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US Telcos Are Slowing Internet Traffic To and From Popular OTT Apps Like YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video, New Research Finds (bloomberg.com)
The largest U.S. telecom companies are slowing internet traffic to and from popular apps like YouTube and Netflix, according to new research from Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Bloomberg: The researchers used a smartphone app called Wehe, downloaded by about 100,000 consumers, to monitor which mobile services are being throttled when and by whom, in what likely is the single largest running study of its kind. Among U.S. wireless carriers, YouTube is the No. 1 target of throttling, where data speeds are slowed, according to the data. Netflix's video streaming service, Amazon.com's Prime Video and the NBC Sports app have been degraded in similar ways, according to David Choffnes, one of the study's authors who developed the Wehe app. From January through early May, the app detected "differentiation" by Verizon Communications Inc. more than 11,100 times, according to the study. This is when a type of traffic on a network is treated differently than other types of traffic. Most of this activity is throttling. AT&T Inc. did this 8,398 times and it was spotted almost 3,900 times on the network of T-Mobile US and 339 times on Sprint's network, the study found.
Especially if you can point out that they are not throttling their own services such as the Direct TV app.
The reason for Net Neutrality was at the time all the Media Companies were forming ISP's before that ISP were separate entities.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Found the astroturfer.
And they had no plans for paid prioritization.
I'm so glad that the ISPs and the Administration didn't lie to us. And I'm glad that this all benefits me, the consumer, and allows me to get my money's worth.
After all, paying $50 a month for 1.5 Mbps down/.25 up at AT&T and having people in Third World shithole countries laugh at my connection let's me know that America and our Capitalist system is the best in the World!
I can just vote with my dollars and have no internet connection. Because of our free markets, I have the same number of choices as a communist country - and the privilege of paying more for less service.
Trump! Making America Great Again!
Interesting that when the summary says "U.S. telecom companies", it assumes that we will all think wireless, rather than terrestrial. I wonder how the throttling compares on the two media....
(I do the bulk of my surfing on a terrestrial circuit.)
by saying that it's both legal and allowed? After all, we ended Net Neutrality.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
FCC should be regulating to make sure that the telecoms are providing enough bandwidth and interconnection to meet the demand. Those are technical issues.
FTC should be regulating the business practices to make sure that telecoms which have regional monopoly power are not using that power to extend their monopolies or colluding to restrain trade in violation of the law.
That's the real question. A 1080 HD stream on Netflix needs about 5Mpbs. It can either constantly such 5mbps, or do peaks of 40mbps every 35-40 seconds. I've profiled that on my routers. If the carries are not slowing down beyond 5mbps which still deliveries the same full HD quality there is no problem - they are just optimizing their wifi spectrum. For all I know LTE likes steady traffic much more than peaks and then nothing in order to manage latency a bit better. Remember, when on LTE your voice calls are IP too. You need to manage your outbound bufferers and reorder packets to give the voice traffic smooth steady rate. If you are going that for voice traffic it makes sense to smooth out peak traffic too, as it allows smaller buffers and much better interactivity of the traffic (less reordering needed compared to when a huge peak hits the node)
Otherwise, I hate telcos as much as the next guy, but I really want this question answered.
Phone systems have to place priority on phone and emergency services, that means sometimes entertainment data gets throttled to preserve space for those priority services. Thems the breaks. Now if this was happening on a wired land line then I would consider this news. I still think the whole smartphone thing is ridiculous, everywhere you go someone has their eyes addicted to that little screen.
AT&T has the "bandwidth economy" setting where they "save" you data when you stream videos by downconverting the stream to 480. Is this actual throttling or a side effect of the conversion process?
No.
The correct approach is to divide bandwidth rationally. If you've bought N% of the total downstream pipe, you are guaranteed to be able to use up to N% of the upstream pipe. What you don't use should be made available to those with extra demand. Apply at each router/switch. It's not an expensive algorithm.
No throttling, just a fair division of resources.
Throttling means providing a site with less than that N%. Throttling when popular means seeking to make a site unpopular. That's why you would do this. It does not mean sharing, it means confining. What I described would be sharing, but it isn't throttling. Even if you added RED.
