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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.
"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.
"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."
You can't just take something out of it's context and make a meaningful argument.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
Right, this exactly. All the customers connected to the network should get a maximum bandwidth allotment of one portion of the total bandwidth divided by the amount of connected clients. Latency should not be fucked with, period. Traffic should not be prioritized, period, above everything getting the exact same priority.
Any counter-arguments to this are expressly for the purpose of allowing situations where carriers can overbook their networks and shift the blame around between the customers.
QoS only ever affects network traffic in any significant way when there is congestion. If there is congestion, the correct solution is to increase capacity, not to throttle some traffic. That traffic is paid for! You oversold your bandwidth too much and need to upgrade. QoS is fine on your own network with your own data. You can be as cheap as you want and use QoS to prioritize traffic that is important to you. An ISP however carries other people's paid for traffic and should absolutely treat it all equally. Yes, that means FTP gets the same priority as gaming packets. That is no problem at all unless you fail to upgrade the network to handle the traffic that your customers paid for. An ISP with regular bottlenecks on their network is doing it wrong.