There was a time, long long ago, when RoadRunner (and the other cable providers) blocked traffic on common server ports. These restrictions were more a matter of neccessity than a desire of the cable operators to limit the functionality of their networks. Upstream and downstream traffic are handled differently on a cable network. Under early standards, it was assumed that upstream traffic would be significantly less in terms of the amount of data being moved and that upstream traffic would be rather sporadic or bursty. Placing a server on a cable connection would not fall into that scenerio, and as such would cause upstream loads that the system was not capable of dealing with and still maintain reasonable service to other subscirbers.
Cable infrastucture and technology has changed and the RoadRunner policy has changed accordingly. Everything is open now, with a few minor exceptions. Also, RoadRunner now allows users to supply their own cable modem, so you are not stuck with what they supply, although I can't think of any good reason someone would want to buy additional hardware at this point. None of the cable systems I come in contact with today have unreasonable blocks in place, although there certainly may still be some that do.
On the point of throttling bandwidth and blocking ports, it is worth noting that these are two completely different issues. Throttling takes place at layer 2 and is not an IP function in this case, and as such has very little relation to the idea of blocking ports. When the port filtering was in place, it did not happen at the modem level, but somewhere within the IP network of the cable provider.
At this point, it really does not make much sense for any ISP to attempt to block ports. Most of the broadband routers available today allow for a port to be forwarded to a different port on an internal machine. Several dynamic DNS services offer port redirection services, so it becomes very easy to circumvent these efforts.
One last point before I finish this rant. Broadband ISPs certainly do block some ports, but this is a good thing. 137-139 and 445 are commonly blocked to dissallow simple file sharing over the internet and reduce broadcast traffic on the local IP network. This is realatively recent for RoadRunner, and prior to the port blocks being put in place it was usually possible to find 8-10 computers broadcasting to the local subnet, usually with drives shared without passwords. Sometimes it is necessary to protect people from themselves.