
Major Canadian ISP admits throttling World of Warcraft - pieter
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/oops-major-canadian-isp-admits-throttling-world-of-warcraft.ars
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btmorex
Can anyone explain to me why Canada has such poor internet service? I kind of
understand why countries like Australia and New Zealand don't have great
internet plans, but Canada is right next to the US and yet has far worse
service.

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kgermino
Canada is far less dense than even the United States and internet access is
controlled by a duopoly, which is a bad combination for competition or
affordable access.

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dmix
Also the regulatory body (CRTC) thats is supposed to be watching over these
companies is run entirely by ex-staff of said companies. So it's very similar
to the big banks in the US (their negative actions don't have market
repercussions because of their ability to dominate the market with the help of
regulatory bodies).

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rpledge
Interestingly WoW uses bit torrent to distribute patches to users, so its not
uncommon to have P2P traffic occurring while playing WoW.

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marshray
It's worth pointing out that "peer to peer" is a network protocol
architecture, one that the Internet was designed for.

Technically it's unrelated to illicit file sharing, other than that game
companies, free operating systems, and pirates all distribute large DVD-sized
files and thus seek the most efficient way to do so.

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mrcharles
Yes, but that doesn't stop the ISPs here from treating all P2P traffic with
the same hammer. As far as they are concerned, P2P = bad for network, and so
they throttle it.

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drdaeman
ISPs (I work for one) dislike traffic, which heavily saturate channels. Total
uplink capacity is comparable with total customer demand at peak hours. So,
ISPs have to distinct between immediate (VoIP, gaming, SSH), normal priority
(web browsing, email) and bulk (BitTorrent et al) cases. Although, throttling
to pre-defined per-customer value seem like stupid idea, but putting them into
different buckets is a must.

ISPs also dislike high-PPS low-packet-size (significantly lower than MTU) UDP
traffic of uTorrent's uTP protocol, because it quite negatively affects the
network hardware.

And, most important — ISPs, in fact, _love_ P2P traffic when it happens
between their peers, because such traffic does not consume uplink channels.
When it's legally possible — they endorse it (for example, by setting up
gaming servers or introducing locally-hosted software-update mirrors), when
it's a gray waters of file sharing — they just don't stick their nose in
other's business (unless law enforcement requests them so). Of course that's
unless they want to make customers dissatisfied their service as network
connectivity providers.

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slyn
>> "ISPs also dislike high-PPS low-packet-size"

This is presumably what was specifically causing the WoW throttling from the
article.

>>"We recently introduced a software modification to solve the problems our
customers are experiencing with World of Warcraft. However, there have been
recent changes to the game, which has created new problems. A second software
modification to address these new issues will not be ready until June."

I'm not 100% sure, but iirc the "recent changes" had to do with WoW changing
the TCP ack frequency when running, more than doubling or tripling the total
number of packets sent over any given period of play time. They turned this on
with a recent patch, but hotfixed it off temporarily because, as you said: "it
quite negatively affects the network hardware". People with crappy
routers/modems were apparently having problems staying connected.

A blizzard dev writes more in detail about it here:
[http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1965992365?page=15#2...](http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1965992365?page=15#287)

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Locke1689
If anyone's interested, this[1] paper highlights why P2P, especially in gaming
applications, isn't going away any time soon. Unfortunately, P2P authors
really need better systems to keep inter-AS traffic to a minimal level, but
the current Internet wasn't really designed with that in mind. There are a
number of different research efforts and fielded methods out right now, but
none seem to have taken a really strong hold.

[1] <http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/72879/donnybrook.pdf>

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delinka
I keep reading too much from the unwashed masses about how this throttling
works. ("They see the process that does P2P and throttle anything coming from
the same process." - I do not and will never install ISP software on my
systems.) Since the ISPs are not forthcoming with that information, could
someone do an excellent writeup on the different throttling methods and then
provide a left-field guess as to what these "access providers" are doing?

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sskates
Jeeze this is awful. If you're Blizzard and an ISP starts throttling your
game, at least you have a little muscle to fight back (and even so their
response is "oops, sorry, we'll try to have it fixed by June"). But if you're
Random Web Startup that is dependent on P2P and your users have to deal with
this I can't imagine there's much you can do. What a horrible barrier to
entry.

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apperoid
It must be noted that according to the article they are not throttling WoW
specifically but are slowing down all P2P traffic.

