Rogers Does Not Comply With CRTC Order In Latest Response

***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***

Contact: Jason Koblovsky
jkoblovsky@rogers.com

TORONTO: The Canadian Gamers Organization (CGO) has received Rogers reply to the CRTC late Tuesday evening.  The reply can be found here.  In its reply to the CRTC Rogers stated that the current system they have in place is working well.  Rogers stated that a short term solution for fixing the problem was to whitelist programs, and expect Cisco Systems to have a resolution to the misclassification in the long term, however Rogers did not provide a specific date as to when it would be fixed.  Rogers also provided a flowchart to their current customer complaints procedure which CGO co-founder Jason Koblovsky says his members just simply are not seeing.

“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, and evidence of this has been submitted to the commission in previous complaints proving what Rogers is claiming with this flowchart is false.  Hopefully the CRTC can read flowcharts and connect the dots.”

CGO co-founder Teresa Murphy added that "World of Warcraft traffic isn't safe until the final fix from Cisco is applied to all Rogers-controlled Deep Packet Inspection systems.  Until that happens, if Blizzard moves any of their servers (as they did last summer), the whitelist will no longer apply to World of Warcraft traffic, and we'll be back in this same situation all over again.  We're also curious as to the current status of the other games users reported to Rogers back in March which were experiencing the same problems as World of Warcraft, but which didn't get as much user outcry as World of Warcraft garnered.  There has been no update from any Rogers employee regarding these other games, which we find concerning.  Updates were sparse on the World of Warcraft issue before the CRTC complaint went in, but updates to users on the forums became non-existent after Rogers was forced to admit their practices with WoW."

Koblovsky added: “The way the CRTC has put this to Rogers is that the CRTC expects a plan with dates to have this misclassification issue resolved. This just simply hasn’t happened here.  The CRTC has been pretty clear to Rogers they want no possibility of misclassification here on any programs, games etc.  Simply whitelisting on consumer complaint here will create undue preference to games, and applications reported.  This is why widespread testing and a solid resolution is needed to fix this issue, and we have been calling for such action.  So has the CRTC.  We also believe this issue is widespread to ISP’s who use Cisco’s ITMP systems, which has been backed up by Rogers in its letter to the CRTC. We have yet to hear from Cisco on this current complaint.  There seems to be a lot more going on here than we first suspected if it’s taken this long for Cisco to fix an issue and still not have a definitive date or plan submitted to its clients on a resolution.  It seems as though Rogers hasn’t been in contact with Cisco on the CRTC order to get this matter resolved.  As a developer myself, I’d be right on top of this especially if it was a big client like Rogers calling me.  Something doesn’t smell right here. The CRTC needs a public hearing on this, and we will be requesting one.”

Koblovsky said that while it will be left up to the CRTC to actively follow through with its updated policies on ISP non-compliance under CRTC net neutrality guidelines, he is actively encouraging Canadians to sign a petition to ensure they do.  That petition can be found:

http://www.openmedia.ca/gamers

Koblovsky stated that the CGO will also be issuing its response to the CRTC on Rogers letter in the coming days.