Senators Ask Four Major Carriers About Video Slowdowns (arstechnica.com) 108
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Three U.S. Senate Democrats today asked the four major wireless carriers about allegations they've been throttling video services and -- in the case of Sprint -- the senators asked about alleged throttling of Skype video calls. Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent the letters to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile, noting that recent research using the Wehe testing platform found indications of throttling by all four carriers.
"All online traffic should be treated equally, and Internet service providers should not discriminate against particular content or applications for competitive advantage purposes or otherwise," the senators wrote. Specifically, the Wehe tests "indicated throttling on AT&T for YouTube, Netflix, and NBC Sports... throttling on Verizon for Amazon Prime, YouTube, and Netflix... throttling on Sprint for YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Skype Video calls... [and] delayed throttling, or boosting, on T-Mobile for Netflix, NBC Sports, and Amazon Prime by providing un-throttled streaming at the beginning of the connection, and then subsequently throttling the connection," the senators' letters said.
"All online traffic should be treated equally, and Internet service providers should not discriminate against particular content or applications for competitive advantage purposes or otherwise," the senators wrote. Specifically, the Wehe tests "indicated throttling on AT&T for YouTube, Netflix, and NBC Sports... throttling on Verizon for Amazon Prime, YouTube, and Netflix... throttling on Sprint for YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Skype Video calls... [and] delayed throttling, or boosting, on T-Mobile for Netflix, NBC Sports, and Amazon Prime by providing un-throttled streaming at the beginning of the connection, and then subsequently throttling the connection," the senators' letters said.
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Best bet is to get your two enemies to fight each other, especially if they've been holding vaults of dirt on each other for generations.
Trump is our best chance, not a good one, but better than any alternative. IMHO It all comes down to 'Hillary for Prison'. If that happens...the prison list gets long, fast.
Bets on the first round of Rs to go, right after Hillary (fingers crossed)?
How hard would the Ds come is the real question, they're all guilty. I'm thinking the Ds would go sort of parity...take
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Right, this exactly. All the customers connected to the network should get a maximum bandwidth allotment of one portion of the total bandwidth divided by the amount of connected clients. Latency should not be fucked with, period. Traffic should not be prioritized, period, above everything getting the exact same priority.
Any counter-arguments to this are expressly for the purpose of allowing situations where carriers can overbook their networks and shift the blame around between the customers.
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Limit everybody to worst case, throw away unused bandwidth.
That's a plan, not a good one, but at least it's a practical suggestion.
You can buy bandwidth that way BTW, not from your average consumer ISP.
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Limit everybody to worst case, throw away unused bandwidth.
You're right, that's not a good plan. But it's also not even remotely what I'm suggesting. Read it again until you can understand it, and until then shut the fuck up.
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That's exactly what you propose. I suggest YOU reread your post with brain engaged. Everybody gets total bandwidth/connected users. 99% won't be using it at any given instant.
'Shut the fuck up' is not an argument...It's what you said when you realized you were wrong.
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He lied to you ('If I ever experience any congestion or loss at all, they will fix it immediately.'), or at best told a half truth.
The backbones don't have infinite bandwidth. Your ISP doesn't have fiber to all servers.
I guarantee you they don't even have 500/customer to the nearest peering point.
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Saying it doesn't make it true.
NNN (Score:2)
I'm confused. Isn't this simply non-net-neutrality?!
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Ajit Pai "should" have warned them all privately that everything he was saying publicly was a complete lie, and he knew it ahead of time.
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Wrong (Score:2)
>"All online traffic should be treated equally, and Internet service providers should not discriminate against particular content or applications for competitive advantage purposes or otherwise," the senators wrote.
Wrong. When there are cases of limited bandwidth, like there is on mobile networks, throttling of certain types or classes of network traffic makes perfect sense to prevent ALL customers' traffic from coming to a crawl or experiencing issues. Video is a perfect example of that, if it is done
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Never understood why they care so much about how much data is transfer over the speed of it.
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
>"They need to upgrade their effin network then. Just like they pledged to do."
I agree. But no matter how much bandwidth is upgraded, people can quickly suck it all away. Now 4K video. Now 8K. Now 3D 8K with surround sound. Etc.
There is always a limit to bandwidth, which if hit, will affect other people on the network. It isn't evil to try and manage congestion to keep things working well. It *is* evil to try and manipulate the traffic for other "agendas".
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>"It's only when the service is oversubscribed that one person's usage affects another."
There is no real definition of "oversubscribed". On a land network, you could have 100Mb of bandwidth and tell 10 customers they all have 10Mb and partition it that way. But that won't work if you don't partition it and it becomes a shared network (like most are). All you can say in that example is "up to 100Mb", which is somewhat meaningless. And on mobile, there is no telling how many people will be in a cell, a
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... if only it was congestion they were managing....
