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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.
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.
Surprisingly, not really. Put this way: they're throttling "video", not "Netflix".
Now if they pushed their own (or a paying partner's) video service and throttled everyone else's, then you'd see a violation of net neutrality.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
You are correct, but the current Net Neutrality rules for the USA do allow for this sort of thing to prevent network congestion.
Net neutrality =/= net neutrality rules, so this creates some confusion.
Cell phone networks have always been given more leeway with net neutrality rules to begin with, and targeting streaming video (a huge bandwidth hog) over the cell network is an obvious choice for preventing network congestion. As long as they treat all streaming video equally regardless of the source, It's not that big of an issue. Sure, I'd like better descriptions of the rate limits in the naming of the packages they're offering, but it's a reasonable measure. I'm betting it's easy to circumvent with an encrypted VPN as well -- at least until they start throttling all VPN connections if that becomes a popular solution.
Remember one of the reasons they're allowed these exceptions is that they are also an e-911 service, and those 911 calls must be routed quickly and get priority over all other traffic. Sure, a simple phone call doesn't take up much bandwidth, but there can be hundreds at any time in an area & if the network is congested with 4K video, that'd be a problem.