Use Rogers? Your Torrents Might Be Useless
- April 12th, 2007
- Read 2694 times
- 4 Comments
Since I’m not Canadian, I’m a little out of the loop on what Rogers has been up to. According to TorrentFreak, the ISP banned BitTorrent traffic due to excessive bandwidth consumption. Enter encryption and for the next year, everyone is safe. Now in an effort to curb encrypted Bit Torrent traffic, Rogers has started to throttle all encrypted transfers. That means your secure e-mail, login, and everything in between are all screwed and there’s nothing you can do about it except complaining directly to Rogers.
TorrentFreak also points out that Rogers’ slogan is still “for sharing large files and much more.” Now I’m chuckling heartedly on the inside right now and really hope you are as well. Call Rogers today and tell them you don’t want your encrypted traffic being shifted around and blocked!
Rogers Fights BitTorrent by Throttling All Encrypted Transfers [TorrentFreak]
Yes, I noticed this too. All my torrents, even they download, I am not able to keep them from uploading back, even though I leave the torrent in shared mode.
This really sucks. I live in a condo, so have no other choice for internet thru cable.
me too, check out 3web @ http://www.get3web.com/highspeed/highspeedMenu.jsp?page=hsindex
they resell rogers at a much cheaper price, but without the traffic shapping
Hey Vince,
A lot of what you said is true but there are a couple of misunderstandings. After spending several hours on the phone with rogers, speaking to all kinds of supervisors and bosses, etc. I’ve learned what the full case is (or at least what I’ve been told that I believe).
Rogers didn’t exactly ban torrent traffic, they just put extensive limitations on it, essentially making it useless and impossible to transfer large files. So for the next year torrent users are safe using encrypted transfer; however at the beginning of April Rogers purchased a new set of IP addresses, the 99.*.*.* IP addresses. The company that they purchased them from had encrypted data blocked on all of those IP addresses. Rogers claims that they are doing what they can to fix this because they do not want to do this to their users (although it saves them money with people not being able to torrent, it’s not what they promise in their internet service contract).
It is up to you if you believe whether they are trying to fix it or not, I think they are, but that is the actual case of what happened. If you are willing to stick it out, they might give you a discount on your internet; personally I have a local ISP that is an extra $4 per month (after the additional discount to my internet) with no contract obligation, that do not block encrypted data or do traffic shaping, and have no bandwidth limt (WTF!? I know…). My plan is to switch to them at the end of the month and wait until Rogers calls me to tell me the problem has been fixed. Not because I’m skeptical of Rogers but simply because I don’t wish to go any longer with my torrents suffering as I’ve got a lot of stuff I need to backup (There was a huge flood in my basement and I lost of lot of music, media, and games :().
Anyways, I hope that this sheds some light on the subject.
-Steve
Rogers is starting down the slippery slope of traffic shaping- net neutrality would protect their clients, but has not been passed into law yet. In the mean time, if Rogers clients plan on canceling because of traffic shaping, please publicly explain why at our site so we can draw attention to this issue: http://www.boycottrogers.com