Slashdot Mirror
EFF: T-Mobile "Binge On" Is Just Throttling of All Data (eff.org)
onedobb writes: Tests confirm that when Binge On is enabled, T-Mobile throttles all HTML5 video streams to around 1.5Mps, even when the phone is capable of downloading at higher speeds, and regardless of whether or not the video provider enrolled in Binge On. This is the case whether the video is being streamed or being downloaded—which means that T-Mobile is artificially reducing the download speeds of customers with Binge On enabled, even if they're downloading the video to watch later. It also means that videos are being throttled even if they're being watched or downloaded to another device via a tethered connection.
Having a service where you are cheating customers by not revealing a major part of how a service works is a serious problem. Countries where people are more trusting of other people, corporations and their governments do better economically, and are better by a variety of other metrics (such as Gini coefficient). While there are serious correlation v. causation issues here, it is likely that a big part of this is that people are more willing to engage in transactions with people or institutions they aren't directly familiar with. See e.g. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/20/trust-wealth_n_851519.html, http://www.pewglobal.org/2008/04/15/where-trust-is-high-crime-and-corruption-are-low/, https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/10/how-trusting-are-european-nations/, and http://www.oecd.org/forum/the-cost-of-mistrust.htm. This means that large corporations bilking customers is damaging to all of us at a large scale.
The majority of Americans believe that Satan is a living, breathing beaing who walks around the place, so... this is way down the list of priorities.
No sig today...
I don't get the complaint.
Binge On specifically says that certain providers don't count against your data cap at all, and others will be processed to use less data.
Quoted from http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/... :
So what's the headline here? 'Telco provides exactly the service they claim to provide'?
If they were downgrading video when Binge On was turned OFF, then THAT would be news.
The majority of Americans believe that Satan is a living, breathing beaing who walks around the place, so... this is way down the list of priorities.
Wait...are you saying Mark Zuckerberg isn't real?
I don't recall anyone asking for anything for free.
A big part of the problem here is that many don't offer unlimited data at ANY price, and when you do find someone that does, they often try to bog it down with fine print like this or just flat out cut you off if you use too much of your "unlimited" service.
Now, people don't expect truly "UNLIMITED" data. They can oversell just fine, but the problem is that they're overselling with the thought that a user should only use 0.05% of the actual stated bandwidth that they COULD use. Anyone that dares go above that is "cheating" and abusing the system.
10-15 years ago they could kinda sorta get away with that, but now streaming content is everywhere. People who don't know what bandwidth even is can consume huge chunks of it - completely legally - with Youtube, Hulu, Netflix, Twitch, Sling, Spotify, Pandora, etc.
The telecom companies 10-15 years ago should have realized that those "excessive" users from that era were the future norm and built out their network accordingly. Don't stamp your feet and demand that progress stop.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Just let TMO explain that they're optimizing shareholder value. I think that's the expression.
Fiat Lux.
No matter how you twist it, "unlimited" means unlimited.
If they're not offering a truely unlimited service, they shouldn't be labelling it "unlimited".
The fact that people have come to expect companies lying to them, doesn't make it right.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
No, because there's also things like data rate caps.
In the landline world, ISPs sell multiple tiers of connection speed. If you want a faster connection you pay more money. Simple.
In the mobile world, this never really caught on, and instead they charge based on link utilization. This results in a metric that makes no sense for customers - most apps don't give an adequate explanation of how much data they use on average and I'm sure, with all the the million analytics suites they apparently need, that they don't want to or outright cannot provide accurate data usage figures for their software. Network speed is comparatively easy to understand, measure, and analyze.
T-Mobile appears to be trying to hack speed tiers back into the mobile pricing model by giving customers the option to reduce bandwidth in favor of it not counting against their link utilization.. which would be fine except for the fact that they will only discount certain video services despite this technology working on all of them for as long as you have it enabled. This appears to be a blatant net neutrality violation, then - the technology clearly works everywhere, why not just let us use it on any qualifying video streaming service?!
