Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study (bloomberg.com) 49
U.S. wireless carriers have long said they may slow video traffic on their networks to avoid congestion and bottlenecks. But new research shows the throttling happens pretty much everywhere all the time. From a report: Researchers from Northeastern University and University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted more than 650,000 tests in the U.S. and found that from early 2018 to early 2019, AT&T throttled Netflix 70% of the time and Google's YouTube service 74% of the time. But AT&T didn't slow down Amazon's Prime Video at all. T-Mobile throttled Amazon Prime Video in about 51% of the tests, but didn't throttle Skype and barely touched Vimeo, the researchers say in a paper [PDF] to be presented at an industry conference this week.
Does It Really Surprise Anyone (Score:5, Insightful)
What we need is internet providers going back to internet providers, MVNOs going back to MVNOs. Trying to cover all the bases has only hurt consumers and trying to invent ways around it just makes them invent new ways of screwing us.
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Video clips will play like on 1000/1000 POTS networks?
Every 5G tower will congestion free as its new. Not like 4G that was something between 3G txt and 4K ready 5G
With the 4K, HDR and AI doing local dimming.
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The wireless providers would love to give you all that because then you'd hit your cap and be throttled 5 minutes into the month, giving them the rest of the month to remind you how easily you could raise your cap by paying more for the next tier of service.
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The rest of the world offers you high data and extremely fast speeds for less than $30 at most while the cheapest I've had was $5. Meanwhile, my mobile phone bill exceeds $250 a month in the US and they tell me I'm using too much bandwidth when all I did was stream non-video music. Then add in the spotty reception and slow speeds in certain areas. But oh my God! We got 5G in the middle of downtown Los Angeles guys! Ignore that the vast majority don't live there.
I'm even considering roaming charges from thes
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Come to Canada, you'll appreciate the cheap American prices.
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Living there doesn't help, it doesn't penetrate windows.
This is only for people walking on the streets of LA, or riding in convertibles.
You can stream 5G while riding a rented electric scooter, but not while in a car unless you're going to hold your phone out the window.
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Europe also seems to have significantly better population density which makes it easier on the infrastructure build out.
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Mobile web users demand burst (Score:2)
I would rather have them be honest about it and sell 500kbps connections without usage limitations
There's a lot more demand among individual users for a 500 kbps connection burstable to 10 Mbps than for a 500 kbps connection that is not burstable.
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I feel a car analogy coming on. What if we set speed limits for roads to whatever the roads could support if every single vehicle owner tried to drive somewhere at the same time?
No, the real problem here isn't throttling, it's source-specific throttling - targeting providers unless they cut a deal with the ISP. This will lead to monopoly. (I.e. the whole Net Neutrality debate).
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No, the real problem here isn't throttling, it's source-specific throttling - targeting providers unless they cut a deal with the ISP.
Can't speak for the other carriers, but that's not how T-Mobile's Binge On throttling works. A provider needs to "cut a deal" to participate in Binge On. But even a provider operated as a hobby can meet T-Mobile's guidelines, and that mostly means falling back to a lower bitrate SD/ED stream when T-Mobile applies its 1.5 Mbps limit. (Any HLS or MPEG DASH player should be able to do that.) The subscriber can opt out of Binge On, but then video starts counting against the subscriber's monthly quota.
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For me the root of the problem is that carriers insist on selling "ultra fast" connections (let's say 10mbps) when the maximum they can consistently provide to each user is 500kbps. I would rather have them be honest about it and sell 500kbps connections without usage limitations than try to sell 10mbps connections that their network only supports occasionally and by limiting what users can download per month.
Because they can sell them for more (and sell more of them), by claiming they are high speed(fine print: up to). It might only be at 2:07 am on the third Tuesday of the month where usage is low enough that you could actually get those speeds, but you still technically could so it's not false advertising. It would be better off if they were forced to advertise based on average speeds during normal network usage.
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The problem is these companies are interested in the bottom line. They can actually build a wireless network that could meet the demand of its users, but it is cheaper and easier to just throttle the users, and influence politicians to support this belief.
While Wireless in theory should be a secondary method of information, in practicality it cannot be. Just as the wireless carriers are being lazy by just limiting the supply, wired ISP are just as lazy delivering high speed networks to homes and businesses
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Not to excuse their greed, but wireless providers cannot just expand as they see fit. Getting permission to build a single tower in a populated area can take years.
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Towers are almost non-existent in populated areas, actually. They used to be extremely common, but now in densely populated areas, they're just on rooftops. And on commercial buildings, the roottops often have sides that are RF transparent, so you can have a cell on a building on a street corner that no one knows about.
It's fairly cheap too - for access to infrastructure and all that, with a small fee going to the building owner
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I see them even hanging off the side of larger satellite dishes that some businesses have on the roof.
The fake trees are almost entirely for places with Home Owners Associations (aka gated communities) who are locked in to rules written in the past that were mostly designed to prevent amateur radio enthusiasts from making the neighborhood look industrial, and bleeding noise into everybody's television.
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game streaming will fail due to this and ISP will (Score:2)
game streaming will fail due to this and ISP will want to have there game streaming as well.
Just hope we have't end up the next CSN Philly. Where Game X is only on comcast cable streaming.