It wasn't. Vimeo wasn't throttled at all, and some services were throttled only after a certain number of bytes. See here [meddle.mobi]
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QoS measures are one thing, but when there's no congestion, no slowdown, and no problem, should it be okay for them to impose arbitrary limits?
I was looking at Cricket's site last night (Cricket is an AT&T subsidiary) and noticed that all of their plans throttle video to 480p. Their limited plans allow users to opt-out of the 480p default (i.e. "It's your data to spend as you want, so it's fine with us if you blow it on HD video"), but their unlimited plans offer no ability to opt-out (i.e. "We're not g
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>"QoS measures are one thing, but when there's no congestion, no slowdown, and no problem, should it be okay for them to impose arbitrary limits?"
On speed? Probably not.
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Agreed all around. I just didn’t see a point in spelling all of that out, since I assumed my audience understood those distinctions already.
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>"You realize your argument is so obviously wrong it's hard to imagine you don't work for a phone company, right?"
Not only is it not wrong, I do not work for a phone company or any ISP, and have no financial interest in them, whatsoever.
>"There's absolutely no excuse whatsoever you can contrive that should allow them to charge you for a 1080p stream, tell you you're getting a 1080p stream, but then only actually give you a 480p stream"
"Charge" you for a 1080p stream? There is no charge for a 1080p st
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>"Perhaps you are unaware that HugesNet transcodes streaming video to bring it down to whatever level you'll pay for. Seriously, go look at their plans."
I am aware that some ISP's (mobile or not) do such things. And I agree that it is wrong and misleading. But my arguments in favor of having some network traffic management are not with the assumption that such secret-behind-the-scenes-transcoding is the norm. I would consider that a separate (and yet interesting) issue.
>"Also, if you use a VPN, the
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No. It's not OK to reduce Sally's download speed [from whats equitably been paid for where all users are equal] in order to ensure Bob's video stream plays without jitters during prime time. If Bob doesn't have a fast enough connection due to limited bandwidth being shared he shouldn't be able stream unjittery videos.
Maybe there is a solution that can work via reducing the quality of a video to fit within the available bandwidth that has been equally divided (or otherwise based on what is being paid for) ba
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Your comment at core is stupid. Ohh look i control the flow of water at the valve, we can all access the water equally until there is a shortage. Ohh look, I turned the valve halfway down, there is now shortage, pay fucking more or get a dribble instead of a flow.
Yout statement makes network bandwidth expansion, a cost with no benefit, more bandwidth charge less, less bandwidth charge more. So darknet will be all the range to reduce shortage to increase charges and of course lawyers and other corrupt pract
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Wrong. When there are cases of limited bandwidth, like there is on mobile networks, throttling of certain types or classes of network traffic makes perfect sense to prevent ALL customers' traffic from coming to a crawl or experiencing issues.
I think it makes more sense to share the bandwidth equally amongst customers rather than trying to pick on any protocol. If some part of the network becomes constrained, throttle down to some bandwidth ceiling per end-user. This will naturally throttle high-bandwidth applications like video, even if they're over a VPN, without affecting customers using low bandwidth.
If there's heavy NATting going on then it may be a problem mapping connexions to customers at some points on the network. IPv6 for the win,
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>"I think it makes more sense to share the bandwidth equally amongst customers rather than trying to pick on any protocol."
Overall, I like your comments a lot. But I will say that certain protocols (services) really do need a certain amount of bandwidth to be of any value.... that is where QOS can be helpful. And on another hand, it doesn't seem unreasonable to limit some types of services, in "reasonable" ways such that it doesn't overly harm other users. The example I would use is that on limited ba
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if I go to YouTube
Encrypt your traffic
YouTube has been HTTPS for years now. What sort of encryption did you have in mind beyond that?
Is this significant? (Score:2)
The Wehe web page is not clear on how significant the throttling is. For example, it seems the 22% of Sprint Skype calls are throttled at .5mbs, but it isn't clear that the unthrottled calls are much faster - they don't say anything about the unthrottled speed.
The response from the industry association is a little bit odd. They claim both that no throttling is going on, and that it is a good thing. I suppose it isn't supposed to be read carefully, so they provide all possible arguments, even at the risk of
Fuck the Republicans (Score:2)
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Ew gross why would I want to fuck a bunch of old dudes.
the XY problem (Score:2)
There is a very simple fix for this (Score:2)
Simply remove the ability for any company to be both a carrier AND a content distributor.
You can either:
1) Be an ISP ( you sell bandwidth. It requires #2 for it to be useful. )
or
2) Be in the content creation / distribution business ( you sell end content people want that requires #1 to experience it )
but not both.
