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T-Mobile To Throttle Customers Who Use Unlimited LTE Data For Torrents/P2P
New submitter User0x45 writes: Here's a nicely transparent announcement: "T-mobile has identified customers who are heavy data users and are engaged in peer-to-peer file sharing, and tethering outside of T-Mobile’s Terms and Conditions (T&C). This results in a negative data network experience for T-Mobile customers. Beginning August 17, T-Mobile will begin to address customers who are conducting activities outside of T-Mobile’s T&Cs." Obviously, it's not a good announcement for people with unlimited plans, but at least it's clear. T-mobile also pulled the backwards anti-net neutrality thing by happily announcing 'Free Streaming' from select music providers... which is, in effect, making non-select usage fee-based.
people who don't know what false advertising is.
Doesn't World of Warcraft use torrents to distribute its patches? And there are millions of WoW subscribers.
I suggest you guys call now and complain that you are not being given the service that you are paying for. You pay to access the internet; their job is to deliver it.
It's not at all clear, especially on whether they are capable of filtering the traffic as they claim. It's far more likely that they will simply filter at an arbitrary usage metric, which will undoubtedly catch many of the people they wish to target, but also net a fair number of innocent users who are simply leveraging the "unlimited" plan for which they pay. Who wants to take the bet that complaints from these people will be neatly swept under the rug?
no big deal. could be worse, they could be terminating accounts, charging outrageous overages, or reporting usage to organized crime..err i mean industry trade group lawyers.
By obscuring that traffic through VPN
I realize that bittorrent is presumptively the protocol used entirely by piratopedophile terrorists and all; but what kind of bullshit excuse do they offer for treating one data-heavy use differently from another? Is this purely about making those pesky unlimited customers use less data by crippling their service in various ways, or is their network riddled with devices that can't handle the volume of connections a decently active bittorrent transfer tends to create, like some mid-90s router?
Who gets enough speed to torrent? Hell I'm on edge 40% of the time! WOOT! FU AT&T.
Uh... Who is mad, or desperate enough, to use torrents on a unreliable, slow and capped as hell cellular connection?
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
You can abuse the word "unlimited" until it screams but the second you start saturating the network it is the responsibilty of any sane operator to slow you down.
What if users use Torrents / peer-to-peer for legit reasons (i.e. - sharing files between friends for things related to school projects, fiction writing, images taken on trips; whatever)?
Answer: Doesn't matter. This company, like every other company, is using yet another cookie-cutter solution to solving quantitative problems.
I suppose we probably have to build one giant mesh network instead of begging for the mercy of these providers no? Probably makes us harder to be spied on too if we don't use the same route to get to the same place every time
The dirty pirate is todays boogyman. Soon, it will be Netflix/YouTube users.
It seems perfectly reasonable for a carrier to enforce their terms and conditions. If you agreed to them when you signed up, you shouldn't feel penalized when they throttle you for violating them. If they change their T+C, you get notice and can change to another carrier (without a headache, since there's no contract.)
I fail to see why this is even news...
I actually read the article. I know, it's a faux pas. Live with it. As I read what T-Mobile said, I realize that all this fluff about Peer-to-Peer is meant to distract us from that little line at the end that reads:
In other words, T-Mobile doesn't care what you do. If you try to use the unlimited connection you've purchased, you're going to get throttled. Yet again, more BAIT & SWITCH! They only want customers who buy their expensive service and DON'T USE IT!
My first thought is, too many people out there want to act like "net neutrality" should mean free, unlimited use of all services whenever the carrier promises some sort of flat rate option.
More realistically, I think people need to differentiate between hard line based services and OTA services, which are currently far more expensive to maintain and to support high bandwidth over.
While I'd be very upset to find my cable company or a service providing broadband over fiber like we have at work was throttling us for using bit-torrent protocol or for "using the service with unauthorized devices" -- I don't have the same issue with it happening on a cellular LTE connection.
I think there has to be some level of understanding of the underlying limitations of the technology in place. When I use cellular data, I know up-front that I'm sharing a finite amount of bandwidth with everyone else in an X square mile area is on the service, using that same tower. That's just the nature of the beast -- and it's what gives me the ability to stay connected while very mobile, doing things I'd never be able to do at all otherwise, without traveling to a specific place with a landline connection.
Anyone keeping torrent downloads going on a regular basis over LTE really is just mis-using the service. Sure, there are probably some who live in rural areas who will complain they have no other faster options. But the bottom line is, cellular companies intend their data services to be used primarily in conjunction with their phone handsets, as a way to keep them connected for the Internet tasks you'd most commonly want to do on a phone. They also sell data cards and USB modems, but pretty much always with some strict limits on monthly data usage, or at the very least -- with an "unlimited" plan that contains a lot of exceptions to what unlimited means in that context.
Really, the only viable alternative is to wind up with pricing like the satellite internet services do; strict monthly usage caps with per megabyte overage fees on top of it. I think it's clear that the majority of customers vastly prefer just paying a reasonable, fixed monthly rate with a promise that "under typical usage scenarios, you can just use the thing whenever you like without worrying about extra costs for data".