In the case of video sharing sites, I have no sympathy at all with ISPs or with MPAA. They created this mess by blocking multicast and web caching to the home because they couldn't bill it. If multicast had been widely available then multiple people streaming the same thing at more or less the same time would not occupy any more of the net than one. If caching had remained in place, the bulk of the Internet would have remained clear.
This is a self-inflicted problem and the ISPs should sit down with the MPAA to figure out how to undo their mistakes.
Unusually for them, the vendors are almost innocent.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
lol. What ever happened to a simple "land line"?! (or hard line as it was called in the Matrix...) Heck some of my friends have started calling their cable internet service (which is absolutely "terrestrial") "wifi" because they have no hard connections to the router.
att has TV and owns content. Verizon has cable tv.
There is a difference between throttling and overloaded peering connections. Does this testing make this distinction? A choke point along the path is not throttling.
I agree with most of this except this:
This is a self-inflicted problem and the ISPs should sit down with the MPAA to figure out how to undo their mistakes.
The ISPs are no less scummy than the MPAA, so your suggestion will not lead to anything of benefit for the general consumer. If anything, it would lead to some new profit-sharing scheme.
Or, Pornhub.com isn't being throttled. Kind of a large gap in your reasoning there. Remember, YOU aren't being throttled. The web site is.
If I pay an ISP for 20Mb/s, where do they get off by limiting my connection to some services to 5Mb/s and not others?
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More likely, YouTube's servers can't keep up and instead of investing in their infrastructure, they blame the providers.
This was a university study.
If the AT&T feature you describe is anything like T-Mobile's "Binge On" feature, then it's throttling video to 1.5 Mbps, and the video provider is expected to detect that and switch the viewer to the SD stream.
The answers are in the article and you could have read them with just a click
I could if my subscription package included Bloomberg News. But I don't feel willing to add yet another monthly fee for Bloomberg News just to participate in one Slashdot discussion.
They created this mess by blocking multicast and web caching to the home because they couldn't bill it. If multicast had been widely available then multiple people streaming the same thing at more or less the same time would not occupy any more of the net than one.
Nobody blocks multicast. Multicast simply doesn't work like that: it doesn't mean that people can simultaneously stream Youtube or Netflix. That would only work if two or more subscribers would start the same video at the same quality at the same time.
Furthermore, multicast addresses are limited to 224.0.0.0/4, or 268,435,454 addresses. Not to mention that there is no global multicast infrastructure in place.
If caching had remained in place, the bulk of the Internet would have remained clear.
And who do you think is blocking caching? Hint: it's not the ISP. The ISP wants to cache, but in order to do so the content must be clear-text. Oh wait: everyone is moving to HTTPS, which cannot easily be broken.
Back in 2013 I was working for a large telecom equipment provider on a joint project with a large CDN provider to build a CDN/TIC solution. Youtube, Netflix and all major streaming sites were supported and cached. Until [b]they[/b] decided to break caching by switching to HTTPS.
Your ignorance in this matter cannot be understated.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Yeah, your ISP can give you a 20Mb/s link, but that doesn't mean that you get a perfect 20mb/s link to every hop along to way to every point on the Internet. You are at the mercy of many peering connections. This is one of the reasons BitTorrent was invented.
No, If I want to use netflix there is no reason the ISP should get to denigrate it's performance vs youtube or any other video service. I the customer paid for the bandwidth and by treating different service differently they are no delivering what they sell. Of coarse they bury terms somewhere deep in their contract that basically say , we can do whatever we want but that doesn't change the perception they create. Nor does it change what I want, which is , access to the service I decide to access at the data rate I paid for, regardless of which service it is. Throttling internet traffic based on the data provider rather then the consumer is unnecessary , disingenuous and nothing more then an attempt to manipulate markets. It should be illegal.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Bingo.
Not to mention all this shit is on somebody else's computer. Sorry, but AWS performance is dogshit compared to bare metal. Cheaper in the long run and at massive scale, of course, but you get what you pay for.
If you want bare metal at AWS, you can have it. But with nvme drives and ehhanced networking that gives the VM nearly direct disk and network hardware access, there's not a whole lot of overhead in an AWS VM.
And the students were not watching pornhub?
Fake news, I tell you!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
What are you talking about?
Youtube is owned by GOOGLE and uses GOOGLE's CDN (googlevideocontent)
Furthermore since you mentioned AWS, Amazon prime video is handled by a purpose built and tuned network stack. So though I know you're not talking about prime video (I think), their video delivery product is arguably barer-metal than most.
