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Why Won't T-Mobile Let Us Binge On All Of It?
Previously I had argued that any violations of Net Neutrality could not exist in a setting where the marketplace was (1) transparent and (2) competitive. Under conditions of transparency and competitiveness, if ISP X were providing Internet connections which blocked certain websites, then ISP Y could offer Internet connections at the same speed and the same price but without the browsing restrictions (competitiveness), and if users knew about this (transparency), they would all switch to ISP Y. (The exception would be if a provider blocks high-bandwidth sites in a scarce-bandwidth setting, e.g. when an in-flight wifi blocks Netflix. In this case it's not true that another provider could step in and provide the same service at the same cost with no filtering, so it's not a case of abusing monopoly power.)
So, the argument goes, any prolonged violation of Net Neutrality could only take place either due to lack of transparency (e.g., the board members of a major backbone provider silently blocking their downstream customers from reaching websites whose content they disagreed with -- yes, this really happened), or, lack of competition (the Comcast monopoly throttling BitTorrent and just generally sucking). So, the argument goes, anything that can survive only by exploiting those market-unfriendly conditions is a Bad Thing, and should be prohibited, by rules that require Net Neutrality for all content. Q.E.D.
But T-Mobile's Binge On service would appear to prove me dead wrong. There's no lack of transparency -- they freely admit that they provide unmetered data access only from certain whitelisted video providers (at downgraded speeds so that the video only plays in 480p quality). And there's no lack of competitiveness, with the Big 4 mobile providers pulling out all the stops to steal each other's customers. So why are normal market forces not having the expected result here?
In other words: Assuming that it would cost T-Mobile the same to provide a low-bandwidth unlimited-data connection to the entire Internet, (as opposed to a low-bandwidth unlimited-data connection to just their whitelisted sites), and given that customers would obviously prefer this, why would they not do that?
T-Mobile's official response is that they want to make sure that a video provider's content is "supported" -- so that T-Mobile can detect when video is streaming, and then request for the content provider to downgrade the video quality to 480p so that it uses less bandwidth. (Users still have the option of switching to high-resolution video, but then it counts against their monthly data quota.) This sounds at first like it makes sense, but there's something missing here -- why not just provide the Binge-On connection as a rate-limited connection, and let the streaming website detect the lower speed, and downgrade to lower-quality video automatically? This is in fact what happens with Youtube and Google Play video, if you try to stream from a connection that is only fast enough to support the lower-quality stream. If the connection is rate-limited, it's not possible for the video provider to stuff too much data into the user's connection and cause them to incur overage charges.
So, why not let Binge On users stream from any site, at the low-quality stream rate? In the best-case scenario, the third-party site will detect the user's slow connection and downgrade to low-quality video, as Youtube and Google Play can already do. In the worst-case scenario, if the streaming provider can't downgrade the stream, then it just won't play (unless the user plays the higher-bandwidth version that eats into their data plan) but then the user is no worse off than they are under Binge On's current implementation anyway.
I did hear back from T-Mobile's PR team, but our emails back and forth tended to go in circles. Repeatedly, they told me: The reason we have a whitelist is because those are the providers where we know we can automatically request for them to downgrade to low-res video. And repeatedly, I would say back: I understand that, but why not just provide Binge On as just a simple data pipe at a fixed low speed, and then any video provider will automatically be able to use Binge On if they can detect the low-speed connection and downgrade their video automatically? You can let users switch between a fixed low-speed pipe which doesn't count against the data quota, or a high-bandwidth pipe which does -- but why not let the low-speed pipe access all sites equally?
So, this is a genuinely puzzling question to me. Assuming it would not cost them anything additional for the Binge-On pipe to offer low-speed access to all video sites, why hasn't T-Mobile done this, and why haven't market forces more or less compelled them to do it? Before one of the other Big 3 providers swoops in and offers a low-speed unlimited data plan that works with all websites which are able to downgrade to low-res video?
Perhaps the explanation is that even in the mobile data industry, what looks like cutthroat "competition" is not actually that competitive. T-Mobile is stuck with the reputation of having coverage not quite as good as the other Big 3, so they've carved out niches in other ways -- calling themselves "the Un-carrier" and selling phones at full price without locking users into a contract, or offering pricey but really actually unlimited data plans (something none of the other Big 3 are doing yet). In their new niche, "unlimited data for $60/month as long as you can live with low-res video", there is currently no competition, and hence no competitive penalty for not broadening the service to include all video streaming sites. Can you think of a better answer?
