O Canada! > Canadian > Rogers > CRTC Enforcements Division finds Rogers guilty

CRTC Enforcements Division finds Rogers guilty

quote:

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Dear Mr. Thompson:

Re: File 545613,
Internet Traffic Management Practice (“ITMP”),
Section 36 of the Telecommunications Act, S.C. 1993, c. 38, as amended (“Act”), and Paragraphs 126 and 127 of Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2009-657 (“TRP CRTC 2009-657”)

I am writing with respect to the above noted file that was transferred to the Compliance and Enforcement Sector by the Telecommunications Sector on October 27, 2011.

Compliance and Enforcement Sector staff has been reviewing this file since its referral to our sector. Based on the preliminary results of our ongoing investigation, Commission staff is of the belief that Rogers Communications Inc. (“Rogers”) applies a technical ITMP to unidentified traffic using default peer-to-peer (“P2P”) ports. On the basis of our evidence to date, any traffic from an unidentified time-sensitive application making use of P2P ports will be throttled resulting in noticeable degradation of such traffic. Enclosed please find a summary of our evidence. Full details, if necessary can be obtained by request through my office.

As you know, prior Commission approval is required pursuant to section 36 of the Act, as described at paragraphs 126 and 127 of TRP CRTC 2009-657, for implementing a technical ITMP that results in:

noticeable degradation to time-sensitive traffic, or
the slowing of non-time-sensitive traffic to the extent that it amounts to blocking the content and therefore controlling the content and influencing the meaning and purpose of the telecommunication.

Within two weeks, I look forward to you either presenting us with a rebuttal of our evidence or providing us with a plan to come into compliance with the Act. Failure to provide a meaningful rebuttal or an effective plan will result in my recommendation to Commissioners to hold a show-cause hearing. I look forward to your response by 12:00 pm, February 3, 2012.

Sincerely,

Andrea Rosen

Chief Compliance and Enforcement Officer

Summary of Evidence

File 545613

This attachment summarizes evidence pursuant to the above noted file, which is an ongoing investigation of Rogers Communications Inc.’s (“Rogers”) Internet Traffic Management Practice (“ITMP”) by the Compliance and Enforcement Sector.

The Compliance and Enforcement Sector’s ongoing investigation includes examining a number of key performance indicators (“KPIs”), such as:

TCP resets, TCP syn/acks, connection status
Latency in milliseconds
TCP Window size
Packet loss
Packets per second
Average packet sizes
Retransmission of packets
Dropped connections
Active connections/sessions
Upstream available bandwidth limits
Packet sequence numbers
Other TCP and UDP traffic statistics and analysis.

As Cisco is Rogers’ vendor,1 the Compliance and Enforcement Sector had and continues to have tests conducted against information from the website of Cisco Systems, Inc. (“Cisco”). Preliminary testing results indicate that unidentified traffic using default P2P ports, as identified in the Cisco SCA BB Protocol Reference Guide,2 is throttled. Such results further indicate that:

default P2P ports for TCP traffic are subject to throttling, except port 6969, and
until December 20, 2011, all default P2P ports for UDP traffic were subject to throttling.

Compliance and Enforcement Sector staff also notes Rogers’ disclosure of its network management policy, which indicates that an application may not attain full speed if encrypted and not using a standard port for the application/protocol in question.3 Moreover, while Rogers has stated that misclassification occurs in only a few cases,4 staff notes that Cisco identifies various applications that may have been misclassified.5

1 Rogers letter dated September 27, 2011, at 3.

2 Cisco SCA BB Protocol Reference Guide: [Cisco SCA BB Protocol Reference Guide].

3 Rogers Network Management Policy: [Rogers Network Management Policy].

4 Rogers letter, supra note 1 at 3.

5 Cisco Service Control Application for Broadband Protocol Pack Notes, available online: [Cisco PP Notes].

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Well, that's promising, even if full of ways that Rogers will attempt to weasel out of it.

Of significant note is the fact that there is no mention of a penalty for non-compliance ... which one has learned to expect.

No penalties because the only allowable penalties right now is for non-compliance of DNCL.

The only real monetary penalty they can do, is from September's release:

initiate a hearing[11] at which the ISP would have to show cause as to why the Commission should not issue a mandatory order, which the Commission could register with the Federal Court

o the mandatory order would direct the ISP to take corrective actions under section 51 of the Act, and could include partial reimbursement to the customer.

reply to resa1983

Just an FYI for the CRTC.

They throttled on port 6969, and throttled any identifiable packets on any ports.

reply to resa1983
port 69 69 was open for crtc viewing pleasure, everyone else's linux distros get throttled. known fact

reply to resa1983
They've been guilty since the day they took it over from Shaw at Home.

Rogers released a statement that they were 'surprised' that they were found non-compliant:

»www.theglobeandmail.com/news/tec···2310196/

quote:

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“We’re actually very surprised by this. We do our own testing constantly and this is not anything that our testing results have shown,” said Rogers spokeswoman Patricia Trott. “We are just looking at the information now and we will get in touch with the CRTC. We’d like to see their detailed testing. It is a little unclear to us what this letter means.”

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Haha typical PR response...

What a bunch of tools.
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GO LEAFS GO!

It's a toss up who I despise more - B#ell or Robbers. I waffle between the two, daily.

My past relationship with Telus lasted all of 2 hours (sold me a phone and 3 year plan, took my CC info, then called me at work an hour later to say they were charging my CC a $300 deposit, so I cancelled and returned the unopened phone forth-fscking-with) so no lasting hatred there.

State of telecom in Canada:
a) Obscene
b) Sad & Pathetic
c) Laughing Stock
d) all of the above

Mike
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No more UBB... nor more AVP... now it's "Capacity Based". Oh... wait... isn't that what we wanted?

If Rogers stlll does DPI to catch evil packets on any port, why do they bother automatically categorizing all packets on a specific port as "evil" ?

Looks to me like this think their DPI boxes are like macintoshes, plug it in and turn ot on and it just works. They may have left everything with the defaults and not bothered really studying it.

Considering all of the brouhaha with throttling since 2009, it isn't as f they didn't have the time to ensure they did things correctly.

reply to dillyhammer

reply to HiVolt

reply to jfmezei

reply to resa1983
I wonder what they've been enforcing for the last 4 months , that took them so long to get around to sending this letter out to Rogers.

My gut feeling is they are going to shut down the DPI boxes, and drop the caps again , just like Bell.

reply to elwoodblues
Didn't actually get to the point of it getting cut off cuz he called in because his usage meter wasn't working and found out about it beforehand. Was able to get the cancellation canceled.

Apparently it happened to someone else on his street as well.

reply to elwoodblues
As for what they've been enforcing...... Seems they've been doing their own research since we specifically asked them to find Rogers guilty.. Was surprised to read they did their own research but man, it means Rogers has less leeway in their lies.

reply to jfmezei