Rogers → CRTC Enforcements Division finds Rogers guilty

Enforcements Division has called Rogers out for their bs lies, gives them 2 weeks to rebutt their own evidence.

»www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archi ··· 0120.htm

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.

really? Why that port?

Just an FYI for the CRTC.

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

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

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/ ··· 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.”

---

*snorts*
I laughed when I read that..

Haha typical PR response...

What a bunch of tools.

Fixed that for you.

Mike

Also true. Once was told by a social media rep that I would get a discount if I called in since I was supposed to be entitled to it. Nope, even the call centre manager wouldn't take the call.

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

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.

honestly i want to say Bell.. it's the first thing that comes to mind, but then you think about who sneaky Rogers is and the way they try to lie about everything to the public and officials.

That as far as i'm concerned trumps Bell. A weasel is the worst kind. When a company will do everything in their power to screw a customer and mask it but say oops i say Rogers.

Bell is more known for bad customer service and no show techs.

Pretty much "What us non compliant? Oh we must have forgotten to send that "fruit basket" to Ms. Rosen. That low level staffer will be fired.

What's wrong with you JF? Why spend money and prevent shareholder returns, on studying equipment, when we can just leave the defaults on and be done with it.

Theresa, did anything come of Jason having his service cut off?, accidentally of course, they'd never do that on purpose.

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.

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.

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.

Actually it's more like they didn't use defaults. Defaults fixed wow in a Dec 2010 Cisco hotfix. Engelbert stated in a wire report interview that they werent using typical DPI but we're using special rules attempting to get all p2p possible. Seems they get all p2p to the detriment of gaming, rdp, Skype and video streaming.

Engelhart is a regulatory guy. He is not a network engineer and not the one who thinkers with the DPI boxes. But he is the one who writes the PR fluff to make Rogers appear compliant to the CRTC.

What rogers may have done is bypass the CPU intensive string searching when port 6969 is involved, this would enable the DPI to handle greater capacity.

This is really surprising as well... I wonder who they hired to do this. It obviously couldn't be the CRTC staffers.

While Rogers will get nothing but a slap on the wrist no doubt, it shows that the CRTC has at least followed thru with some sort of investigation stemming from customers complaints, whereas before they always just nodded along to whatever response Rogers (or others) have given.

This is like when you are young and your mom threaten to tell you teacher about misbehaving at home...

Nothing bad is going to happen until they get to the court order. The worse CRTC could do to Rogers until then is making them fall asleep and waste their time in CRTC hearing.

Definitely Bell for me, though they're improving lately (relatively speaking) while Rogers isn't.

I've always found it's just easier to get stuff done when dealing with Rogers than with Bell... it's still like pulling teeth, just fewer of them.

...Or could this just be the average Rogers' employee that knows very little of the actual service which they provide?

Sorry for the delayed response here guys. Have some interesting things to also put forth. First it's not just Rogers that has this "misclassification" problem. Bell is also guilty, and wondering if the CRTC picks up on this. From the CRTC letter:

»www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archi ··· 0120.htm

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.

Rogers disclaimer:

»www.rogers.com/web/conte ··· nagement

3. Are there other applications that could be impacted by Rogers traffic management measures?

If your Internet connection cannot attain full speed while using an application, such as encrypted FTP, please ensure that you are using the standard port assigned for the application/protocol in question (as per the IANA: »www.iana.org/assignments ··· -numbers).
If you cannot find the application/protocol listed in the IANA's website or you're not currently using the assigned port listed, it is possible that the application/protocol being used may be impacted by traffic management if your Internet connection is using a P2P file sharing application at the same time.
To resolve this issue, please close the affected application and check that all P2P file sharing applications are not running on the Internet connection. When you turn the affected application back on, ensure you are using the standard port assigned and there are no P2P file sharing applications running.
Note: Allow up to 10 minutes after terminating the P2P applications before you restart the affected application to ensure the application is not affected by traffic management. Verify that all computers connected to the Internet follow the trouble shooting process above.
If the problem still persists, please use our online chat at »rogershelp.com/trafficma ··· agement/ for further assistance.

Bells disclaimer: »service.sympatico.ca/ind ··· id=12119

Are there other applications that could be impacted by Bell’s traffic management measures?

If you're using an application/protocol during peak periods, such as encrypted FTP and find that it cannot attain full speed, please first ensure that you are using the standard port assigned for the application/protocol in question (as per the IANA: »www.iana.org/assignments ··· -numbers).

If you cannot find the application/protocol listed in the IANA’s website or you’re not currently using the assigned port listed, it is possible that the application/protocol being used may be impacted by traffic management if you are using a P2P file sharing application at the same time.

To resolve this issue, please close the affected application and ensure that all P2P file sharing applications are also not running. When you turn back on the affected application, ensure you are using the standard port assigned and that no P2P file sharing applications are open at the same time.

Note: It may take up to 10 minutes after terminating the P2P applications before you restart the affected application to ensure the application is not affected by traffic management.

Almost verbatim!!

I spoke with a consumer reporter today who got Rogers on record stating:

They said they did their own tests and found only one complaint held up, involving World of Warcraft, where the traffic management system has classified it improperly. This has since been fixed.

They said the other 20 or so complaints had been closed by the CRTC.

My Reply:

There may have been other complaints closed by the CRTC, but not this one. It's one thing to do your own tests and claim nothing is wrong, it's quite another when an independent body has done theirs and found multiple issues and infractions of the telecommunications act, including in documentation from the people that developed this technology. That's a bit hard to rebutt. We are looking forward to Rogers response to the CRTC if they have the guts to make it public.

Jason Koblovsky
Canadian Gamers Organization
»openmedia.ca/gamers
HT: resa1983

One should seriously put into question Bell's abrupt end to the use of DPI. Part of that decision maybe an attempt to avoid what's about to head Rogers way.

Was turned on in my neck of the woods on Feb 2007 about half way through the month.