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Verizon To Start Throttling All Smartphone Videos To 480p or 720p (arstechnica.com)
Verizon Wireless will start throttling video streams to resolutions as low as 480p on smartphones this week. Most data plans will get 720p video on smartphones, but customers won't have any option to completely un-throttle video. From a report: 1080p will be the highest resolution provided on tablets, effectively ruling out 4K video on Verizon's mobile network. Anything identified as a video will not be given more than 10Mbps worth of bandwidth. This limit will affect mobile hotspot usage as well. Verizon started selling unlimited smartphone data plans in February of this year, and the carrier said at the time that it would deliver video to customers at the same resolution used by streaming video companies. "We deliver whatever the content provider gives us. We don't manipulate the data," Verizon told Ars in February. That changes beginning on Wednesday, both for existing customers and new ones. The changes were detailed today in an announcement of new unlimited data plans. Starting August 23, Verizon's cheapest single-line unlimited smartphone data plan will cost $75 a month, which is $5 less than it cost before. The plan will include only "DVD-quality streaming" of 480p on phones and 720p on tablets.The new Verizon cell phone plans can be compare side by side here, along with all of Verizon's existing plans.
Isn't this 100% against Net Neutrality??
So long as the wireless vendors continue to stick it to their customers with artificial constrainst and service downgrades, wireless is not going to be the replacement for fixed-line Internet access that many have been predicting.
We deliver whatever the content provider gives us.
Just not fast enough to be of any use.
Have gnu, will travel.
You can switch phone providers if you don't like it. Free market.
I hate to be the advocate for something that should be standard in a free, developed society, but it's time all users with plans that shape traffic biasedly get hit with the encryption they deserve. Privacy and neutrality of information transfer takes precedence over these fucktards' right to make a million bucks out of stealing it.
Trump supporters are dumber than cattle
They actually think this is going to end well?
> "DVD-quality streaming" of 480p
Yeah, right. I luv me them 480p DVDs...
Sure it will. Verizon is ripping out the old pots copper line and forcing people to use can-tennas. I don't have time to RTFA right now but my question would be, how does this affect customers forced on to wireless systems?
So that the thus like you try to kill us with a bike-lock to the head "to fight Hitler?"
No thanks.
Particularly on a mobile device, even with "retina" display quality, I doubt there are many people who will notice any difference... except of course, geeks and those of us who concentrate really closely.
It's like the difference in mp3 between 192kbps and 128kbps encoding - most people won't be able to tell the difference, except musicians and audiophiles.
I'm sure they conducted a small scale research to see if anyone noticed.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if they already performed a/b testing against existing live customers.
I used to get angry about stuff like this. I guess I just don't care any more. No amount of complaining or calling congressmen or legislators, posting on forums like this or protesting is going to help so I'll just take up fishing and golf to fill my Netflix time and probably be healthier for it.
Yeah, I remember Hillary wanting to stop this. LOL!
When you get your head out of your ass, you'll realize that BOTH parties don't give a fuck about you.
Most people can't tell the difference between 480p and 730p anyway, especially on a smartphone screen. However, trying to load even lightweight text pages on a marginal cell where every other user is watching cat videos on youtube is a real PITA.
As long as Verizon or its "select partners" don't get a pass and are not allowed to stream video faster, it's not a net neutrality thing. Prioritization by protocol (as long as the rules are the same for all endpoints) does not violate the concept of net neutrality. There is a physical limit on the bandwidth available in any radio based system and it is the responsibility of a network provider to manage that bandwidth properly for the health of the network itself. Why is it unreasonable to put limits protocols that are known to use lots of bandwidth (eg video) as long as those limits are applied universally? And from the summary, they are talking about 10Mbs video streaming bandwidth limit - that is sufficient for a high definition stream on a 70 inch television (with multi-channel surround sound), certainly it is enough for the screen size of a phone or tablet being listened to in stereo at best.
Goddamn that hit was satisfying to see. Got any more?
Any time you have a resource where usage is unchecked, people will consume more and more of it until it is unusable for everyone. If there were no limits, then what's the downside to people streaming more and more? Nothing. Expanding bandwidth costs real money, and in some cases there are spectrum limits which prevent them from expanding much more. Ever used the free WiFi in an airport - the dopey kids sitting across from you are streaming some mind-rot and killing the bandwidth for everyone else. So the kids get the lolz, and you can barely get your work emails.
If I recall correctly, wireless carriers are allowed to throttle and process internet traffic as they want. The maximum bandwidth of a maxed-out tower is only a few hundred Mbps, so even at 10Mbps a single tower will only be able to handle a few dozen people streaming simultaneously.
One possible solution is to build more cell towers with shorter range, which isn't always viable as figuring out RF propagation is very tricky. Simply adding towers doesn't necessarily result in better service.