You're getting free downloads, and you are upset that they are slow? Turn it off, get them fast and use up your data allotment.
They are throttling even the providers that you still get charged for.
You're getting free downloads if you're streaming video from the providers T-Mobile has blessed. If you don't stream from them, you still "enjoy" lowered video quality (which, in this implementation, is almost certainly going to make some videos unwatchable), but you still pay.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I work in marketing and advertising by turns these days (seems like every career trajectory eventually ends up somewhere in this playground, whether near top or bottom of the food chain), so I have to admit guilt here as well.
There is a tendency to operate with the goal of eliminating negative and limiting language because, surprise surprise, positive language tests out well in actual conversion numbers. But there is unquestionably an element of half-truth in it.
"slowed down and degraded to reduce data use" becomes "optimized for mobile"
"we've raised our prices" becomes "we've changed our plans to offer the best possible value to our customers"
"we've removed a bunch of features that raised costs for us" becomes "we've streamlined our service for ease of use"
"we've slashed our support staff" becomes "we're enabling you to find answers more quickly with our self-help area"
"we've eliminated our warranty" becomes "our product is so reliable that it's made warranties obsolete"
and so on.
It's not the actual policy that's the problem. It's that language is Orwellian. Bad becomes good. "Optimization" is supposed to be a good thing. But in this case, the customer's presumption that "optimized" equals "good for me" is actually not true; the word is being used in opposition to its conventional connotation.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
that many don't offer unlimited data at ANY price
Boohoo. Pay for what you use. Do you demand the power company give you unlimited electricity or the hydro company unlimited water? Bandwidth is a finite resource at any given time.
First off. I *DO* pay for what I use. On top of a plan for unlimited data, I'm paying special rates simply for having a smartphone that can actually USE that data. Moreover, the plan price just got jacked for ADDITIONAL money, as it's a grandfathered "unlimited" plan that's no longer sold. As such, the unlimited plan is significantly MORE expensive than a metered plan. Stuff like this throttling mean they're overselling and expecting people to use less than one percent of their total possible bandwidth. And anyone who uses more is "cheating". Regardless of how much they pay.
And your analogy is fucked up.
Sure, maybe I can't pull 1.21 jiggawatts, but I run a business out of my home and use roughly 2.5x the power consumed by my neighbors. At no point does the power company sit there and say "between times A and B we're going to limit your power consumption to only what your neighbors, who aren't home and thus not really using much power, consume during the day..."
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Good grief. Any society depends on cooperation and sharing of resources. You can manufacture outrage that your "unlimited" plan is actually limited, and demand that your carrier provide you with your own dedicated cell tower everywhere, for the "agreed upon price" but that's bullshit. What's more you know that's bullshit.
Of all the carriers, TMobile is about the most generous with bandwidth per dollar, and most reasonable with its terms of use.
Seriously, there are greater abuses out there.
Reduce your browsing? Turn off your phone, just like you turn off your appliances?
What you're saying is that your big expensive light shines in the corners of your house, and you don't use that light so you don't want to pay for it.
They advertise that. It costs $95/month and you get what you pay for.
(According to others, you CAN enable "binge on" with that plan, and you get "extra" stuff for doing so. Kind of like how Amazon gives Prime users movie rental credits if they choose "slowboat" shipping instead of the free 2-day)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
^But you are not paying a flat fee for unlimited power. You are paying by the KWH. So the analogy would be paying the ISP by the MB, not flat fee usage.
But there have been instances where user consumption has been limited due to power supply constraints. Brownouts are an example. Load control devices another.
This is why I've always preferred the term "unmetered" to "unlimited", where the notion of unmetered does not necessarily mean no records of usage are kept at all (although it may, and certainly that it what the term might literally imply), but that any records which *MIGHT* be kept are not generally used to change any aspect of the terms of service for the customer, so that the end result for the consumer for the most part is as if their usage were literally unmetered.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
... And it costs me nothing to stream it to my phone. I don't care how they do it. It works great.