If that's the case, then competitive forces may work, albeit slowly, as the other Big Three eventually offer some form of "unlimited data for low-speed content," and some of them will offer low-speed unmetered access to the entire Internet, and then all of them will have to follow suit in order to remain competitive. In the meantime, Binge On customers can get their favorite shows on Hulu with no data overages, but cannot do the same thing on Google Play. This will annoy and even outrage some people, but it's also a reminder that "market forces" do not necessarily solve the problems that Net Neutrality legislation is intended to solve -- at least, not very quickly.
Welcome back Bennett Haselton! I have missed your random blog thoughts about your personal issues with various companies. You were a frequent contributor!!! It is really terrible what you are going through with T-Mobile. We need to make it a top priority to get your issue solved!!!
dedicated CDN servers to host the data close to the users, dedicated network equipment and circuits so the traffic doesn't degrade their other network traffic. Netflix and Hulu are probably picking up part of the cost of this being that you need this at multiple locations around the country. and it helps Netflix and Hulu as well since a lot of customers will use less data and will delay upgrading their CDN infrastructure chances are google doesn't want to participate contrary to luser belief, when you stream content it doesn't come from the other side of the country to make you feel cool and like an "advanced user"
Why won't Slashdot let us binge on all of the rambling nonsense that Bennett Hasselton submits?
I want to gorge myself on his meaningless musings on Dayling Savings Time, his banal ponderings about leap seconds, his pointless navel-gazing about drone regulation, and his idiotic proposals for instant runoff voting. The world is too complicated and disturbing, Slashdot, so please fill my brainpan with the mushy tapicoa that is every one of Bennett Hasselton's mundanities!
1) Interesting RSS feed headline...I'm curious to hear the high points.
2) Click link in RSS feed.
3) Oh. Uhh...
4) Oh. It's Bennett. Huh. I thought we were past this stuff.
5) Complain that TFA is not supposed to be the same thing as TFS.
6) Point out that if Bennett wants to post this stuff, either do it on his blog and submit a summary here, or else post it in the comments like the rest of us.
7) Close the browser tab without reading anything more.
That was a lot of words formed in ignorance, so I didn't bother to read all of them.
I support Net Neutrality, and to my surprise, so does the FCC's Tom Wheeler. The FCC has said this service does not violate Net Neutrality and they're going to keep an eye on it.
Why does it not violate Net Neutrality? Because, as you pointed out, any service can sign up for Binge On. Is it too much to ask that a video service go through some kind of certification process with T-Mobile before that happens?
Just because T-Mobile doesn't do it YOUR WAY doesn't mean it's bad for Net Neutrality.
Maybe you're just too smart and T-Mobile should hire you so that you'll stop posting here.
Assuming that it would cost T-Mobile the same to provide a low-bandwidth unlimited-data connection to the entire Internet, (as opposed to a low-bandwidth unlimited-data connection to just their whitelisted sites)
Why would you assume that? If I can only unlimited stream from Hulu and Netflix, but pay for the data to stream YouTube, I may very well watch less YouTube, and there may not be a 1:1 replacement with Hulu or Netflix watching - since YouTube fills a very different role in video consumption. T-Mobile could very well be saving money by excluding YouTube from the free streaming.
There's also the possibility of kickbacks - maybe Hulu and Netflix are paying T-Mobile for the privilege of unlimited streaming. It's certainly a competitive advantage for them compared to other video services. So even if COST is the same, REVENUE may be greater with the whitelist scenario.
Why not post the actual requirements for content providers. http://www.t-mobile.com/conten...
I'm guessing your country has the landmass of a small- to medium-sized US state.
Scale plays a role here.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
For some reason Bennett thinks that the free market works nearly instantaneously, and everyone gets perfect information instantly and instantly makes the switch. The real world takes a bit longer than that for information and action to spread. It often takes multiple years before a market shakes out problems like this. This is Econ 101 stuff -- stop puzzling and read some case studies.
At least with their audio streaming counterpart, where they enroll specific services to not count against caps, there don't seem to have been any kickbacks or limits. They've been pretty good about bringing in a pretty wide list of services (they cite http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/... as their current list). I could certainly be wrong of course - but one other possibility is that, because T-mobile is in 4th place among the major providers, they're desperate to find anything to set them apart from Verizon/AT&T.