8, 9th, 10th points:
Pretty sure pornhub is on a hosting provider or at least their datacenter is virtualized. CDNs are faster than bare metal because the edge node is closer to you than the origin would probably be, bare metal or not plus a portion of the TCP handshake is simulated and never actually built up or torn down at the host node side.
Many major providers are running bare metal nodes with no virtualization though they can manage and provision the nodes similar to how you might administer a vmware cluster.
I mean I could go on and on and on.
The ISPs already got the Supreme Court to agree that the FTC couldn't regulate NN, and that only the FCC did. Unsurprsingly, they took advantage of this to start fucking with sites, including blocking mobile payment systems they didn't own. Surprsiingly, a few months later, the FCC did put NN regulations in place. Note, this all happened several years ago.
See also, why all the "things weren't so bad pre-FCC NN" comments were bullshit. Because the FTC was allowed to regulate them for a while, and it trended hellish when neither agency did
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Is all traffic really "created equal"? What if the firefighters or police need to send a video of something they are working on — and the local tower is faced with the dilemma of whether to drop your or their packets? They can't analyze the stream's content (even if it weren't encrypted), but they do know the endpoints.
YouTube, being pure entertainment, loses...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
What the fuck does OTT stand for?
Over The Top?
Object Type Translator?
Off the Truck?
Serously, what the fuck? https://www.acronymfinder.com/...
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You make some nice points, but what happens when a cell tower or two in the area become saturated? Just maybe the data hogs get throttled first? Why would they care if you burn through your quota, they can just charge you for the overage without a care in the world. Someone sounds grumpy as hell.
I never mentioned latency, only priority content. So whose confused now? You think that just because you want streaming 'low latency' content, they will give that data priority over other web traffic? haha.
Or youtube is being throttled and pornhub isn't.
Nobody blocks multicast.
To be clear, every ISP blocks multicast transport between Internet AS's except in a very few special circumstances, and typically it is not routed within networks as well. It isn't that you can't bill for it, it is the inherent danger of multicast, and also multicast routing doesn't scale well.
Some end-user ISPs are considering using highly controlled multicast ABR to efficiently deliver live content to their own subscribers, but it is unlikely that multicast will ever be distributed across the Internet.
Multicast can be used to efficiently deliver popular non-live content as well (for example, see this paper).
[FWIW I was involved in a multicast ABR trial]
Netflix has offered to colocate a cache box for various ISPs many times which would reduce their upstream traffic for popular movies to zero. Every time the ISP has demanded impractically massive payments for that rather than reducing their upstream costs. Apparently they only have congestion on their upstream when they want to use it as an excuse to demand more money or push their customers to a subsidiary.
That's not at all what throttling means, which I suspect you already know full well and are intentionally misusing in an attempt to confuse the issue. To "throttle" is to "suppress" or to "reduce the speed of" or to "decrease the flow of". It's an imposition on something that is capable of more.
To use some car analogies, when I press a car's accelerator to the floor so that it can't go any faster, that isn't throttling. That's simply the fastest the car can go. Nothing more. When too many cars are on the road and we're forced to slow down, that isn't throttling. That's simply a bottleneck resulting from there being more traffic than the road can handle. Nothing more. When a Corolla loses to a Corvette in a drag race, that isn't throttling. That's simply different products performing to their different limits. Nothing more.
But when your car is capable of X and traffic conditions allow for X, yet you're intentionally using the accelerator to drive it at less than X, that's you throttling your car.
Likewise, when a site is serving content as fast as it can and can't go any faster, that isn't throttling. That's simply the fastest the site can go. Nothing more. When too much traffic hits a link along the route and the traffic can't be routed at full speed, that isn't throttling. That's simply a bottleneck resulting from there being more traffic than the link can handle. Nothing more. When a 50 Mbps plan is slower than a 1 Gbps plan in a speed test, that isn't throttling. That's simply different products performing to their different limits. Nothing more.
But when you and the site are capable of X and traffic conditions allow for X, yet an ISP is intentionally forwarding packets at less than X, that's the ISP throttling your connection.