Move on to the next 'outrage'.
Except the content keeps streaming just fine... For as long as you want. It's unlimited streaming, not unlimited bandwidth.
But then you'd be as well not signing up for the binge on service. If you run your traffic through a VPN then all the benefits of binge on (Netflix streaming that doesn't count against your data usage) will vanish.
Even if you get LTE speeds all the time, you are still limited. You can argue that your hitting a technological, rather than a business, limitation, but it's still a limit.
I have metered power. I don't expect the power company to be trying to identify which electrons are going to my water heater or refrigerator and blocking those, while letting my TV electrons through, so long as they are going to an approved TV channel.
And I've had unmetered water and unmetered power. Note the other utilities never sell them as "unlimited" just "unmetered". And yes, they do sell them that way, in some places and circumstances.
Learn to love Alaska
The thing is, at least to me, that there are two different aspects of a net connection that 'unlimited' can target.
One is speed. Obviously physics prevent such a thing as an unlimited speed, but it could be taken to mean that no matter how much you're trying to download, it will come through as fast as the server on the other end is pushing it.
The second is total data transfer. Download 100 GB in a month? Fine, do so with nothing extra appearing on your bill or your speed dropping from overuse. 200 GB? 15 TB? Go right ahead, it's unlimited!
It seems to me that they are going kinda for the second - download as much video content as you will, BUT it will be at this speed. Not really unlimited, but marketing is about buzzwords, not page-long descriptions about what it is they're selling. That's for you to look at before you put your signature on the paper.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Honestly, who cares? 1.5mpbs for free streaming video is a long way away from what other providers provide. If the quality is knocked a bit and keeps me from paying up to $15 a gig of data, I'm fine with that. Besides, with 10gig of data per line versus the competitors 4 gigs shared across all the lines, T-mobile is doing just fine. I'm good with SD quality on my ipad. ... for free.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
Your reading comprehension needs some work. T-mobile has two different "unlimited" data options, one which is unlimited 2g with an allotment of (limited) 4g LTE bandwidth, and one that is unlimited 4g LTE. What you've quoted refers to the former, while for $95 you get the latter (along with unlimited talk and text).
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
The free market doesn't apply to mobile carriers because the supply is limited to available radio bandwidth which must be tightly regulated by some authority in order to keep it free from interference.
It's actually impossible to offer unlimited data. This would require infinite bandwidth.
A restaurant can offer "all-you-can-eat", but they probably can't offer "unlimited food", because food is a limited resource.
As far as I can tell, "unlimited data" in the world of cellular means that they will never cut your data off or charge you more money for going over a certain amount of data. There will always be a limit to your bandwidth whether artificial or from physics.
People just need to get used to the idea that datarate is as important a spec as gigabytes when getting a data plan.
It's easy to offer "unlimited" data plans if the data rate is low enough.
I rather like the idea of being able to throttle my connection to have it not count toward my data cap. It would be nice if I could actually decide when this happens, rather than having T-Mobile decide.
What crack are you smoking, and where does someone get some?
So if something has 0% trans fat (for example), it can legally contain trans fat (in U.S.A.)
No, 0% means 0%, not 0.1%.
What crack are you smoking, and where does someone get some?
So if something has 0% trans fat (for example), it can legally contain trans fat (in U.S.A.)
No, 0% means 0%, not 0.1%.
Well, when it comes to nutrition labels, 0% means anything under 0.5%, because they can round off to the nearest percent: When the Nutrition Facts label says a food contains “0 g” of trans fat, but includes “partially hydrogenated oil” in the ingredient list, it means the food contains trans fat, but less than 0.5 grams of trans fat per serving. So, if you eat more than one serving, you could quickly reach your daily limit of trans fat. (American Heart Assoc.)