Good decision. Only dickheads clog cellular radio frequencies with torrents. If you love pirating so much, you can obtain a wired connection for that.
T-mobile also pulled the backwards anti-net neutrality thing by happily announcing 'Free Streaming' from select music providers... which is, in effect, making non-select usage fee-based.
You could look at it that way, I guess. I look at it as I get unlimited data access with the first 3GB per month at LTE speed, but any data from those selected services don't count against it. Kinda wish Amazon or Google music were on those lists, but the original deal I signed with T-Mobile a few months ago was 2.5GB at LTE and no 'free' services. I'd consider the deal now to be a good improvement over what I originally got. Does it prefer some music services over others? Yes. Does it cut my services or increase the amount I pay per month? No. Is my access to Amazon Music or Google Music affected? No.
Unlike Verizon and their sorta-but-not-really-anymore unlimited data service.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, do these sound like the actions of a man whose had ALL he could eat?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Does anyone have a plan with Unlimited tethering from t-mobile??
I have an Unlimited plan, but that is data to the phone, it always had some limit if I turned on 'hot spot' (tethering)
However I have a 64G uSD card in the phone, easynews will download binaries via the web interface however a 800mb or so mkv is about the limit of the battery.
BTW it gets hot.
Is it just me who has trouble trying to understand the summary?
" backwards anti-net neutrality thing "
And then makes it worse here:
"making non-select usage fee-based."
What the hell does this mean? Non select usage?
You agree not to misuse the Service or Device, including but not limited to: (a) reselling or rebilling our Service; (b) using the Service or Device to engage in unlawful activity, or in conduct that adversely affects our customers, employees, business, or any other person(s), or that interferes with our operations, network, reputation, or ability to provide quality service, including, but not limited to, the generation or dissemination of viruses, malware or “denial of service” attacks; (c) using the Service as a substitute or backup for private lines or dedicated data connections; (d) tampering with or modifying your T-Mobile Device; (e) "spamming" or engaging in other abusive or unsolicited communications, or any other mass, automated voice or data communication for commercial or marketing purposes; (f) reselling T-Mobile Devices for profit, or tampering with, reprogramming or altering T-Mobile Devices for the purpose of reselling the T-Mobile Device; (g) using the Service in connection with server devices or host computer applications, including continuous Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, automated machine-to-machine connections or peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications that are broadcast to multiple servers or recipients, “bots” or similar routines that could disrupt net user groups or email use by others or other applications that denigrate network capacity or functionality;
And in the very next section states that:
WE MAY LIMIT, SUSPEND OR TERMINATE YOUR SERVICE OR AGREEMENT WITHOUT NOTICE FOR ANY REASON, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, if you, any user of your Device, or any user on your account: (a) breaches the Agreement;
They are well within their rights under the agreement that every user signed on to. Now while the classic argument is that nobody reads the TOS, that is not Verizon's fault, nor is it their responsibility to make sure you do, and it is certainly not their responsibility to verbally advise you of every condition of service before you sign. It is a perfectly fair argument that "unlimited" can mean "unlimited, but not to the point where it interferes with other users".
Now, some will argue that they have a responsibility to deliver truly "unlimited" services at the advertised bandwidth. However, I don't think it states anywhere in their user agreement that unlimited services are exempt from throttling. The affected users' bandwidth plans are still unlimited, however, at a slower speed, and even if it is stated somewhere that connections will not be throttled, they have already established under contract, their right to limit service in the event of a breach of the TOS.
The affected users still have unlimited bandwidth. They are being administratively punished for a breach of Verizon's TOS, which is a legitimate activity. They cannot cry foul because they don't like the terms. They agreed to them when they signed up.
Personally, I think Verizon is doing this the right way.
"Government is like fire; a handy servant, but a dangerous master." -- George Washington
T-Mobile is not "introducing artificial scarcity. Comcast is; they refuse to properly provision their network. T-Mobile, on the other hand, can get no more bandwidth. They're putting in cells as fast as they can (I'm enjoying the money, not the weather) but it's not an artificial limitation. What they're doing is applying QoS so that everyone on the cell has a useable connection. Very different than AT&T and Verizon's caps that will apply EVEN IF YOU'RE THE ONLY CUSTOMER ON THE CELL.
Most people with "unlimited" data will probably use anywhere between 3-10GB.
But there are people, on the same unlimited plan, that will use 100 or 200 or more GB a month. Now, since they bought "unlimited" data, this is fine. They're getting what they paid for. Some might argue that they are abusing the service, but that doesn't matter: they bought unlimited data, so they're using it.
The result is that people who might use less than 10GB of data a month by streaming lots of music and youtube video, are put into the same service tier as people who might basically run torrents on their phone, or even use it as their home broadband, racking up hundreds of GBs of data a month.
I think part of the problem is that right now the data tiers are silly. Plans basically offer triers that look like this:
500MB
2GB
3GB
UNLIMITED
There's this huge spike.
