OTTAWA – Rogers will follow the lead of rival Bell Canada and abandon its Internet traffic management practices (ITMP) starting next month.
The communications giant made the announcement on Friday in a letter to the CRTC’s Chief Compliance and Enforcement Officer Andrea Rosen. That letter was filed in response to one from her dated January 23 that asked Rogers to respond to evidence that its Internet throttling practices breached the net neutrality rules within the Telecommunications Act, as Cartt.ca reported.
Signed by SVP of Regulatory Ken Engelhart, the letter said that Rogers has been reviewing its traffic shaping policy “for several months”.
“New technologies and ongoing investments in network capacity will allow Rogers to begin phasing out that policy starting in March 2012”, it reads. “These changes will be introduced to half of Rogers existing Internet customers by June 2012 and to its remaining customers by December 2012.”
Rogers also refuted the CRTC’s evidence that it presented as part of its throttling investigation into Rogers' practices. Calling the testing “artificial”, Engelhart’s letter said that the Commission’s traffic “was not representative of the way our online gaming customers or other customers use the Internet”.
“In the real world, an insignificantly small amount of traffic would be subject to traffic management based on using a peer-to-peer file sharing port and virtually all of that traffic is peer-to-peer file sharing traffic”, the letter continues. “Accordingly, we do not believe that Rogers’ ITMPs have traffic managed time-sensitive traffic. However, out of an abundance of caution, we have reprogrammed the software so that this unclassified traffic is no longer subject to traffic management.”
Pro-Internet group OpenMedia.ca called Rogers’ decision “a victory for Internet openness”.
“We are extremely pleased that Rogers was forced to stop restricting access to online services,” said executive director Steve Anderson, in a statement. “We commend the CRTC for moving on this, and hope that this serves as a strong reminder to all ISPs that Canadians will stand up for the open Internet when pushed.”
The Canadian Gamers Organization, who have complained for months that Rogers’ throttling of peer-to-peer traffic is a major impediment to online game playing, urged Rogers to take things one step further and make their test results public.
"Rogers failed to provide the CRTC with technical data as to which games and applications they have tested themselves”, said founder Jason Koblovsky, in a statement. “Without the technical data from their tests on online games, the Canadian Gamers Organization worries that Rogers’ response may be an attempt to mislead the CRTC and the public. We continue to call on Rogers to make these numbers public.”
– Lesley Hunter
