Rogers' traffic shaping

Rogers is my terrible ISP. When I live in Toronto coming this September, I am going to join the ISP co-op. Currently I am paying the top teired Rogers connection ($50/month!), yet they are shaping my traffic down to an unbearable dial-up type speed (currently I max out around 40kbps). Stangely, when I turn off my bittorrent client (Azureus) I can pull in a few hundred kb/s (closer to their advertised 6Mb/s download speeds). (I am being satirical, Rogers’ traffic shaping is well documented elsewhere). Apparently no one told Rogers that, in Canada, we have a Private Copy Levy that makes it legal for me to download copyrighted material (for backup purposes, of course). Thus, my bittorrent bandwidth is in no way illegal. Not that Rogers cares though, since they strictly forbid many things that are legal (in Canada): you cannot,
“disseminate or otherwise make available obscene, profane or pornographic material; post, upload, transmit, disseminate or otherwise make available content that is unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, slanderous, defamatory or otherwise offensive or objectionable; unlawfully promote or incite hatred; or post, upload, transmit, disseminate or otherwise make available objectionable information,”

Of course, this End User Agreement would never stand up in court (can’t download regular porn apparently!). Further, the EULA, as always, makes no claims of guaranteeing service: “WE DO NOT GUARANTEE OR WARRANT THAT ANY DATA OR FILES SENT BY OR TO YOU… WILL BE TRANSMITTED, TRANSMITTED IN UNCORRUPTED FORM, OR TRANSMITTED WITHIN A REASONABLE PERIOD OF TIME”. But, according to any reasonable interpretation of of Canadian Consumer law you cannot sell a service that does not exist, or falsely represent the service (beyond natural difficulties like occasional service interuptions due to problems beyond their control). Rogers, however, is intentionally throttling my connection. In other words, they are advertising a service and intentionally not providing me with the service. I am as mad as hell.

Comments

[Brad]

When my g/f uses BT she loses her Shaw connection. She calls them and tells them she knows what they're doing and they play dumb. Then they try to make her (a certified mac tech) restart her computer and whatnot. Finally her connection is reactivated. It works perfectly until BT is loaded again.

You should take those motherfuckers to court.

[Quinn]

The amazing thing is that they pretty much have to play dumb, otherwise they might get a class action lawsuit against them, or at least it would be really bad PR (come pay $50/month for highspeed internet, but if you use things we don't like [BT, VOIP, soon to be competitors websites, etc.], you get nothing!). My plan of attack is to flood them with annoying service calls, and see how many techs I can get to come over here. For whatever reason, the ISP traffic shaping is a uniquely Canadian thing (maybe Australia too), there are no US ISPs that have been caught traffic shaping.