Put another way, because T-mobile is currently the upstart rather than one of the big incumbents, they're not in a strong position to try and play gatekeeper/tollkeeper the way Verizon/AT&T might. (Though if that changed, who knows - and this is why we need Net Neutrality regulations)
Damnit, I clicked the article. Now Slashdot editors will think we enjoy Bennett's posts because they get a lot of clicks.
I'm sorry, but I have to do something to offset this:
Bennett Haselton posts suck.
I hope that's enough.
There's nothing particularly nefarious about it, and no kick backs - T-Mobile have been clear no content provider is paying them for this, and others are welcome to join.
The deal is "If you watch video via our compressed system, we'll make it free" combined with "If you let us recompress your video, we'll let our users watch it for free." That's it.
T-Mobile wants to compress it, not let the content provider decide what bit rate to do it at, because this is about their network, not just one user on it.The fact a publisher might be capable of sending 1Mbps to a user doesn't mean this is in the best interests of everyone using the same tower as that user.
So, T-Mobile makes the offer: "Hey providers, if you work with us and send your video in a way that means we can intercept and compress it further, we'll let you be a part of this scheme." It's reasonable. It doesn't violate net neutrality (it's available to Amazon and YouTube, they just choose not to use it - be it for political, financial, or technical reasons), and it's probably a good idea.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If you're watching Hulu or Netflix...YOU are WATCHING them. The amount of bandwidth you will actually consume will be governed and restricted by your free time to spend watching the content (or the amount of content that interests you, whichever is less).
In contrast, other uses...like downloading and sharing files (the nightmare scenario of all bandwidth-conscious service providers) can continue merrily along without you even being awake. You could keep that up 24/7, and end up consuming far more bandwidth even if all other things are equal.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
No, CDNs really count. If you distribute lots of content, and don't want to get bagged with routing issues, you use a cache of content on hot networks-- or suffer the consequences of pissed off users.
Universities do this, a hotbed of NetFlix users, so it's not just a carrier "enhancement". Get the CDNs enabled, and everything but peer (think onion routers) becomes more evenly distributed without stepping on network neutrality. The problem is: someone has to pay for it and know where/when to deploy them. Stickier issues are what to do with DNS, and how to shift resources across timezones to take advantage of them.
It's not as simple as the poster describes, and while T-Mobile's circular answers are opaque, behind the scenes are a lot of CDN deployment deals going on. In a star-based/hierarchical network that they use, distribution becomes tricky-- not that I'm defending them. Only demand or regulation will change them, however.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Sorry Bennett, mobile carriers can pretty much do what they want, how they want, when they want. You could switch carriers you know, go to Sprint or Verizon or AT&T or one of their VNOs. Grow a pair and stop being such a whiny bitch.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Here I was completely confident that Bennett Haselton got a new persona called StartsWithABang to keep feeding his attention whoring on Slashdot. But now we get an article from each posted on the same day so there goes that theory.
So with multiple people now whoring the front page have Dice automated the process? Is there a form I can fill out combined with Paypal checkout that allows me to post shit for a year without recourse?
Probably. But I would love an unlimited-but-slow switch on my phone, where it doesn't count against the data cap. (Particularly if I could use it anytime, not just once I hit the data cap.)
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
You can probably get your subsonic server through their process. They have five requirements, all reasonable:
All in all, reasonable rules.
. Full rules
Your ad here. Ask me how!
So, T-Mobile makes the offer: "Hey providers, if you work with us and send your video in a way that means we can intercept and compress it further, we'll let you be a part of this scheme." It's reasonable. It doesn't violate net neutrality (it's available to Amazon and YouTube, they just choose not to use it - be it for political, financial, or technical reasons), and it's probably a good idea.
Do we actually know that they require intercepting and modifying the stream, or do they simply have a way to signal to their partner that, hey, for the moment, assume video requests coming from IP xyz is bandwidth capped and just go ahead and stream the 400kbps or less stream as your system already would after probing the need to downgrade, versus if the user signals to you that they want the HD despite the cost, in which case, post a message to this API in our billing/provisioning and stream the HD content?
You must be young enough not to remember this - cellular service in the US was historically segmented in exactly the way you describe.
In fact, to prevent monopolies, the existing Baby Bell regional phone companies got licenses for "wireline" based systems that utilized the existing telephone system infrastructure, and there was spectrum allocated for a single competing "non-wireline" service that used microwave repeaters between towers as the competition. These were labeled the "A" system and the "B" system. You wanted cellular service? You had exactly two choices. Wireline from the phone company, or non-wireline from the other guys. Most phones could work on either, but not both simultaneously (this was soon rectified as the carriers realized the potential for roaming fees between local carriers.)
