Research coming out of Syracuse University and funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation has determined that Rogers Communications is not only the biggest culprit in Canada when it comes to traffic throttling – it’s the worst in the world.

The research, led by Milton Mueller, a professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies, used Google's M-Labs technology to determine the percentage of users who are having their internet speeds throttled by ISPs around the world.

The findings? Rogers throttles more of its users than any other ISP on planet earth.

In fact, Rogers seems to be in a league of its own, throttling 78% of users, with some quarters since 2008 seeing over 90% of users throttled.  By comparison, Cogeco was the next worse culprit, throttling BitTorrent connections more than 31% of the time

The other ISPs were well below these levels:  in 2010 Bell throttled 16% of users, Shaw throttled 14%, and other Canadian ISPs like Telus, Sasktel, and MTS throttle just 6% or less.

Rogers breaching net neutrality rules?

In an interview with the CBC Mueller said, under the regulations that the CRTC promulgated for reasonable internet traffic management practices, he believed that near full-time throttling “is not conformant."

This could then form the basis of a consumer complaint to the CRTC. However, Rogers has maintained that it is compliant, and the CRTC has proven its limited effectiveness in this area. It is slow to respond, and its actions, some of which include fines, seem to be just the cost of doing business for some of the big players.

Even fines are a long shot. In September the CRTC issued guidelines for resolving consumer complaints about throttling, with timelines for each step. A summary of complaints are to be published four times a year. Violators could face a third-party audit or a public hearing. But, as Telemanagement previously reported on this issue, this likely will have no effect for the simple reason that you can’t shame the shameless.

Clearly, Rogers’ policy of setting maximum upload speed of 80 kilobits per second at all times for peer-to-peer file sharing means that there is near constant throttling. That is unless you subscribe to its fastest internet service, which is is up to two megabits per second, or 26 times faster.

It would seem that Rogers is in contravention of the CRTC’s rules that traffic management must be designed to address "a defined need and nothing more" and that they should be neither "unjustly discriminatory nor unduly preferential."

In other words, throttling has to address traffic issues, not cap product lines in order to encourage up-selling to premium services. If you subscribe to a slower service, and the network can handle faster speed, then you should get faster speeds.

Mueller is now compiling the data for late 2010 and the first half of 2011. He intends to see whether other protocols besides BitTorrent are being throttled by ISPs. More impressively, he even wants to investigate whether deep packet inspection is being used for copyright policing, advertising placement, government surveillance, and censorship.