Senators Ask Four Major Carriers About Video Slowdowns (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Three U.S. Senate Democrats today asked the four major wireless carriers about allegations they've been throttling video services and -- in the case of Sprint -- the senators asked about alleged throttling of Skype video calls. Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent the letters to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile, noting that recent research using the Wehe testing platform found indications of throttling by all four carriers.

"All online traffic should be treated equally, and Internet service providers should not discriminate against particular content or applications for competitive advantage purposes or otherwise," the senators wrote. Specifically, the Wehe tests "indicated throttling on AT&T for YouTube, Netflix, and NBC Sports... throttling on Verizon for Amazon Prime, YouTube, and Netflix... throttling on Sprint for YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Skype Video calls... [and] delayed throttling, or boosting, on T-Mobile for Netflix, NBC Sports, and Amazon Prime by providing un-throttled streaming at the beginning of the connection, and then subsequently throttling the connection," the senators' letters said.

Comments

Re:This is why NN is dumb.

[dgatwood]

Net Neutrality doesn't mean all packets of the same type, you're just making up bullshit. Net Neutrality means it's agnostic to what kind of packet it is, and just handles them without trying to tune them to be faster.

No, that is NOT what Net Neutrality advocates are asking for. Net Neutrality means that ISPs should be agnostic about the DESTINATION, i.e. that VoIP traffic to Skype should not be slower than VoIP traffic to Facebook Messenger or whatever.

No (sane) NN law should ever be written in a way that prevents differing prioritization of different classes of traffic, e.g. ensuring that latency-sensitive data, such as VoIP traffic gets sent without delay even if it means that non-latency-sensitive data, such as bulk downloads, are slower, even by a few seconds.

I'm paying the same amount for my connection, what the fuck do I care if your game is faster while my stuff is slower?

Because a five second difference in your download time could make the difference between somebody else's phone call being perfect and dropping out over and over. Services that require low latency should get priority, because if slowed down, they become unusable. Other services, if slowed down, do not become significantly less usable. The assumption is that every user will eventually do something for which latency matters, whether it is gaming, Skype, or even just video streaming, though the extent to which latency matters varies, obviously, depending on what you're doing.