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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.
There is no unlimited tethering, and they aren't throttling capped data.
They are throttling phone based P2P, and (as I read it) separately, unauthorized tethering.
WoW distribution, needing to be tethered, would be capped data and not throttled.
It's people like me that have downloaded movies on the go to watch that would be throttled.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
You play WoW on your phone or use your phone as your only home internet connection? Seems unlikely.
At least they are being honest and upfront about the services they provide and that gives the customer the freedom to choose appropriately.
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.
Irrelevant - if T-Mobile's T&C says you cannot use the service for bittorrent or other P2P protocols, and the T&C was available at the time the customers signed up, T-Mobile is fully within its remit to throttle these.
I use T-Mobile as my ISP at home... We use an old phone as a hotspot, have three laptops and two xboxes.
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".
Uh... Who is mad, or desperate enough, to use torrents on a unreliable, slow and capped as hell cellular connection?
I can't speak for where you live specifically, but here in the northeast, I can tell you this much:
1.) T-Mobile is, in most metro-ish areas, as reliable as any other carrier. Also, it's not beyond the realm of realisticness to presume that users torrenting on their phone aren't torrenting while driving - if you're stationary and have four bars of LTE signal, T-Mo is pretty damn solid.
2.) I've gotten 2.5MBytes/sec down on my phone. Not during peak hours, of course, and somewhat varied based on what tower I'm connected to, but >1MByte/sec is quite common - and triple the speed of my home DSL.
3.) T-Mobile still offers kitchen-sink unlimited data plans if you pay enough. On those, they have a cap on tethering, but on the phone, you can download as much as you want. Since Android has a handful of bittorrent applications, it's entirely possible to be torrenting on an unlimited, uncapped data plan.
I don't blame T-Mo for doing what they're doing. Torrenting, by nature, takes a significant amount of bandwidth, requires lots of network connections, pounds the Carrier NAT with connections that can't be completed, requires a metric ton of extra routes, and doesn't stop seeding unless the user sets it as such.
If there's a protocol that's terrible from a cellular provider's standpoint, it's bittorrent. Blocking it on cell phones is about the least objectionable form of "network non-neutrality" that a carrier could implement. On a similar note, I don't know that T-Mobile's music streaming policy is terribly unfair, since they're whitelisting all the major streaming music providers. If they made Pandora free while Slacker had to pay, that's not 'net neutral'. Since everyone who streams audio is included, it's a blurry area for net neutrality.
It's only for TETHERING beyond the allowed limit on unlimited data connections. Let me say that again, TETHERING only and only when you've used up you're tethering allowance for the month. Hell, they basically said you can tether as much as you want for everything else, which is pretty freaking cool.
If you've got tons of bittorrents running over your TETHERED t-mobile connection beyond 2.5 GB/month, you're a douche. You brought this on yourself and no cell phone company should have to put up with it.
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
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
Of course it this case it IS ethically right. There's no moral requirement to let abusive users who violate the TOS take up far more than their share of a limited resource.
I can't necessarily disagree. I know, I know, the /. refrain is "if it's not unlimited they shouldn't have called it unlimited!" Fine. Maybe they should say "almost unlimited." What they're trying to say is that you don't need to watch a meter when you're checking your email and surfing the web on your phone. But come on, torrenting movies over your phone data plan? Really? You think the network can handle that?
Yeah, McDonald's says "free refills." But I'm pretty sure if you try to hook up a garden hose to the soda fountain and pump gallons of coke into a drum they're going to kindly ask you to leave.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Where do those who determine what is and is not ethical come down on the issue ISPs who introduce artificial scarcity by refusing to re-invest the revenue that they generate from their customers into infrastructure upgrades that would allow them to support the internet usage habits of ALL of their users?
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.
There is no unlimited tethering, and they aren't throttling capped data.
Yes and no. I originally went with T-Mobile because their tethering plan seemed like a bargain compared to the other telcos; Verizon, Sprint and AT&T, but they must've dropped it at some point because it's apparently something they don't offer anymore because when I went to upgrade my phone a few months ago they asked me if I wanted to keep it. They told me that if I did dropped it I wouldn't be able to get it back because my account was grandfathered in and that they don't offer it anymore otherwise. Mind you they still have tethering but not unlimited tethering it seems.
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.
Last I checked they have not repealed the laws of physics nor has anyone disproved the Shannon Harley limit recently. T-mobile has only a finite amount of radio frequency spectrum available to them. If you don't believe me, then get 10 gigabit networking running on 20 Mhz of spectrum on 2.4 Ghz wifi. There might be a Nobel Prize for you if you do.
Loading webpages faster? Sure. Loading a video on youtube? Sure. But torrenting (and thereby also uploading) a 1.2GB Blu-ray rip? Come on, man. That's not what cellphone data plans are for and we all know that.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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 am an unlimited 4g lte customer of t-mobile. And when I asked what unlimited meant, the seller told me exactly what it meant. unlimited up to 2GB per month (which is a lot, I never reached it), then throttled down to a slower speed which still allows you to check emails and navigate.
I even frequently use my phone as an internet acecss point for my computer. But I don't dump the web when I do so. So it never was a problem. The only people that reach the throtling are pretty much people that explicitely try to push the limit and know very well they are not supposed to. If you are smart enough to route P2P application through your phone network to use the "unlimited" internet, you are probably smart enough to know what unlimited actually means. So yeah, I get it, companies are misrepresenting, but does anybody actually get tricked by that?
I knew two different people who used a cell network hot spot as their sole home internet access. I'm not sure what compels people to do that. These were type of people who already have $160/mo phone plans, so I imagine it's a misguided attempt to save money by cutting the separate "Internet bill" and putting everything on the phone bill instead.
I could see it working out for some people - I get around 5 Mbps at home over 4G, and if my typical home data usage per month were low enough that the corresponding mobile data plan cost less than wired home internet, it could very well be cheaper. I imagine this would be true for many people who use the web lightly, and don't stream much video.
Comcast cable internet here is >$60/mo, and equivalent DSL is near that (although slower plans are much less), and T-Mobile's data plans range from $10 for 2GB (what I have) to $60 for 13GB of LTE data (after your data cap the speed is throttled, but you still get data). It wouldn't work for me, but for someone who used the internet mostly for surfing, facebook, etc., but not much video; it could pay off.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
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.