[Image: http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/9/2011/09/3730117.jpg]
OTTAWA — Canada's telecommunications regulator on Friday gave Rogers Communications Inc., mere days to come up with a plan to solve a problem that could be unfairly slowing down the speed of online games.
In a letter to the telecom giant, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission said the company's own traffic management policy states that online games, such as World of Warcraft, should not be throttled or slowed down, and would only be affected if Rogers misclassifies the games and other peer-to-peer applications were running at the same time.
Rogers now has until Sept. 27 to present a plan to the regulator to deal with the issue.
"Commission staff considers that Rogers should address and resolve this misclassification problem," the correspondence, dated Sept. 16, states.
In a statement issued Friday, Rogers downplayed any problems, saying the company already has corrected the issue with World of Warcraft and is "not aware of any problems with any other online games."
That's why the company "will table the process that we already have in place to deal with these issues," Rogers said.
The issue of traffic shaping has heated up in recent years as more consumers flock to the web to play games and to watch TV shows and movies, which require more bandwidth.
While Internet service providers have said they need to manage online traffic to deal with network congestion during peak hours, the CRTC has instituted a policy stipulating that the noticeable degradation of time-sensitive Internet traffic requires prior commission approval under Canada's Telecommunications Act.
The CRTC cites this policy in its letter to Rogers.
"Commission staff also requests that Rogers provide a detailed report to the commission once the problem is resolved, demonstrating that the problem has been fixed," the letter states.
The Canadian Gamers Organization filed a complaint against Rogers last month, alleging the speed of Internet connections was being unfairly affected by the company's traffic-throttling measures.
On Friday, the head of the group said he's pleased with the commission's response to the complaint. But Jason Koblovsky suspects the problem goes beyond Rogers, so he will ask the CRTC to broaden its probe.
"We are currently getting reports from our members that Shaw customers are also affected by misclassification. The CRTC has also been aware for quite some time that Bell Sympatico members have also experienced similar problems," said Koblovsky.
"We will be asking for the CRTC to broaden its investigation to ensure that solutions presented by Rogers in this case are implemented on those ISPs, as well."
For its part, Rogers said that "gamers are some of our best customers," and encouraged them to contact the company if they're having issues.
The commissioner's traffic-management framework requires companies to be transparent with their customers about their practices.
The CRTC's framework also says traffic shaping only should be used as a last resort to deal with network congestion and encourages companies to use "economic measures," such as data caps, to manage demand.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/life/CRTC+tells+Rogers+stop+slowing+down+speed+online+games/5415963/story.html
a very tiny step for Canadian internet