‘No one is more interested than we are’ in providing good service for online gaming, Rogers says

Rogers Communications Inc. will routinely test the country’s most played video games to ensure they aren’t affected by traffic shaping errors, the company said in a letter to the CRTC Tuesday. “tarting immediately, we will proactively test the top ten most popular online computer games in the Canadian market,” Ken Thompson, Rogers’ director and counsel of copyright and broadband law, wrote in the letter. The new tests will serve as one of two tactics the company will employ in a five-point plan to fight misclassification errors that in recent months have slowed down online gamers on the company’s network. Rogers did not say how frequently it will test the games, but Ken Engelhart, the company’s senior vice-president of regulatory affairs, confirmed the tests would involve Rogers employees playing the games under a wide variety of network situations and conditions. “It’s not as high-tech as you might think,” Engelhart told The Wire Report in an interview Wednesday. “It’s kind of a fun job for a few engineers at Rogers.” As reported by The Wire Report Tuesday, Rogers is using “whitelisting” do deal with misclassification errors. Applications selected for whitelisting are pushed through Rogers' network without being subjected to traffic management systems. Misclassification errors have delayed time-sensitive gaming data transmitted over the company’s network. Rogers and the company’s Internet traffic management equipment manufacturer, Cisco Systems Inc., conduct testing before new traffic management software is deployed, Rogers says. The company also says it conducts tests when complaints come to light. Rogers said in its letter to the CRTC that it will also routinely run Cisco updates to fix misclassification errors. That will allow the company to take gaming servers or applications off its whitelist after the updates are complete. “We believe our process is a workable solution to the rare problem of misclassification. It ensures that misclassifications are minimized and dealt with in a reasonable timeframe,” Thompson wrote. “Rogers certainly regrets any problems faced by our online gaming customers.” Misclassification errors occurred when the company’s traffic management equipment mistakenly identified time-sensitive data as peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic. The CRTC had ordered Rogers to outline steps the company is taking to resolve the issue, which came to light in March for users of the popular World of Warcraft game. The issue resurfaced in recent weeks for players of another online game on the Sony Playstation network, Call of Duty: Black Ops. On Sept. 16, the commission ordered Rogers to report on a strategy to correct the problem by Tuesday evening. In the company’s letter, Thompson reiterated Rogers’ stance that the misclassification errors occurred only when peer-to-peer services were used alongside game-playing and when a user’s traffic use climbed above 80 Kbps. He noted that Rogers’ traffic management practices are intended to manage peer-to-peer uploading traffic. If this traffic is not managed, it “would grow to occupy the capacity available on our network and so impact our customers’ experience,” the letter said. “Without our traffic management practices, our customers, including online gamers, would experience difficulty uploading traffic.” Rogers suggested that the problems are common among service providers using Cisco’s traffic management systems. “The technology and software in use at Rogers is provided by a leading network equipment vendor: Cisco. This is the same technology that is in place in hundreds of other ISPs worldwide, and Rogers does not believe the problems we have experienced are unique to our network,” the letter said. In an earlier interview with The Wire Report on Monday, Engelhart said that, as far as he knows, Rogers does not conduct upstream traffic shaping for wholesale Internet customers on the Rogers network. But the practice is likely to start happening "soon,” he said. "It could be real soon, as opposed to when we said in 2009 'soon' and we're still not doing it. I think it could be quite soon," Engelhart said. Engelhart told The Wire Report Wednesday that Rogers has whitelisted games that recently faced misclassification issues and that the company is no longer aware of any issues affecting gamers on its network. “In the world of computers, you can never be sure there are no bugs, but right now we’re bug-free,” he said. He rejected suggestions that whitelisting might create an undue preference for designated games because some would not be subjected to the company’s traffic management system while others would. “An undue preference under the CRTC rules is for a person … I don’t think you can have an undue preference for an application,” he said, adding that whitelisting simply removes undue burdens on misclassified traffic. Even if whitelisting gave some games a speed advantage, it wouldn’t last for long, he said. “It’s a short-term solution. We put in the whitelisting, that clears up the problem and then the smart people at Cisco go back to work to do the software fix so that we don’t need the whitelisting. We don’t view whitelisting as a permanent solution, we view it as a very quick and effective short-term solution,” Engelhart said. The Canadian Gamers Organization (CGO) issued a release Tuesday that said Rogers is still not doing enough to fix problems on its network. “Rogers is stating here that they are actively dealing with throttling issues, and suspecting throttling when connection problems are being reported to them. Quite frankly, we are seeing quite the opposite. They are actively refusing to even acknowledge that throttling might be taking place,” CGO founder Jason Koblovsky, who first brought the Call of Duty misclassification problems public in August, said in a statement. Engelhart said the suggestion that the company seeks to slow down its gaming customers is counter-intuitive and personally frustrating. “Our well-being and profitability as a corporation depends on us giving our customers the best possible Internet service we can,” he said. “No one is more interested than we are in making sure these gamers have a good service.” nkyonka@thewirereport.ca

‘No one is more interested than we are’ in providing good service for online gaming, Rogers says

News | September 28, 2011

Unlock all the Canadian telecom, broadcasting and digital media news you need.

FREE TRIAL

SUBSCRIBE

Inside The Wire Report

Information

Hill Times Publishing

Get in Touch With Us