the fall pile from a crap-chute.

I'm currently with Cogeco cable and they're mostly accurate with their throughput even close to peak times, however the price is high and the bandwidth amount is appallingly low.

I'm actually lucky that being tech-knowledgeable I've been able to deal with their workers well (it helps one of my friends works there, but didn't help when I moved into my apartment as he couldn't do the install) so they'll max-out my up and down (my mother-in-law has 3mbps upload when she should have ~500K thanks to me talking to the guy).

Australia has bad internet for reasons similar to Canada.

It wasn't always bad but it is getting worse, back in 1994 I had at least four, if not more, ISP companies to choose from in my small little corner of Canada.

Now that been whittled down to two, there are others but it involves cellular sticks and some long-range wifi involving grain silos.

My local ISP offers 5, 10, 15, 30 and 100Mbps service but the 30 and 100Mbps are capped at 250GB, I have 15Mbps/1Mbps without a cap since I have had it before caps were implemented.

So choice of an ISP is less, speeds are up but caps have appeared.

This is not quite as bad as what Mediacom, a large US cable ISP is doing on their network. They are modifying TCP in transit to change 404 responses from websites into a 200 response with a line of javascript to redirect the browser to their own search engine. They've been receiving non-stop complaints for 2 months and there's still no way to opt-out.

A month ago they were caught injecting ad's on top of google.com and apple.com, as well as replacing AdSense on arbitrary websites with their own advertising.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Mediacom-Injecting-Their-...

Rogers, the isp from the article, has already done 404 redirection.

http://www.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/rogers-customers-get-ad-la...

Oh, Canada.

Interestingly WoW uses bit torrent to distribute patches to users, so its not uncommon to have P2P traffic occurring while playing WoW.

By default P2P is disabled during gameplay.

It's worth pointing out that "peer to peer" is a network protocol architecture, one that the Internet was designed for.

Technically it's unrelated to illicit file sharing, other than that game companies, free operating systems, and pirates all distribute large DVD-sized files and thus seek the most efficient way to do so.

Yes, but that doesn't stop the ISPs here from treating all P2P traffic with the same hammer. As far as they are concerned, P2P = bad for network, and so they throttle it.

To them, P2P=bad for entertainment monopoly.

ISPs (I work for one) dislike traffic, which heavily saturate channels. Total uplink capacity is comparable with total customer demand at peak hours. So, ISPs have to distinct between immediate (VoIP, gaming, SSH), normal priority (web browsing, email) and bulk (BitTorrent et al) cases. Although, throttling to pre-defined per-customer value seem like stupid idea, but putting them into different buckets is a must.

ISPs also dislike high-PPS low-packet-size (significantly lower than MTU) UDP traffic of uTorrent's uTP protocol, because it quite negatively affects the network hardware.

And, most important — ISPs, in fact, love P2P traffic when it happens between their peers, because such traffic does not consume uplink channels. When it's legally possible — they endorse it (for example, by setting up gaming servers or introducing locally-hosted software-update mirrors), when it's a gray waters of file sharing — they just don't stick their nose in other's business (unless law enforcement requests them so). Of course that's unless they want to make customers dissatisfied their service as network connectivity providers.

>> "ISPs also dislike high-PPS low-packet-size"

This is presumably what was specifically causing the WoW throttling from the article.

>>"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."

I'm not 100% sure, but iirc the "recent changes" had to do with WoW changing the TCP ack frequency when running, more than doubling or tripling the total number of packets sent over any given period of play time. They turned this on with a recent patch, but hotfixed it off temporarily because, as you said: "it quite negatively affects the network hardware". People with crappy routers/modems were apparently having problems staying connected.

A blizzard dev writes more in detail about it here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1965992365?page=15#2...

If anyone's interested, this[1] paper highlights why P2P, especially in gaming applications, isn't going away any time soon. Unfortunately, P2P authors really need better systems to keep inter-AS traffic to a minimal level, but the current Internet wasn't really designed with that in mind. There are a number of different research efforts and fielded methods out right now, but none seem to have taken a really strong hold.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/72879/donnybrook.pdf

I keep reading too much from the unwashed masses about how this throttling works. ("They see the process that does P2P and throttle anything coming from the same process." - I do not and will never install ISP software on my systems.) Since the ISPs are not forthcoming with that information, could someone do an excellent writeup on the different throttling methods and then provide a left-field guess as to what these "access providers" are doing?

Jeeze this is awful. If you're Blizzard and an ISP starts throttling your game, at least you have a little muscle to fight back (and even so their response is "oops, sorry, we'll try to have it fixed by June"). But if you're Random Web Startup that is dependent on P2P and your users have to deal with this I can't imagine there's much you can do. What a horrible barrier to entry.

It must be noted that according to the article they are not throttling WoW specifically but are slowing down all P2P traffic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com