T-Mobile is Making Its 'Unlimited' Data Plan Even More Confusing (theverge.com)

When T-Mobile announced "One" plan, little did the company know that people wouldn't like seeing their "unlimited" data plan offer video streaming max out at 480p resolution. The company is making some tweaks to that plan, only to make things more confusing to people. It will now begin selling "HD day passes" for $3 per day, allowing customers to stream in 1080p for 24 hours. The Verge reports: That's simple enough, but here's where it gets really weird: T-Mobile is also offering a plan called T-Mobile One Plus, which, among other benefits, offers unlimited HD day passes. So by subscribing to the plan, you can stream 1080p video all you want every single day -- but only if you go and activate the HD day pass again every single day. Presumably, T-Mobile is hoping you'll forget to activate those passes, or else it would have just lifted the 480p quality limit without this bizarre constraint. Making this even more confusing, T-Mobile originally announced plans to offer an "HD add-on" for the One plan that offered unlimited HD streaming without constraints. That's no longer going to be an option, however, so if you want HD video streaming, you're stuck re-enabling it every day. A T-Mobile rep framed the change as "giving customers more" for the same price, which is true (both cost $25 extra per month), but the new plan also involves the strange new reactivation hurdle.

Comments

HD-Traffic vs. SD-Traffic

[burni2]

How can T-Mobile differentiate between these,
as far as I know the connection to youtube is cryptographically secured.

So one could be guessing by the data rate and the duration, but with browsers using buffering that would be complicated.

However I would tunnel the traffic through my trusty unlimited broadband at home or my root server, using ssh.

So T-Mobile ain't see nothing yet !?

Re:HD-Traffic vs. SD-Traffic

[markus]

How can T-Mobile differentiate between these, as far as I know the connection to youtube is cryptographically secured.

Even with TLS encrypted HTTPS connections, you can see the domain name of the request. If it says youtube.com, T-Mobile can rate limit the connection to something much slower than what it usually would give you. And the rate limiting forces YouTube to downgrade the video resolution.

So, it's not T-Mobile that selects the lower video resolution, it's YouTube. All T-Mobile does is provide differential network performance based on service; of course, that sounds suspiciously close to a violation of network neutrality. But that's a question for the FCC to decide.

I suspect the reason why this originally didn't work for YouTube, when T-Mobile first starting rolling out BingeOn is the fact that Google is increasingly using HTTP/2.0 which supports multiple streams in a single connection, and it also is often using QUIC which fundamentally looks very different to a HTTP connection over TCP.

Re:HD-Traffic vs. SD-Traffic

[ljw1004]

How can T-Mobile differentiate between these,
as far as I know the connection to youtube is cryptographically secured.

TMobile addressed this in their technical notes: https://www.t-mobile.com/conte...

This requires that video detection signatures be present. T-Mobile will work with content providers to ensure that our networks work together to properly detect video. We will continue to work with content providers as new traffic identification means are needed in the event of future technology enhancement or changes. Use of technology protocols which make detection of video difficult such as https and UDP require additional collaboration with TMobile to enable the video detection.

Presumably you have to work hand-in-hand with TMobile developers to make sure your streams are recognized. I haven't found the technical truth. There was an interesting academic paper: http://david.choffnes.com/pubs..., also outlined here: http://dd.meddle.mobi/bingeon....

How does BingeOn classify traffic? Our prior differentiation work suggested that DPI devices classify applications using regular expression matches on certain
fields of HTTP requests and responses, and SNI fields in TLS handshakes

Unlimited **1

[HumanWiki]

**1 -- Not applicable to all plans. Void where prohibited. See merchant for more details. Days that end in Y are excluded. Mobile data restrictions apply. The party of the first part is not beholden to the party of the second part, but is otherwise beholden themselves to the third. Prior approval is required for data entitlement. Data packets larger than 100bytes subject to fee.

Use the Tmobile Music Unlimited prepaid plan

[Maxo-Texas]

It's $50 ($55 with tax).

I get unlimited music and 1 gig of data.

Recently right as the month ends I'm hitting 900mb (and that's with youtube videos).

They tried to upsell me to the post paid plan.

It was $70 ($77 with tax). And otherwise the same plan.

I looked at the salesperson and explained my plan again.

She went, "oh.. right" and stopped.

Do you have a great plan to recommend? I'd love to hear it. Every month, I have the option of changing plans or even services. I love it.

This should be ILLEGAL.

[fish_in_the_c]

My basic take it is this. No one especially a data carrier should have any right to inspect packets I PAY to transmit any more then they have the right to randomly search my car without legal cause and search warrant. It should and needs to be ILLEGAL for any data provided to in anyway inspect or log traffic contents or destinations unless it is for purposes of debugging a problem. If they want to meter the amount of data fine, make it clear in the contract, they have no more business knowing what I send and receive then the electric company who powers the routers. Sorry that doesn't allow carries to milk their current networks for every last penny they can stick it to people for , but customers have a right to privacy that includes not having a corporate hack decide which data I'm worthy to receive and what rates, we agree, I pay, end of story. All this traffic inspection is violation of basic privacy and as a society and as consumers we should vehemently oppose it. Perhaps apple and Google should start enabling router based TOR by default on their phones. Sad that it has to come to that, because tor is a bandwidth hog but if carriers aren't going to treat people right that is what everyone should start doing.