People who will stream slightly mare than average, and people who intend to use their data for massive broadband demands will have no choice but to go with the unlimited plan. How about some more reasonable tiers? Something like
1GB
5GB
20GB
UNLIMITED
I lost track of what my point was supposed to be so I'm going to stop typing now.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
nope. read the fine print, idiot.
Hmm, good point. T-mobiles "Free Music" is a variation of tiered-service that breaks net neutrality.
Tiered service: An ISP allows customers to full stream at top speed from Ourflix (TM), but streaming from Netflix is throttled unless the ISP is paid (by Netflix or the user).
Tmo-Tiered service: For our flat rate you can have "Free Music" from our select partners Ourmusic(TM), but streaming music from sites from which we do not have agreements will cost the user their paid for data limits.
If I were selling a moving service, and I put out ads showing us moving an elephant, how on earth could I complain when a customer actually asked us to move an elephant? That's what was advertised, that's what they should deliver. End of story.
In your example, the ad showing the elephant would certainly be considered mere puffery and not give you a valid claim in court. See, e.g., Leonard v. Pepsico (in which a plaintiff tried to sue Pepsi for failing to deliver a Harrier jet as the prize in a contest based an a TV ad showing the jet as a prize).
The question is whether "unlimited" is a claim whose truth or falsity can be demonstrated, and what kind of expectations reasonable people have.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
It's called fair queuing. Serve all active customers equally.
That's what my solution would have been, as well. And I wondered why they didn't. Why did they set caps on particular users, rather than just split it equially on a moment-by-moment basis?
But then, a few years back, I was put on a team designing the hardware accellerators that handle bandwidth division in big router packet processors.
Turns out that doing real fair queueing, when you've got a sea of processors and co-processors trying to hot-potato all the packets, is NOT easy. It involves information sharing among ALL the streams, simultaneously, packet by packet, across coprocessors, processors, chips, even boards. This is both N-square and doesn't parallelize well. So a typical implementation works by setting per-user or per-category-within-a-user limits (only havng to access one, private, data structure per stream), assigning limits to each and counting each's usage without reference to the current usage of others.
That means that, to avoid dead backhaul time while customers are throttled below what's available, you have to give them oversize quotas. But that means the "flight is overbooked" and the heavy users, with more packets in flight, get more than their share of "seats", squeezing out the lighter users. To get back to moment-to-moment fair, with only the quota "hammer" for a tool, you have to throttle them back. Tweaking their quotas even on a minute-by-minute basis, let alone milisecond-by-milisecond, would swamp the control plane, and you couldn't easily share the storage for the rapidly-adjusting limits by classes, but would have to store them, as well as usage, per stream (or at least have many subclasses to switch them among). Oops!
I had some inkling that might be fixable. But the company downsized, and I was laid off, before I could examine it deeply enough to see if it could be done efficiently. That was a processor generation or two ago, and I've been doing other stuff since. Good luck, telecom equipment makers!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If you are *always* bit torrenting on cellular networks, you *are* an asshole, dragging down the service for others.
If you grab small files or only on rare occasion, sure, but 24/7, you should be dropped as a customer.
First thing I noticed when testing Tox is that it only worked if I turned on wifi; if I used T-mobile's network, it didn't work. I assume it's because Tox uses DHT and that's "associated with" torrents. Stupid. (But to be fair, I did say ass/u/me; I haven't checked out what's really going wrong.) This isn't a dealbreaker yet because I simply don't have the time to fuck with Tox enough just yet. But eventually I'm going to want stuff as simple as instant messaging (!) done right. If you can't use T-mobile for im, then that'll be the end of a (so far) 11 year business relationship.
While I can understand T-mob. in this case, they - and others as well - could just do what my mobile internet provider in Europe (not T-mob.) does: I got a data package with 10GB of monthly limit with all the constraints (e.g., no torrent use) for average use, but from midnight to 8:00am in the same package they give a separate 100GB monthly allowance without any restrictions at all (and at LTE speed). This way they can force the heavy users out of the more crowded intervals, and everyone can be happy. Oh, the best part, the whole thing costs only ~$20/month....
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
At some point in the mesh someone will likely need to be connected to a fibre to go somewhere, and when he gets a bill he will be pretty pissed.
I remember we actually had these arrangements commercially in Australia. My ISP back in the day imposed a 10GB cap, but interestingly enough the cap didn't include any internal transfer. Not just data served up by the ISP, but also data served up by the ISP's customers, and the ISP's Peers. It created a very interesting market.
A bittorrent tracker appeared with open registration but would only serve users on PIPE networks peers. Effectively we formed a small Australian network of unmetered bittorrent to get around ISP restrictions. PIPE specific gaming servers also started appearing as well as several warez providers (ok starting to feel old now) moved their FTPs to servers with ISPs peered via PIPE.
So yeah a giant mesh in the city would work well providing you're not sending data out of the city, if you do the poor sod at the end of the mesh will get royally screwed.
I guess encrypting incoming and outgoing bittorrent traffic won't fool Sprint? Something probably will and the it will be made easily moddable to users.
Like in the Darth Vader sense? That's disturbing.