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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.
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?
By obscuring that traffic through VPN
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
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
What excuse? The excuse that they've identified it specifically as a huge bandwidth hog on their networks and, given the practical realities of sharing bandwidth among multiple users, disallowed p2p services in the terms and conditions that those users agreed to when they signed up. Nobody said anything about pedophiles.
When I'm in my home area, my T-Mobile is often faster than my cable (198xx zip code).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I agree, with both sides but you always will have people that abuse the system which makes them have to do this. The fact that this "hurts" mostly people that break the TOS in the first place I don't see the big deal. It does hurt normal customers which always happens but in my eyes I'd be passed if everyone was torrenting and p2p that aren't even for their phone too...
So if you were running an ISP, what would you do to bandwidth hogs? QOS, Throttle, or just drop them as a customer? Perhaps a courteous letter or warning?
Life is not for the lazy.
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".
You can saturate a gigabit connection from a single person seeding Bittorent P2P traffic. The amount of connections it creates is insane too. It's like standing on the rooftop of your home and throwing money on the ground in the ghetto. You don't have enough lawn space for all the hoards of people waiting to fight over it. P2P bandwidth is high because people are fighting for resources to access "free" shit.
ISOs, FOSS.... yeah what the fuck ever man. It's Movies, Music, Porn, and Games. STFU and get real. P2P is 99% illegitimate traffic and highly illegal.
So if you were running an ISP, what would you do to bandwidth hogs? QOS, Throttle, or just drop them as a customer?
It's called fair queuing. Serve all active customers equally. I switched WISPs because my old one couldn't handle bittorrent and so banned the protocol, so there is definitely something to the idea that their network might be shit and thus they might be banning it because it causes service to degrade even when they do fair queuing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
1. T-Mobile only throttles after you hit your limit
2. This is made clear in ToS and if you are too lazy to read ToS, the sales person also mentions it in the store.
3. P2P is forbidden as other's have pointed out. No regular ISP has forbidden P2P on their networks AFAIK.
People are falling for the "Unlimited = Unmetered" again like they did when people first discovered file sharing at universities and cable ISP's, crushing the ISP's upload bandwidth.
With wireless, it's entirely within reason to throttle down Peer2Peer file sharing because the bandwidth is equal going up and down. If you have a good signal you can get 75Mbits (up or down, but not both at the same time.) But regardless of using that bandwidth, those CDMA symbols are still being used, so just one person in a cell sector can monopolize the entire available spectrum.
Cap bandwidth during (and only during) peak usage periods, similar to "unlimited nights and weekends" voice plans.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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
QOS. When the network is congested, "bulk data" like BitTorrent should get a lower priority than low-latency data like streaming audio/video. When it isn't congested, there's no need or reason to throttle at all.
(And if your network is still congested when only streaming data is left, then it means you need to upgrade your network!)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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
If you can ingest it... yes.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Absolutely. They should be punished for their flagrant false advertising.
So if you were running an ISP, what would you do to bandwidth hogs? QOS, Throttle, or just drop them as a customer? Perhaps a courteous letter or warning?
If it became necessary, throttle them; but without regard for what sort of traffic makes them bandwidth hogs. My problem is not that networks don't have infinite capacity to deal with high demand situations; but that the various throttling measures put into effect seem to be focused against certain types of traffic and/or subscriber types that the operator dislikes, rather than being based on volume.alone. You can't avoid volume based throttling unless you pay enough for a guaranteed non-oversubscribed line; but if there is a crunch doing your throttling based on what sorts of traffic you like least, or what customers you like least, seems like a bad road to go down.
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.
This doesn't even stike me as an "Unlimited vs Unmetered", argument, this strikes me as a, "for live, personal, in-person client use vs for server-type or impersonal use" argument.
