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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.
I'm confused. Isn't this simply non-net-neutrality?!
Net neutrality FTW.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
>"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.
Wrong. When there are cases of limited bandwidth, like there is on mobile networks, throttling of certain types or classes of network traffic makes perfect sense to prevent ALL customers' traffic from coming to a crawl or experiencing issues. Video is a perfect example of that, if it is done across-the-board or impartially. Video can consume a zillion times more bandwidth than anything else. And when we are talking about phones, it is unlikely that more than maybe and handful of users would even notice throttling that forces a 480P stream instead of 1080P on a 5" display held at a normal viewing distance. Another example would be once you go over your cap/plan data allowance- nobody will offer truly "unlimited" data with no throttling on mobile bandwidth, it would be a recipe for a disastrous user experience for most everyone.
What should be wrong is when the network operator does it to gain advantage over other companies, or to extort them or customers to pay something extra or force them to use certain alternative services owned by that company. But those magic words "or otherwise" in the quote, above, makes it sound like there could be no valid reason to throttle or apply quality of service, ever. There are services that also need to be real-time, like VOIP, compared to other traffic, like ftp, Email, or web downloads.
What exactly.
I have heard one, maybe two pieces of good news that have come from the FCC since he took over.
Most of the time it is him listening to the whispers of what the carriers want while getting fuck in the ass by the carrier without the reach around.
And enjoys every minute of it.
He is also cheap at $10 an hour.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
seems when I am just surfing the Internet all is fine.. but if I go to YouTube and watch a 14 minute soccer game clip -- quality degradation to the highest and I switch networks to my business network on Allstream | Integra and all is fine. ;-) switch back to Charter and all is bad.. seems funny huh?? oh well, at least I can make out the ball and the players, and the grass is green.. No 1080 or 4K but at least the audio is ok, and the video(s) are jerky... blurry.... just started about 30 days ago... I have noticed... we'll keep an eye on them...
they just don't want me to watch too much TV -- I get it...sounds like my parents.
The Wehe web page is not clear on how significant the throttling is. For example, it seems the 22% of Sprint Skype calls are throttled at .5mbs, but it isn't clear that the unthrottled calls are much faster - they don't say anything about the unthrottled speed.
The response from the industry association is a little bit odd. They claim both that no throttling is going on, and that it is a good thing. I suppose it isn't supposed to be read carefully, so they provide all possible arguments, even at the risk of self-contradiction.
Also, I don't understand why only mobile is considered. We can no longer watch Netflix in the evening, because Comcast/Xfinity no longer provides enough bandwidth for Netflix to function. Why no test for wired connections?
You are like the politicians. Starting from a lack of understanding, you say stupid things, thinking they are smart.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Fuck the Republicans
Ajit Pai "should" have warned them all privately that everything he was saying publicly was a complete lie, and he knew it ahead of time.
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.
Fix: Stop pretending infrastructure is, or can ever be, "free market". Stop allowing private wealth to extract rent from the privileged positions this misunderstanding creates. Utilities should not have any private stake in ownership.
Limit everybody to worst case, throw away unused bandwidth.
That's a plan, not a good one, but at least it's a practical suggestion.
You can buy bandwidth that way BTW, not from your average consumer ISP.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
I use sprint, I haven't noticed a difference since the end of the 2015 NN rule, well the service has gotten better.. And they recently upped my throttle cap(only in congested areas) to 50GB, and "mobile hotspot" to 50GB from 25 and 10 respectively. And I have been using my phone as home internet for the last 3 months exclusively.. I can play games just fine, watch youtube just fine with the exception of sometimes it will drop to 480p for a few minutes or at normal peak times when all the kids around where I live are on their phones. I have more problems with youtube being a prick than anything else because I use safescript.
Limit everybody to worst case, throw away unused bandwidth.
You're right, that's not a good plan. But it's also not even remotely what I'm suggesting. Read it again until you can understand it, and until then shut the fuck up.
Saying it doesn't make it true.
Simply remove the ability for any company to be both a carrier AND a content distributor.
You can either:
1) Be an ISP ( you sell bandwidth. It requires #2 for it to be useful. )
or
2) Be in the content creation / distribution business ( you sell end content people want that requires #1 to experience it )
but not both.