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ISP will want to have there game streaming as well.
Nobody without a smart phone buys one just for the type of game streaming that is affected.
ISPs do not care unless you pay more for it.
This is one of the features that they can use to make you pay more.
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and streaming will fail when you need to pay $30-$50 /mo extra for unlimited / with no slowdown data and we can't isp's say with our gaming service starting at $19.99 data does not court as part of your base plan.
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Wireless carriers fought over net neutrality for years because they knew they couldn't build a wireless network that could meet the demands of it's users.
True. But, the real problem is that the users and their "demands" are stupid.
Seriously. WTF. After decades of amazing technological progress, we are actually going backwards. Watching video over a cellphone connection, on a 5 inch phone screen, is beyond retarded.
While you morons bitch about this stupid shit, again, I will continue to enjoy watching video, problem-free, on a real computer, with a wired connection and a 32 inch 4K monitor.
Transit passengers and rural/Seattle dwellers (Score:2)
I will continue to enjoy watching video, problem-free, on a real computer, with a wired connection and a 32 inch 4K monitor.
If you watch video only at this one place, then throttling of video over cellular Internet doesn't affect you as much as two other classes of subscribers.
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I will continue to enjoy watching video, problem-free, on a real computer, with a wired connection and a 32 inch 4K monitor.
If you watch video only at this one place, then throttling of video over cellular Internet doesn't affect you as much as two other classes of subscribers.
I take mass transit often and I see the multitude of riders who are watching any number of youtube/twitch/netflix/etc streams. It's everywhere.
Personally I don't, because I agree with rudy_wayne.
Watching video on a phone is just annoying to me.
But throttling doesn't surprise me when I see how many people taking transit are doing it.
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They couldn't build a wireless network to meet the demand becau
Is throttling against neutrality? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have T-Mobile. I forget what they offer, but basically I think you get unlimited data if you agree to video throttling (I think it's 1080p, may be 720p).
To me this doesn't seem like it's against network neutrality, after all you get a lot of bonus in return for this throttling with a much higher data cap. Furthermore for most people it's not that much of a degradation, if you are watching it on a mobile device how much better is 4K going to look as it chews through your data allowance?
If you can disable it, and it's helping end users, why is it a problem? Why would people be fighting for a world that is worse for cell phone users, where they could not data throttle 4k video to more reasonable speeds if they wanted to for more compact viewing?
TV tethering (Score:2)
if you are watching it on a mobile device how much better is 4K going to look as it chews through your data allowance?
It depends on the size of the display to whose Chromecast adapter your mobile device is sending its signal.
Some video sources require HD for high motion (Score:2)
Say you're watching high-motion video, such as a video game or a sporting event, at SD/ED resolution (640x480 to 864x480 pixels) on the 4" to 6" screen of a smartphone. If something is shot in high motion, it'll look a lot better at 60 fps than at 30 fps. But YouTube won't send more than 30 fps unless the video is at least 720p.
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To me this doesn't seem like it's against network neutrality, after all you get a lot of bonus in return for this throttling with a much higher data cap. Furthermore for most people it's not that much of a degradation, if you are watching it on a mobile device how much better is 4K going to look as it chews through your data allowance?
Yeah, remember, NetNeutrality means you can't discriminate based on /who/ sends the data, not what type of data. So saying StreamingCompanyA can stream unthrottled but StreamingCompanyB cannot, that's a violation. But saying DataTypeA gets throttled but DataTypeB does not, that's fine (QoS).
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As this is the wireless part i.e. the "last mile", they cannot use backbone clogging as a reason.
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Net neutrality never applied to wireless networks in the first place. Dial-up was regulated in a way that provided "net neutrality" due to the fact that it was provided via phone lines, which were regulated under Title II. Cable ISPs came under similar regulation around 2005 when the Bush-era FCC provided rules similar to what we now think of as net neutrality. And again with the Obama-era FCC trying to regulate cable ISPs under Title II. But wireless carriers were never added to any of those rules. In fact
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>"If you can disable it, and it's helping end users, why is it a problem? Why would people be fighting for a world that is worse for cell phone users, where they could not data throttle 4k video to more reasonable speeds if they wanted to for more compact viewing?"
Because many people seem to believe that there will be enough bandwidth for everyone to stream endless video all the time. The reality is there just isn't, not without slowing things down to a crawl for everyone. Video is a zillion times more
Satellite, too (Score:2)
Exede throttles the piss out of streaming video, but torrents are nice and fast...
Barely Touched Vimeo (Score:2)
The majority... (Score:1)
Sick of the paywalled links on this site!!!! (Score:2)
Dear msmash,
If possible, please put links that are NON-PAY-WALLED into the article description? If there aren't any alternate non pay-walled links, then please do not post the article to start with.
Two articles posted today only have pay-walled links and I have done ran out of free views (as I am sure many others on this site are as well) on those sites.
Are They Blocking by IP? Would a VPN Help? (Score:2)
The article makes it seem like carriers are targeting only certain video sites. That would suggest that the throttling is based on the IP addresses used by these sites, or possibly by some characteristic of their traffic. Either way, this seems like another use for a VPN. If you have a good ISP at home, with enough uplink bandwidth, you could run your own OpenVPN service there to work around throttling on your mobile phone.