This would effectively remove any financial incentive for a carrier to throttle competing services in an effort to promote their own.
( Because, come on. This IS what they're doing regardless if
Re:This is why NN is dumb. (Score:5, Insightful)
"All online traffic should be treated equally, and Internet service providers should not discriminate against particular content or applications for competitive advantage purposes or otherwise."
You can't just take something out of it's context and make a meaningful argument.
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You are like the politicians. Starting from a lack of understanding, you say stupid things, thinking they are smart.
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Vermin Supreme was the best candidate. Living in CA, my vote was wasted anyhow.
Moron.
Re:This is why NN is dumb. (Score:5, Informative)
No, that is NOT what Net Neutrality advocates are asking for. Net Neutrality means that ISPs should be agnostic about the DESTINATION, i.e. that VoIP traffic to Skype should not be slower than VoIP traffic to Facebook Messenger or whatever.
No (sane) NN law should ever be written in a way that prevents differing prioritization of different classes of traffic, e.g. ensuring that latency-sensitive data, such as VoIP traffic gets sent without delay even if it means that non-latency-sensitive data, such as bulk downloads, are slower, even by a few seconds.
Because a five second difference in your download time could make the difference between somebody else's phone call being perfect and dropping out over and over. Services that require low latency should get priority, because if slowed down, they become unusable. Other services, if slowed down, do not become significantly less usable. The assumption is that every user will eventually do something for which latency matters, whether it is gaming, Skype, or even just video streaming, though the extent to which latency matters varies, obviously, depending on what you're doing.
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The only correct solutions are to increase the capacity or to reduce the traffic.
Uhh, yeah, you're right. That's why they reduce the traffic by dropping packets, i.e. throttling...
Prioritization is also very subjective. What if you're mindlessly yapping about nothing on the phone, but if my download takes a minute more, I'll miss my flight?
If you miss a flight because a download took a minute longer, then you are to blame for incredibly poor planning. But aside from that, in order for this kind of QoS to impact a bulk download on the order of minutes requires it to be a download that is large enough to take many minutes. Over that kind of time, you would never be able to blame one particular person's usage on your delay. Now the question is no l
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Lol, let me tell you something. You cannot miss a flight by 1 minute. If you have flown significantly in your life, I'm sure you will remember waiting on the plane with everyone else until suddenly 2-3 people board and sit. And then the plane leaves. Of course you can miss a flight, but not by 1 minute.
That means that 1 minute was on top of the time they would have waited for you after everyone else boarded. If you said your download was delayed by 10 or 15 minutes, then maybe I would be more sympathetic. S
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Re: This is why NN is dumb. (Score:1)
Because ftp is not as latency sensitive as gaming (well gaming is actually more jitter sensitive)
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I have heard one, maybe two pieces of good news that have come from the FCC since he took over.
Most of the time it is him listening to the whispers of what the carriers want while getting fuck in the ass by the carrier without the reach around.
And enjoys every minute of it.
He is also cheap at $10 an hour.
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I use sprint, I haven't noticed a difference since the end of the 2015 NN rule, well the service has gotten better.. And they recently upped my throttle cap(only in congested areas) to 50GB, and "mobile hotspot" to 50GB from 25 and 10 respectively. And I have been using my phone as home internet for the last 3 months exclusively.. I can play games just fine, watch youtube just fine with the exception of sometimes it will drop to 480p for a few minutes or at normal peak times when all the kids around where I
Re:This is why NN is dumb. (Score:4, Insightful)
QoS only ever affects network traffic in any significant way when there is congestion. If there is congestion, the correct solution is to increase capacity, not to throttle some traffic. That traffic is paid for! You oversold your bandwidth too much and need to upgrade. QoS is fine on your own network with your own data. You can be as cheap as you want and use QoS to prioritize traffic that is important to you. An ISP however carries other people's paid for traffic and should absolutely treat it all equally. Yes, that means FTP gets the same priority as gaming packets. That is no problem at all unless you fail to upgrade the network to handle the traffic that your customers paid for. An ISP with regular bottlenecks on their network is doing it wrong.
Re: This is why NN is dumb. (Score:1)
QoS only ever affects network traffic in any significant way when there is congestion. If there is congestion, the correct solution is to increase capacity, not to throttle some traffic
So you're arguing that QoS shouldn't exist because everyone can always just immediately increase capacity.
Good one.
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Consumer bandwidth does not come with a SLA (Service Level Agreement). If you want that, you can get it. It ain't cheap.
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Link to the ISP and it's SLA.
I doubt it.
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ISPs only control your speed to the peering point, they _can't_ make that promise in general. Most servers can't support that speed.
Even with a SLA you have to traceroute and show the slowdown is on the ISPs network.