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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.
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.
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?!
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