This would effectively remove any financial incentive for a carrier to throttle competing services in an effort to promote their own.
( Because, come on. This IS what they're doing regardless if they admit to it publicly or not. They will stone-cold LIE to your face to protect it. )
Hell, a Congress with a spine ( we can dream right ? ) needs only threaten these folks with such a possibility and this silly behavior will cease as of yesterday.
You read his post and know that isn't what he is arguing for. Why are you trying to twist his argument and confuse the issue?
Because ftp is not as latency sensitive as gaming (well gaming is actually more jitter sensitive)
The only correct solutions are to increase the capacity or to reduce the traffic.
Uhh, yeah, you're right. That's why they reduce the traffic by dropping packets, i.e. throttling...
Prioritization is also very subjective. What if you're mindlessly yapping about nothing on the phone, but if my download takes a minute more, I'll miss my flight?
If you miss a flight because a download took a minute longer, then you are to blame for incredibly poor planning. But aside from that, in order for this kind of QoS to impact a bulk download on the order of minutes requires it to be a download that is large enough to take many minutes. Over that kind of time, you would never be able to blame one particular person's usage on your delay. Now the question is no longer "my download vs. your phone call", but actually "my download vs. many other peoples' phone calls". Suddenly the prioritization isn't so subjective.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
But, but World of Warcraft is MUCH more important than those MRI images I'm sending!!! /sarcasm
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
So they can throttle everything coming OUT of Netflix and Skype, so long as they don't throttle my occasional request to change channel...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That's exactly what you propose. I suggest YOU reread your post with brain engaged. Everybody gets total bandwidth/connected users. 99% won't be using it at any given instant.
'Shut the fuck up' is not an argument...It's what you said when you realized you were wrong.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Consumer bandwidth does not come with a SLA (Service Level Agreement). If you want that, you can get it. It ain't cheap.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Vermin Supreme was the best candidate. Living in CA, my vote was wasted anyhow.
Moron.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
He lied to you ('If I ever experience any congestion or loss at all, they will fix it immediately.'), or at best told a half truth.
The backbones don't have infinite bandwidth. Your ISP doesn't have fiber to all servers.
I guarantee you they don't even have 500/customer to the nearest peering point.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Link to the ISP and it's SLA.
I doubt it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Agreed all around. I just didn’t see a point in spelling all of that out, since I assumed my audience understood those distinctions already.
Lol, let me tell you something. You cannot miss a flight by 1 minute. If you have flown significantly in your life, I'm sure you will remember waiting on the plane with everyone else until suddenly 2-3 people board and sit. And then the plane leaves. Of course you can miss a flight, but not by 1 minute.
That means that 1 minute was on top of the time they would have waited for you after everyone else boarded. If you said your download was delayed by 10 or 15 minutes, then maybe I would be more sympathetic. So yes, absolutely this is poor planning and nothing else.
And again, it isn't you vs. one person. This is not like when you had dial-up and your Mom was on the phone so you couldn't play Unreal Tournament. Network management doesn't work that way. For every one person "yapping" there could be another making a 911 call.
The customers paid for the bandwidth and throttling denies them what they paid for.
Yes, well this is an entirely different problem altogether. When ISPs give you a download/upload speed, that is your theoretical maximum. You will almost never get the speed you pay for. The problem is in the way ISPs sell and advertise their speeds, not in how QoS manages the network.
There is such a thing called the "over-subscription rate", which is how much the ISP oversells their bandwidth. I.e. let's say the ISP has a 1 TB pipe to a neighborhood to sell. What they actually do is sell 10 TB of bandwidth to customers in that area, i.e. an over-subscription rate of 10.
No system works the way you describe. If everyone tries to make a call, no one can make a call. If everyone tries to take their money out of the bank, there is not enough cash in existence to match actual wealth. If everyone was guaranteed their advertised speeds from their ISP, everyone would get shitty speeds. We design these systems with the amount of simultaneous usage in mind, and that way we can actually achieve higher performance.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
ISPs only control your speed to the peering point, they _can't_ make that promise in general. Most servers can't support that speed.
Even with a SLA you have to traceroute and show the slowdown is on the ISPs network.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'