Rogers Stops DPI/Traffic Management; Cisco: "there have been very few cases of misclassification"

 
For several months now, Rogers is facing resistance against its traffic management policy enforcement, as it misclassifies some non P2P file sharing traffic as such. This comes from interested parties (Canadian Gamers - here) and, more importantly, Canada's regulator, the CRTC (see "CRTC to Rogers: We Know what you are doing ..!" - here and "CRTC to Rogers: Fix your DPI System!" -here).

It turns out the Rogers decided to give up on traffic management enforcement (this follows a similar step by Bell Canada - here). So either the problem is too complicated for Cisco to solve, or there is no longer a business justification to manage P2P file sharing traffic.

In his letter to the CRTC, Kenneth G. Engelhart, SVP Regulatory (here), says that:  

• First, it should be noted that very little traffic is affected by the traffic management of unidentified traffic on peer-to-peer file sharing ports. Rogers has conducted a test of real world traffic and determined that only .005% of real world traffic falls into this category. In other words, 5 one thousandths of 1% of real world traffic is not classified by the Cisco software and is on peer-to-peer file sharing ports
   
• Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution and to allay any concerns which the Commission’s investigation may have created, we have reconfigured the Cisco equipment so that the unclassified traffic on peer-to-peer ports is no longer traffic managed.
   
• In addition, we have been reviewing our traffic shaping policy for several months. New technologies and ongoing investments in network capacity will allow Rogers to begin phasing out that policy starting in March 2012. These changes will be introduced to half of Rogers existing Internet customers by June 2012 and to its remaining customers by December 2012.

Rogers added a letter signed by Larry Chang (pictured), VP engineering Technology, ERBU stating that "there have been very few cases where traffic has been misclassified as peer-to-peer file sharing traffic".