O Canada! > Canadian > Rogers > Throttling will continue with Rogers' new usage plans

Throttling will continue with Rogers' new usage plans

He [Phil Hartling, vice-president of consumer services for Rogers Cable] said the new service fees are similar to those of other ISPs ... Mr. Hartling said Rogers's plans will not change the company's policies regarding traffic management.

This is because caps and throttling on cable solve two different problems.

Throttling is designed to limit the load on the mainly the upstream path on cable segments through neighbourhoods.

Caps are designed to help limit total transit bandwidth consumption.

On Cable internet, your upstream path is severely limited in total traffic and the number of packets of data that can be sent at any time. As a result it only takes a few heavy users in a neighbourhood to slow everyone in the area down dramatically. Go visit areas near colleges and universities particularly near the start of each semester ... performance which was good in the summer often tanks.

The only way currently to solve that problem is to put fewer users on a node and segment ... which is all very well, but for the fact that it is EXTREMELY costly.

The cable industry organisation CableLabs is coming out with a finalized DOCSIS 3 specification soon and hardware has already started appearing which will ease that problem at least for a while.

reply to FFFF
that sucks, ok now im pissed. At least he's coming outright and saying it, but im still pissed. Hopefully that will change if they realize they dont need to do it.

Rogers needs competition, Hopefully the government steps in on what bell just did to teksavy and 3rd party dsl providers.

reply to sbrook

I KNOW this to be the case - just study the specs of how cable works. The upstream path is like gold and platinum ... it's a very limited resource. Also, if you follow the complaints in this forum, prior to throttling, complaints of performance sagging off in the evenings have definitely declined. Also, the neighbourhoods that have been rebuilt like a lot of Richmond Hill have improved because they've reduced the numbers of subscribers on a cable segment (the original cable operators in RH, Markham, Scarborough, designed their networks in a manner that was great for cable distribution, but poor for 2 way, because of too many subs on the segments and difficulty doing "node splits".

Actually a lot of the problems predate Shaw ... Shaw bought up a number of local cable operators who laid out the original cable networks. When Shaw came along and set in 2 way (for internet and STBs) they didn't correct the mistakes ... not believing there would ever be the penetration into homes we're seeing today!

reply to FFFF
All I've been personally battling the question of WHY throttle lately, I kinda understood when there were no caps but now with caps in place I need a logical answer to this question.

I was hesitant to post this but here goes since this seems to be the main topic of this thread.

Question 1) If Rogers caps the bandwidth use to your max, for ex. extreme to 95 Gigs, why is there a need to throttle P2P application since whether I use P2P HTTP or NNTP or any other protocol I will still use 95 Gigs anyway. On top of that I can max out my connection 24/7 with HTTP or NNTP, how can those two not affect traffic but P2P can ?

Question 2) If Rogers would charge your account "Tiered Service Bandwidth" for excess bandwidth use, why is there a need to implement throttling ? Would they not make a killing by selling you all that extra P2P bandwidth ?

Question 3) Why can any user on any given day on NNTP or HTTP download over 200Gig/day and over 1 Terabyte per week with no problems and only pay $25 max per month extra. However you can't download your cap with P2P which seems to be a network burden. If P2P is such a network burden, then why is downloading 2 or 4 Terabites of NNTP not a burden and is not being throttled ?

Question 4) If network management or "load" is the issue, why is there a need to throttle 24/7 and even on weekends? is the network being used to the max at 5AM Sunday mornings?

Question 5) How can small 3rd party ISP's be able to offer un-throttled access without affecting their network and with room to spare when two of the biggest ISP's in the country can't.

Can someone please explain to me once and for all how P2P can be such a bandwidth burden but not HTTP or NNTP.

I would like to have a logical and technical reason to throttle but right now the only possible conclusion that I can come up with is that the Throttling of P2P is a type of punishment for P2P cutting into the Cable and Telco's media business.

reply to sbrook

reply to FFFF
And there is one thing Sbrook and a few others have forgotten about.... Yes the upstream bandwidth is shared among all the modems.... BUT only PER channel/frequency. Rogers uses one channel/frequency for modems and the other for the packetcable phones.. (so anyone that tells you high usage will interfere with the phones is full of whoey! BUT each CMTS is capable of having 4 (yep 4) different upstream channels!!!

Rogers received quite a few tax breaks and grants to develop their infrastructure. And like all high tech equipment gets to depreciate it at a faster rate on the books for even more tax breaks.

I have proof that Rogers has purposely interfered with 3web, they like bell don't like being forced to allow competition and will make anyone using their/our (I say our as a lot of tax payer $$ went into building that infrastructure) system besides them a nightmare.

The ONLY hope we have is to contact your local MP and MPP and bitch like hell to them. Let them know that you will be a single issue voter and that if they don't start doing what we pay them for we all will all have MUCH more expensive internet. And you will make sure to vote them out of office.