All analogies break down at some point if you stretch them too far, so this is by no means an exhaustive list of the ways that ISPs may engage in throttling or other shady behavior (e.g. ISPs intentionally divert traffic for some sites to links that are constrained as a way to throttle those sites, which would be like a cop always diverting you back onto surface streets every time you tried to get on the highway; or ISPs may intentionally throttle certain types of traffic, which would be like manufacturers installing devices that limit your top speed based on the contents of your car when you started it), but they at least hit the high points.
most turned down the offer due to Netflix was also hosting other providers content with the boxes and geting payed for it
whole " ITS FREE TO ISPS ETC" was a joke i believe slashdot even carried the story about it 2 years ago
And that would harm the ISPs how? They would still be getting a break on the upstream that they claimed was oh so very expensive and congested.
Nope. Try switching away from AT&T's dns server and using a VPN, bam suddenly YT works great.
I'm savvy on tech terms, yet this is the first I've heard of OTT. One True Turd?
To be clear, every ISP blocks multicast transport between Internet AS's except in a very few special circumstances
Wrong. Multicast needs to be explicitly enabled and configured to function properly. What you're saying is similar to saying that all ISPs block MPLS at their borders.
It's not blocked. It's simply not configured.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
So far, no evidence the alleged ISP net tech is either working for an ISP or a network engineer. Still, plenty of time. The questions are carefully selected to examine the range of understanding in the specific area under dispute as well as the history of network engineering.
I'll add a few more. If there's no response by the claimant, then I might turn these into a drinking game.
7. Name the congestion control schemes relating to UDP that are also names of colours? (This is fair. If you're into drinking games, you'll know why.)
8. Name the author of the Multicast section in LARTC.
9. Name the predecessor to VIC.
10. What is the command to enable ECN on Cisco routers?
11. What is PIM-BiDi?
12. What are the current RFCs for IGMPv3 and MLD?
These aren't intended to be derogatory or insulting, I genuinely want a clear picture of who is debating this. An unquestionable demonstration of the level of understanding they have. How they interpret this is their problem, I'm interested and I follow the SOP of any geek who is interested, I ask questions.
There are no trick questions, there are no traps, these are simple, honest questions.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That's easy. A.
Now, what is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You're arguing semantics. My car doesn't support HDMI. Is it blocked or not enabled? (yes, it's intentionally a stupid analogy to go along with the stupid point)
Multicast can be supported on almost anything but it isn't, on purpose, because multicast is a great way to break far more than you're fixing most of the time. Plus it typically cannot be routed between subnets, on purpose again, because it's a great way to break far more than you're fixing. Again.
Plus multicast simply doesn't align with the use case for the majority of streaming services except live TV/radio anyway.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
And that would harm the ISPs how? They would still be getting a break on the upstream that they claimed was oh so very expensive and congested.
Yup, this. They made such a huge complaint about peering agreements and cost as the focus.
Even if they had other content on the box, it still greatly limited upstream bandwidth (including for that other content!) and reduced those magical peering costs. It's not like the demand for that other 'scary' data goes away either...ISPs need to stop trying to play favorites and actually deliver the experience their customers are seeking.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Some end-user ISPs are considering using highly controlled multicast ABR to efficiently deliver live content to their own subscribers, but it is unlikely that multicast will ever be distributed across the Internet.
As I recall, AT&T U-Verse uses multicast to deliver U-Verse TV content to their subscribers.
Yup, this. They made such a huge complaint about peering agreements and cost as the focus.
Even if they had other content on the box, it still greatly limited upstream bandwidth (including for that other content!) and reduced those magical peering costs. It's not like the demand for that other 'scary' data goes away either...ISPs need to stop trying to play favorites and actually deliver the experience their customers are seeking.
I have always assumed that ISPs want to limit upstream bandwidth of their consumer users to sell it to customers that provide content but there are other reasons for consumer customers to prefer asymmetrical upload and download speeds.
For what it is worth, my best home internet experiences were with symmetrical low latency technologies like SDSL even if I was not taking advantage of the higher upload speeds.
No. Each TCP connection has it's own congestion control and the TCP algorithm for each connection is responsible for throttling itself.
So if I have 5 active connections from my machine to www.slashdot.org and one connection to tacotime.com; tacotime only gets 1/5th of the pie, not 1/2 of the pie.
There is no reason other than complexity that traffic shaping cannot aggregate separate connections to the same IP.