Back when I had a cablemodem in 1997, I knew that if I was caught hosting services I could have my service shut off requiring me to sign up for a business-grade account. They weren't terribly picky though, so basically so long as I didn't host a web server on port 80 and didn't have tons of incoming mail on port 25 I was probably alright, and since my connection was never shut off it was indeed alright. Later I had a business-grade DSL line/account with full reverse-resolve and several static IPs, and I could literally do anything that the law didn't prohibit me from doing. I had DNS with reverse resolve, web, mail, FTP, etc, and it was never an issue at all. It cost a little more than a residential account, but not significantly more.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Actually, they're pretty clear about their terms of use, and there's no restriction on the *amount* of data, so it is, in fact, unlimited. I'm saying this as an affected user; I fully expect to get a call from T-Mobile about my data usage, as I'm uploading >10GB/mo via an automated process, and have been doing so for the past year or so. Honestly, I've been expecting the call for some time, so I'll actually be surprised if I don't get it sometime this year.
That said, the process in question is uploading video to YouTube, so it's just as likely they won't flag it because it's not continuous and it's not P2P.
I do know that AT&T cut my wife's grandfathered unlimited data down to 2GB, with a warning and throttling at that point, while charging her the same price I was paying for 4GB on the same account. That's one of the reasons we're no longer with them. T-Mobile isn't doing that here, and I really have no complaints with how they're handling it; I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
So you're ok with subsidizing your consumer dollars for an upgrade to benifit P2P users? No right or wrong answer, but one that needs to be both asked and answered just so we are all clear of the cost implications here.
Life is not for the lazy.
I've used an Android torrent app (also, an iOS one on a jailbroken iPod Touch). My LTE connection is a significant fraction of the speed of my cable internet connection. If I had my hardwired pipe saturated, and I "just had to" have something ASAP, I could imagine running a torrent on my phone. Or if I were a high schooler trying to hide my activities from tech-savvy parents, or something.
OK...those are kind of contrived scenarios. You might be surprised by some of the stupid things people do with tech, though.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Does that use less bandwidth than piracy? Surely their concern is that it uses a lot of data. Not that it's not "legit"
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.
Thank you for understanding my tortured summary.....see the "Variation on Tiered Service" for a more clear description.
This doesn't even stike me as an "Unlimited vs Unmetered", argument, this strikes me as a, "for live, personal, in-person client use vs for server-type or impersonal use" argument.
yes, its because you are a well conditioned American sheeple
Meanwhile I get 250/20 Mbits, with bundled tv and phone for ~$30, with no data caps, no asterisks with small print, no T&C bullshit.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I know this is modded flamebait, but I tend to agree to a point. The providers shouldn't be let off the hook for advertising/selling "unlimited" data plans when short of putting a micro-cell tower on every lightpole, such a thing is not economically viable. It's all false advertising at the least. But at the same time, P2P/torrenting over a cellular connection all the time is like pissing in the pool. It's probably cool if it happens occasionally, but when it's being done constantly it fucks everyone over.
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
Just FYI, I was uploading 50GB of video to youtube and got flagged by my school's network as a torrenter. Once they came by it was all cleared up (I was actually uploading the videos for them), but youtube's uploader may trip things if they're detecting 'torrenting' in some sub-par way.
Like I said, I won't be at all surprised to get the call if/when I do.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I'm pretty sure they throttle even if you use it from the device itself... it's been in the fine prints of everything.
it's not really news that unlimited in USA means "yo this is limited more than some small countrys 3g was in 2004".
if there was any control of the advertising then they shouldn't be calling it unlimited hsdpa or whatever unless you could actually max out the advertised connection speed for at least a day. now you'll hit the limits in mere hours or even under a hour.. which is silly.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Meanwhile I get 250/20 Mbits, with bundled tv and phone for ~$30, with no data caps, no asterisks with small print, no T&C bullshit.
*sigh* living in Australia sucks. 15/1 mbps ADSL2 for $80/month, $10 a month for a voip phone with that and if i want foxtel TV they want a minimum of $60 a month on top for just basic channels in SD, anything worth watching means $130 and an extra $10 for an HD box... and then they wonder why we pirate.
... wait, what?
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.
There is absolutely no reason why every user shouldn't be a "P2P user," so yes! The Internet isn't -- and shouldn't be -- fucking cable TV, you know!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
No, what they advertise is unlimited data from the phone. What they don't say is that once you hit 10 gb of 4g download on that "unlimited" plan, you have unlimited edge service. That said, I'm an extremely heavy data user and have only run up against that cap once in the 4 years I've been with them.
Like in the Darth Vader sense? That's disturbing.