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Charter Launches Mobile Service, Throttles All Video To 480p (arstechnica.com)
Charter Communications launched its mobile broadband service on June 30, and it's throttling all video streams to DVD quality. From a report: "DVD-quality video streaming is supported. Video typically streams at 480p," Charter notes in the "Pricing & Other Info" section of its mobile sign-up page. The quality limit is similar to one just imposed by Comcast, which previously did not impose any video quality limits on its mobile service. Comcast is letting existing customers get 720p video streams "on an interim basis at no charge," and the company announced plans to charge extra for longer-term access to HD quality. But Charter hasn't announced any plans to let customers stream in HD over its mobile service, for free or otherwise. HD video "is not currently an option for Spectrum Mobile," a Charter spokesperson told Ars. Wirefly has a Spectrum Mobile review.
That's where this becomes an issue. There's areas near me where the only provider available is a shitty dsl provider whose service isn't much better than dialup. People are paying for 4Mb but get closer to 1 or less. So people use their cell phones for internet. Would this include streaming video going through a hotspot? If so that's a problem.
Google + Netflix do not get "free" internet.
They pay handsomely for their interconnects, infrastructure, caching edger servers + what not.
Consumer ISPs do not get to charge them twice for connections + data customers are requesting.
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
The text of the standard was:
> A person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of Internet content, application, or service, or use of a non-harmful device, subject to reasonable network management
So, your reading would be --- you can't throttle traffic based on content/type ... except you can for network management. Which in turn neuters the entire standard. In turn, the order has dozens of pages breaking down what was argued in the 2010-2015 to be reasonable network traffic management and how administrative law judges had found.
So no, just because *you* can call it reasonable network management doesn't mean it was for the purpose of the rule.
Actually......
Back in the days when Yahoo! was the biggest thing on the Internet, there was an article talking about how Yahoo! was only paying for around half of the cost of their total bandwidth usage. How? Instead of sending all of their data over transit, around half of their data went over links directly connected to large ISPs (peering links). At the time, transit was common. Only large telecom (backbone) providers were well peered across the nation. More and more content providers started doing this. For example, AOL bought a national network from IBM so they could do the same thing. Peering. Peering was the thing that saved the Internet. Robert Metcalfe's famous prediction that the Internet would collapse due to all the traffic on the backbone networks didn't happen because of the growing popularity of peering.
A lot has changed since then. Peering very common and the business of peering has changed. A important part of a CDN is peering. Peering went from something that is a win-win for a content provider-ISP to a service a last mile can charge for (last mile networks are valuable). Note the fee for peering is still cheaper than transit. That is what makes it attractive to companies like Netflix. I can't imaging what Netflix's bandwidth bill would be if they were ONLY using transit. Peering saves them a TON of money.
The reason Net Neutrality is brought up in the context of peering is that NN first started as a discussion of traffic shaping/filtering/blocking. Then the Netflix issue with their CDN (Cogent) hit the news and everyone seemed to treat it as a NN issue. It wasn't a NN issue, it was a peering issue. My fear is that NN would encompass peering. When all this was going down the FCC make a statement that they were watching the Netflix situation, but didn't consider peering part of NN. Unfortunately, some people disagreed (IMHO, mainly due to ignorance). If peering were to be part of NN, then, yeah, large content providers (e.g. Netflix, Google) could demand cut rate deals on peering. Or, like the initial post argues, "free bandwidth", which has NOTHING to do with the ORIGINAL intent of NN.
This is definitely not about data usage because if it was then they would be restricting bit rates. But they're instead restricting resolution.
And here I thought I was paying for the wires to my house.
I should pay for my heavy peak use, sure, but it shouldn't matter what I'm doing with it, be it Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, some other on demand.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
How did this get modded up? Net neutrality is the principle of treating data equally regardless of originating source on the Internet. e.g. You can't throttle Netflix while prioritizing your own video streaming service.
What you're proposing is content neutrality - treating all data the same regardless of the type of data. If we mandated content neutrality, the Internet would die a horrible death as filesharing, spam, and DDoS attacks got equal priority to video streaming, web browsing, and online game traffic. The only reason the Internet is able to function despite the terabytes of illegitimate traffic being dumped on it is because ISPs and backbones are allowed to lower its priority via traffic shaping to give legitimate traffic first crack at the available bandwidth.
"Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers treat all data on the Internet equally, and not discriminate or charge differently by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or method of communication."