The other solution is to buy up more spectrum, which is very expensive, and takes time to roll out (phones and towers all have to be upgraded.)
https://opensignal.com/blog/2016/07/13/whats-in-a-megahertz-how-spectrum-impacts-our-4g-experience/
You're on an unlimited data plan that allows throttling after 24 gigs. Would you rather burn up that data on 4K video on a tiny screen or get more viewing time? I'd choose the later over the former.
So long as the wireless vendors continue to stick it to their customers with artificial constrainst and service downgrades, wireless is not going to be the replacement for fixed-line Internet access that many have been predicting.
This is also a really bad marketing move right before the Game of Thrones finale. My guess is Verizon has been losing too much money with every Game of Thrones episode.
Real lawyers write in C++
There need to be a corollary to Godwin's law regarding Trump. Not everything bad that happens is because of Trump.
Netflix cancelled Sens8 - DAMN YOU TRUMP!
It was cloudy during the eclipse - DAMN YOU TRUMP!
The summer movie season sucked - DAMN YOU TRUMP!
Send me a vid of you shoving a baseball bat into your transgender vagina.
I dont use Verizon. Every time I try to send a picture to someone I know using Verizon, I get a message that the image is too big to send because Verizon has image size caps. Now they are going to cap video resolution. This is not progress. This is a step backwards.
I suppose they (Verizon) will make the argument about screen size and perceived quality. But it should not be their decision but left at the hands of consumer.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
While codecs and containers are well known, most video providers nowadays are encrypted; if the algorithm / keys used allow for content fingerprinting at scale then the encryption itself is badly broken (one would hope they won't dare go and install their own wildcard certs on all customer phones).
No, you voted for this, when you signed up for Verizon. You have the complete ability to switch to any number of different providers, any time you want. Vote with your dollars, and leave government out of it.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
They aren't ripping out anything, they just aren't accepting new POTS subscribers. They'll probably phase out POTS over the next few decades, but why spend money on tearing stuff out now?
Besides which, voice calls use negligible bandwidth. ~30 seconds of VOIP traffic is about the same amount of data as loading a single graphics heavy news site, like CNN. Verizon could buy a band dedicated to VOIP traffic and handle thousands of simultaneous calls per tower.
Why don't you post that comment under your real name, fucking chicken shit. You're just like those cowards who wear masks when they attack people in demonstrations, you're a disgrace not a social vigilante.
If all lessees of suitable FCC-owned spectrum do this, it's not a free market.
How can they know what device I have?? Do they look at the MAC-address? The browsers user agent?
This seems like a rule that will only affect the users that have no idea how to setup a VPN or just tunnel through SSH via the home server, et.c. Sysadmins and other data-muppets like us will be totally unaffected by their downgrading.
It seems that totally blocking 1080p is kind of a greedy dick move. Why not have it dependent upon network usage at a given time?
I'd love to see those antifa faggots try that shit around here!
Protocol question: Would the masks go inside or outside the bodybags we send them home in?
Can you tell the difference between 480p and 720p on your tiny 4.5" or 5.0" screen smartphone? I doubt it.
When it's docked to an external display through HDMI out or Chromecast, I can tell the difference, especially for text-heavy videos such as screencasts from a desktop or laptop PC. Each&Everything's tech support scam investigations, for instance, are just barely readable at 480p and more comfortable at 720p.
Doesn't this eliminate much of the incentive to buy a phone with a hi res display? I guess Candy Crush can still take advantage of retina/4k/resolution-du-jour.
Well if they can't handle it they need to upgrade their networks. If they can't, they need to plan a more sustainable long-term budget. If this is how they handle increased demand from consumers then they will eventually hit a wall.
Twinstiq, game news
* Except for the limits.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
When does "unlimited" not mean "unlimited"? Whenever the provider says. This is quintessential bait-and-switch, which means it's false advertising, and depending upon the plan a person has with Verizon, breach of contract. And they will completely get away with this because the FCC is in the service of the corporations, not the people.
One big problem with someone deciding what you need is that they don't. It's apparently assumed here that the video will be played on that particular device but --as an example-- there has been work in the past and as of late in using mobile devices as computers... so if I want to use mine in that way along with a much larger display I would be artificially limited. To put this in a more general way, innovation and advancement cannot take place when there are arbitrary limits already set.
The whole breaking-net-neutrality thing just isn't compatible with either innovation or the interests of the public. We already have cable companies and turning the Internet into the same thing achieves nothing more than eliminate their competition. Although, speaking for myself I do not consider them on par since I have never, ever had the slightest inclination to get/have cable whereas I need [open, free] Internet. But I guess that's the whole motive in all of this ...eliminate the competition.
