ISP's War On BitTorrent Hits World of Warcraft 252
jfruhlinger writes "Canadian Internet users have the prospect of a metered Internet looming over their head, and now World of Warcraft players who use Rogers Communications as their ISP are encountering serious throttling. The culprit seems to be Rogers' determination to go after BitTorrent. WoW uses BitTorrent as a utility to update game files — something most users probably aren't even aware of."
Re:too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
DADVSI and HADOPI (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be better [for the RIAA and MPAA] to try this [latest "fuck the consumer" crap] in France?
They already are. What do you think DADVSI and HADOPI are?
WOW and other games affected (Score:4, Insightful)
If I'm not mistaken, the torrent aspect of WOW also extends to its normal gameplay connection since Cataclysm. In that they altered their network traffic protocols which resulted in high ping times for users of various ISPs. I think RIFT has the same issues with its traffic being delayed by ISP traffic management software because it sees it as P2P traffic.
I think this is an example of how the witchhunt against pirates and the reluctance to upgrade systems to meet consumer demand will hurt innovation and use of the internet overall.
My understanding is developers are making these protocol changes because they are more efficient - except they are being blocked by ISPs.
Sadly, we do need government regulation to keep the playing fields level, and to ensure that we see continued growth and development of various industries over the Internet. If every ISP employs the same measures, and smaller providers must follow the traffic restrictions of their own larger providers, there is no Choice and Free Market to influence the behaviour of these corporations. It is also clear that these corporations are working hand in hand with IP Holders such as the MPAA and the RIAA. So there is no decoupling of the various business considerations.
I'm not sure why Anti-Monopoly and Anti-Trust laws haven't kicked in yet to prevent what is obviously destructive to competition and a free market. Perhaps Rogers wants Blizzard to knock on its doors and offer money to allow WOW traffic to flow unimpeded?
We may all need to pay a separate VPN provider to play our MMORPGs and other games in the future. Then they'll probably spend MILLIONS developing software that can inspect VPN packets and determine if it's likely to be gaming, video, or torrents. Instead, of course, in spending those millions in upgrading infrastructure.
Make no mistake, none of these companies are strapped for cash. None of them would be pushed to the brink by the use of World of Warcraft, Torrents, or Netflix across their networks. They post >40% profits.
Re:Not news.. (Score:5, Insightful)
No... no it's not.
Just because a large portion of the world has shitty internet, doesn't mean everyone should have shitty internet. It's only funny in the sad/pathetic/hopeless sort of way... just because they let it happen doesn't mean we do. If everyone else drank urine, and we drank water... we'd protest when people started pissing in our faces too...
I'm fine with universally limited bandwidth, ie: Xk/s down, Yk/s up... but throttling specific uses of it is retarded... from 00:00 to 18:00 I can download "normal" things (HTTP, etc) at 1.7MB/s (which also used to apply to torrents), torrents are limited to about 350k/s... between 18:00 and 00:00 it's limited to 120k/s... which isn't terrible, however whichever way my ISP chose to implement it, fucks up everything else at the same time (even if I haven't downloaded any torrents), it turns my cable connection into noisy WiFi... websites that take a few attempts to connect, occasional messenger disconnects, etc. It was "unlimited" for years, till about 2 weeks ago.
I wouldn't have much of a problem with that either, except they still charge the same price for basically half the connection. No real alternatives either except to rent a higher package from the same ISP (to get speeds that the current plan says it provides), or switch the ISP which also means switching the connection to WiFi, or Satellite... both of which are useless, regardless of whatever arbitrary speed in some other country may be.