T-Mobile Adds YouTube To Its Zero-Rated Binge On Program (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: T-Mobile is expanding its Binge On program. The wireless carrier on Thursday announced that it is adding YouTube and seven other video services including Discovery Go, Google Play Movies, and Red Bull TV to its program which allows subscribers to stream as much as they want without billing the usage against their data plan. The carrier says that its partners can now optimize the video as well, with YouTube being the first service to make use of the feature. From an Ars Technica report, "Binge On is enabled by default and affects nearly all video regardless of whether a video provider has joined the program. Binge On throttles video streams and downloads to about 1.5Mbps, forcing the video services to deliver lower quality, typically about 480p. Video services that meet some technical requirements also get their data "zero-rated" so that customers can watch shows without it counting against high-speed data limits." Many have raised concerns about Binge On and the way it handles internet traffic. Some strongly believe that T-Mobile's program violates Net Neutrality. Earlier this year, privacy rights group, EFF, also expressed its concerns, adding that Binge On was just "throttling of all data." Interestingly, YouTube was one of the key video platforms which hadn't joined Binge On when T-Mobile first introduced the program last year. At the time, the Google-owned video portal said, "Reducing data charges can be good for users, but it doesn't justify throttling all video services, especially without explicit user consent." Not sure what made YouTube change its heart.

Comments

It's a cost-service optimization

[bluefoxlucid]

The fact is HD video targeting a 5-inch OLED cell phone screen only needs 1.5Mbit/s at 1080p h.264; h.265 can apparently get as small as half the bitrate for the same quality.

If you try to view a 3 minute video, watch the first 15 seconds, and buffer 2 minutes across your 12Mbit/s connection, you've spent 15 seconds holding the pipe at a high data rate only to discard all that data. With 100 users, that's got to be a 1.2Gbit pipe, and so you have to provide that kind of service with the cost divided among 100 users.

If the data is throttled to 1.5Mbit/s, suddenly you can provide that kind of streaming video service to 800 users at once. They can each pay 1/8 as much of the cost, and they all receive the same service they were trying to get anyway. If they switch to something other than video, you have to give them the full 12Mbit/s; but if they're watching Netflix, you can cut back their pipe for that particular stream.

T-Mobile has observed that this makes it reasonable to just *not* meter data if they throttle the pipe while people watch Netflix. The more of their video traffic they swing under this strategy, the more costs they save; and the end result *should* be transparent to the user. There have been a few bugs--the download bitrate is throttled if you try to download a video file because the DPI is too dumb to recognize you're not streaming--but it mostly works as advertised.

So long as they make reasonable effort to supply the same service as an unthrottled connection--you can still watch as many Netflix or Youtube streams (on a phone, that's ONE) as with generic service--they haven't slowed down access or created a premium service; they've ensured a service works at minimal cost, maximizing efficiency and reducing the cost to the consumer.

Broken is still broken, but it's not an evil conspiracy. Someone will still say they're trying to cut cost and screw the consumer while ignoring that they outright stop charging the consumer for the data.

Re:I have T-Mobile

[Anonymous Coward]

Then turn it off. It's opt-in by default, but you can turn it off.
There's nothing stopping you from getting every last bit if you want to burn data.