Lala
Unless you're streaming multiple videos and not even watching them all, there is a limit to how much video you can consume on a single device. They can quantify this and plan for it
You can get 1080p quality (sort-of) at DVD bitrates...
well not really. it's not a net neutrality thing, however if they did it like they describe then it's 100% against privacy and it's 100% against using https.
youtube defaults to https. they can't intercept that and re-encode it.so what tools do they have in their possession to do it?
however, they can just throttle it to say 1mbps or whatever they think that 1mbps is, which seems actually much more likely than anything else - that they throttle all long tcp connections. MAKING THEIR ENTIRE HIGH SPEED SALES PITCH UTTER LIES , because really they are not selling connections any faster than that. they don't know what you are streaming.
really, just ditch verizon. I'm visiting finland for 2 weeks. I pay 70 cents for prepaid 4g per day and have already transferred 200gigs give or take. it's so fast that I don't bother even looking for public wifis. and yes there are no limits - and yes it has had 4g coverage just as good in helsinki and literally in the sticks, where you have to drive 30 minutes to go to a shop(I would have expected it to drop to hsdpa or just old normal 3g in there).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Why don't you post that comment under your real name, fucking chicken shit. You're just like those cowards who wear masks when they attack people in demonstrations, you're a disgrace
Why hasn't someone sued them for false advertisement?!?
They need to be told what "Unlimited" really means because apparently reading a dictionary isn't a possibility.
I might see a use case for phones with maybe a 7" screen, but the typical 5-6" screens in most phones (tablets are a dying thing) 720p is just about as razor-sharp as you'd ideally want and for 4" phones 480p video is again about as crisp.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It is also a consumer fraud, at lease on current users, since they are providing less service than what their advertising would be understood by customers as claiming.
The FCC is not good at regulating this. This kind if thing is exactly what the FTC (the federal government's primary consumer protection watchdog) handles, and often handles very well.
IMHO this kind of regulation (as well as the anti-competitive behavior of vertically integrating ISPs into content provision conglomerates and then treating their services' packets better than those of other or demanding to be double-paid by both the subscriber and the other provider) should be performed by the FTC, not the FCC.
And, yes, I KNOW that this would require enabling legislation, since that power was taken from the FTC some time between their forcing of the breakup of the Bell Telephone System and the "hands off the Internet" legislation. (I say something about this every time I post this proposal, but people keep following up to tell me about it. So here it is, in your face.)
The Trump administration has already made noises about doing this. Perhaps, now that they're not fully engaged with healthcare they might get around to slipping it in.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That's why the people with Google Fiber have such painfully slow service... because everyone overloaded it. Where usage is unchecked, the upper limit is informed by the human condition.
How come placing a limit on overselling their service is never a QoS policy?
I'm not the hugest fan of Verizon for some of the shady things they are doing, but the cries that this runs afoul of Net Neutrality are a bit alarmist. Unless I'm reading the article incorrectly, they are throttling bandwidth such that 720p will come through ok, but 1080p will not. I'm reading that as a global throttling, not just for video. Am I wrong?
Ars is not giving us a straight story - they say on one hand that video will be throttled to 10Mbps, and on the other that it will be throttled to 480p on phones and 720p on tablets.
For starters, they won't know what resolution the video is if it's coming across HTTPS (which more and more is). And if they're just going on bandwidth and capping it at 10Mbps, that's not going to have a huge effect, because you can get a solid 1080 HD stream in 5Mbps using H.264, and you can get a pretty decent 4K stream under 10Mbps with h.265.
If VZ doesn't throttle VPNs, then just get a VPN account which averages a few bucks a month if you buy a year of access up front, then stream all your video though the VPN, they'll have no way to identify the video traffic to throttle it.
Im so sick of this argument. I signed up for Verizon this month when the explicitly stated that streaming video would not be throttled. There was a substantial cost of becoming a new customer, ie I had to buy a Verizon phone because of the cdma network which they use.
Now that you've decided that 10Mbps is going to be considered a "high-speed" internet connection, the ISPs are able to dumb down all the available content to fall within that definition. 4K video over the 'net? Who cares. Doesn't work worth spit on our [ahem] "new" high-speed connections so you won't want it. Who cares if the US falls even further behind the rest of the world in technology. As long as our ISPs don't have to upgrade their equipment, more profits can go to the shareholders. Investment in infrastructure is for suckers anyway, eh? Kudos! You're Making America Great Again!
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Breach of contract. Easy fix. Walk it, ask for your money back.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Are you suggesting the phone companies are in collusion with each other?
The U.S. carriers do collude in some cases. In 2008, all major U.S. carriers raised the price of each sent text message and the price of each received text message from 10 cents to 20 cents within a few months of each other. (Source)
Let me rephrase it more rigorously: A 5-inch 1280x720 pixel display has sqrt(1280^2+720^2)/5 = 294 pixels per inch. When reading printed text, a user holds the phone about 15.7 inches away.[1] This is 15.7 * 294 = 4615 pixels per radian, which exceeds the commonly accepted 60 pixels per degree[2] or 3400 pixels per radian resolution of the center 5 percent of the retina.
[1] "How Close Do You Hold Your Smart Phone?"
[2] Understanding Pixel Density and Eye-Limiting Resolution
Well, that explains the "test" they were caught conducting a few weeks ago...