When I started selling phones out of high school 20 years ago, our coverage area was less than half the state - driving 100 miles to the next big city would get you "roaming charges" of 99 cents per minute, plus long distance charges if you were making a "not-local-to-where-your-billing-area-is" call. This caused problems especially for people who lived on the edge between two areas, because their phones would (per design of the "cell" in "cellular") switch between one tower and the next without warning. I had people coming in complaining that they only ever used their phone at home (too rural for a landline) and would get half their calls on the roaming network. Eventually phones came with network locking possibilities to prevent roaming accidentally, but that compounded the problem since some users had to manually reprogram their phone for roaming each time they went to the post office. They demanded simplicity.
Eventually, these problems came to a head and the market demanded "no roaming fees" for increasingly large areas, and we could finally get all of Arizona as one big home calling area. (But watch out if you lived near the Colorado river!) Over time all the regional carriers decided to make their own networks one giant "no roaming" footprint, and our local calling map spanned the entire Southwest U.S. Hooray, you could now drive to the next state and not incur roaming charges!...as long as you were on your own service provider's towers. You still had to pay roaming fees if you went onto a neighboring network, though.
Then came digital networks - spectrum for AT&T (the long distance company, not the regional Baby Bells) allowed them to become one of the first NATIONWIDE providers, and people flocked to their system, even as spotty as it was. The writing was on the wall, and nationwide calling was going to be the norm.
As a result of this new nationwide threat, next came the consolidations. The Bell companies started banding together (the local one to me at the time went from US West Cellular to a multi-state Airtouch to what is now nationwide Verizon) and the non-wireline companies started either building out their own digital networks or merging with their neighbors like Verizon. And thusly "free nationwide roaming" became possible for the first time for all carriers.
Now it's so natural to assume your phone will work everywhere, that to fall back to regionally segmented pricing would probably introduce many new layers of cost and complexity to billing services that have since been thoroughly optimized for national use. I'd wager that many people have never even heard the term "roaming". What you're describing is not going to happen on any meaningful scale, if at all.
He's wrong. They are signalling the partner. This is the requirement to sign on to Binge On.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Getting your op-eds accepted is not based on karma as much as writing interesting columns in your journal and submitting them.
"others are welcome to join"
OK, I'm willing to set the encoder on my personal Subsonic server to 480p video. How do I get my server included?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Content providers are NOT subsidizing the bandwidth. T-Mobile will let any content provider participate, and they don't have to pay anything to get on the list of approved providers. The requirements are pretty straight forward:
1) You have to identify the data to T-Mobile as streaming video data.
2) You must use adaptive bitrate technology
3) If you make changes to your streaming methods you have to give T-Mobile a heads up before those changes go live to ensure you still meet the requirements.
4) You have to be able to tell T-Mobile when you are sending non-video content so they can count that against user data caps.
5) You can only stream content legally (proper licenses to content, etc.)
6) Don't violate their trademarks
You don't have to pay, and T-Mobile will work with you directly to ensure you can meet their requirements. Once you've been approved, you're all set. No other requirements and you don't have to pay them anything.
Source: http://www.t-mobile.com/conten...
That's a good write-up, but I immediately notice you left out a LOT of intermediate phone company names...
You can't talk about the history of AT&T Mobility without mentioning SBC and Cingular. Or discuss the history of Verizon and Sprint without mentioning they were strangely BOTH formed from GTE.
I found a much more complete history of all the crazy splits and (mostly-) mergers here:
http://www.technologizer.com/2...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Netflix already offers "CDN" like capability in the form of caching servers that any ISP meeting a volume of viewership can negotiate to have. It's like a Squid proxy for Netflix, and it's pretty straightforward.
1) You have gobs of users on your network.
2) You negotiate for a NF content server.
3) You install a big server (or servers, depending on load) that caches the most commonly viewed shows. It automatically updates as demands change.
4) ????
5) Profit from sharply reduced upstream or peering point bandwidth bills.
The only reason that Comcast doesn't do this is that they offer their own content and *want* a degraded network for NF users, or NF to pay $$ to Comcast, and they want that degraded performance in a way that isn't blatantly their fault.
Source: I'm a techie with friends who work at a regional ISP.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.