And yes the Java injection of your usage into your webpages WILL lead to paid advertising in a short while. And since there is no regulations there will be nothing you can do about it.

I can't give you all too many more details as this forum is monitored and I don't want my manager to figure out who I am and get fired. VERY strict rules about letting the common folks know what is really going on.

BTW Sbrook.... your commenting that $1.25 per gig is close to the true cost of transfer is not even close....

To give you an idea of how much markup there is... Motorola sells the modems to Rogers for under $10... Why do you have to buy them for $100? 10:1 markup.... hmmmm one example of many.

Call, write, email your politicians before it is too late! It's only going to get worse! MUCH worse!

reply to Stewy
This issue applies only to cable modems ...

Cable is a shared medium, particularly for its upstream. There is bandwidth available for only so many simultaneous upstream data paths on a given cable segment. The CMTS (Cable modem termination system - essentially the modem and controller at the cable head end) control when modems can transmit on your cable segment.

When your modem has data to transmit, it must do so by taking part in a bidding war. The CMTS says "Transmit on frequency X in time slot NN" There are only so many available time slots and frequencies available. The bidding war is a freeforall in another time slot. If your modem doesn't get assigned a slot in the current bidding time slot, it has to wait for the next and bid in that one. The bidding process is kind of like the old manual people on the floor type stock exchange!

So the upstream is very limited. BitTorrents are not just download, they rely on your uploading to others. Torrent users leave their torrents running for prolonged periods, and the torrents present a constant upstream traffic demand. The result is that very few torrent users on a cable segment can degrade performance for all users on the segment because they fill the available upstream slots very quickly.

Throttling was introduced to a) slow the upstream demand (which is why it's a 24/7 thing unlike Bell's peak demand only) and b) to cheese off users to the point where they don't really want to use it!

So, throttling on a cable network has nothing to do with the amount of transit bandwidth the ISP is consuming (which is what caps aim to control).

reply to FFFF
BTW did any of you know that most equipment for the capital requisitions has had a 6 month to 1 year payback!

reply to FFFF
annondaks ... I don't know where you're getting your info from but some is decidedly inaccurate.

reply to FFFF
Sbrook... your missing the point... each cmts has 4 UCD's so the battling for time only occours on each UCD frequency. What is overloaded on channel 1 will not affect the other 3 channels. It's all very well documented at the Cablelabs site.

I know... I do this for a living.

This is all part of a long term strategy to help pay for the new Fios system...

reply to FFFF
I will do my best to answer your questions here Stewy

1) With P2P traffic you are using the network both ways simultaneously and that is hard on a cable network because of the fact that you share the main pipe with everyone else in your neighbourhood. Now if you were the only person on your segment doing P2P it wouldn't have any affect on everyone else performance but as soon as you have lets say 50% of the users on that segment doing P2P file sharing you are going to really use up a lot of the available bandwidth on that pipe and therefore slow down everyone else internet surfing capabilities.
With HTTP you are only only pulling bandwidth down to your computer one way and that doesn't have any real effect on everyone else surfing capabilities. Because there is so much more available bandwidth for download even if 50% of the users on your segment the effect wouldn't be nearly as severe as P2P because the upload pipe is still open to ensure traffic can get out fast and keep everything working.

2) Although making more money would be in Rogers best interest it all goes back to answer 1

3) reference answer 1

4) No I am sure that Rogers network is not being used to the max at 5 am in the morning but its easier for them to just simply throttle traffic all the time rather than on some of the time.

5) This last question comes down I think simply to the size of the business. Most people recognize that small companies are quick and agile and are able to make change relatively quickly to adapt to whatever is needed. If they need a new router lets say to help improve network performance the amount of time it takes to get it ordered, delivered and setup is a lot less than a large company that is really entrenched. With the large company it has to get approved by like 10 different people to buy a router and then they have to get quote from X many companies and then the quotes have to be reviewed by 10 more people so on and so forth which means it takes them a hell of a lot longer to get the new gear in place to keep their networks up to snuff.

I hope this helps you better understand how things work but if your not sure feel free to ask for an explanation cause knowledge is power 8)

reply to sbrook
no it's not Sbrook... go over to the Cablabs site and start pulling up some of the documentation... if I get some time I'll post the links for you.

Well, I don't know how Rogers implemented it, but I was informed from very reliable sources that Rogers went to throttling because prior to doing so, Digital Phone was turning into a disaster.

I've read a lot of cable labs documentation.

Digital Phone! Pffffft who needs that!

reply to FFFF
Throttling and caps come down to a few things:

maximizing profits
stomping the competition to own the market
open up space for voip that will be oversold

reply to FFFF
Is Skype considered a P2P application - is its traffic throttled?

If so, that's an anti-competitive measure by Rogers to limit alternatives to its own Phone solution.