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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.
Trump supporters are dumber than cattle
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.
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.
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.
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's a tethering "bucket?" Why would someone even want Verizon?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.
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.
like "thanks obama"?
No, it's really not a good thing. Granted, most people don't care or won't notice, which is why T-Mobile's auto-opt-in, but with the choice to opt out, makes T-Mobile's version of this "throttling" acceptable.
It sounds like Verizon sold a lot of unlimited plans with the understanding they would not modify video, and now they are not even giving their customers a choice. That alone warrants a lawsuit, or at least letting customers cancel plans with ZERO penalty (maybe even a kickback to pay for a switch to another service).
But there's really two other points here. First is that people can use their phones as hot-spots (or use something like slimport) and so they will get poor video quality watching on larger devices. But the second, as others have pointed out, is that the FCC is saying mobile data counts as broadband access, so you can look at it as two separate things (which is probably the best option), or you can say Verizon is now modifying the broadband data their customers are paying for, which certainly should be a violation of NN, if not something else.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.
There's a tethering "bucket?" Why would someone even want Verizon?
Because the other cellular ISPs also have tethering quotas.
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.
wireless carriers are allowed to throttle and process internet traffic as they want
According to this, this goes against pure Net Neutrality.
To quote the interesting part:
[...]Internet service providers and governments regulating the Internet must treat all data on the Internet the same, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication.
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.
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
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?
If you like your plan you can keep it. Period.
Customers don't like data limits because they find it hard to understand and control how much data different things use but adding more data capacity to mobile networks is difficult and expensive and once you give a customer an unlimited plan they won't make any attempt to control their data usage.
So this is where things end up. The main data category doesn't have a traffic limit but certain potentially high-traffic activities are either forbidden, throttled or placed in a seperate non-unlimited category.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
It was cloudy during the eclipse - DAMN YOU TRUMP!
Those in the know use satellite imagery to avoid clouds. And Trumps budget cuts $500 million (about 20 percent) from NOAA's satellite division. So, while Trump isn't to blame for cloudy conditions during this eclipse, he might be to blame for cloudiness during the next eclipse...
Trump’s budget cuts could mess up your next solar eclipse viewing
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.
Obama shouldn't have made promises he couldn't keep.
The average savings per family that was promised didn't pan out either. Not even close.
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
I understand the issues; the problem is then that they shouldn't sell unlimited plans... and then f#@k with the data to suit their needs. The way T-Mobile did it was an acceptable solution because, while some find it annoying that they opt you in by default, you can at least opt out.
Stupid sexy Flanders.